On May 11th, 2023, Moscow priest John Koval was defrocked by the ecclesiastical court after being suspended by Patriarch Kirill in February of the same year. His offense was replacing the word “victory” with “peace” in the “Prayer for Holy Rus’” mandated by the Patriarchate of Moscow to be included in all litanies. The “offensive”…
Continue readingThinking Out Loud: In Response to the OCA’s Curbing of Intellectual Freedom
by Very Rev. Dr. Isaac Skidmore I would like to respond to the Statement on Same-sex Relationships and Sexual Identity, issued by the Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America during the recent All-American Assembly in Baltimore in July. I believe it will be evident I have concerns about the statement’s curtailment of…
Continue readingFreedom from Fear: Response to the Statement of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America
by the editors of the The Wheel “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18) In our inaugural editorial in 2015, we stated: “The Wheel is a journal for the intelligent…
Continue readingFullness of Faith or Fullness of Fear?
On Prohibiting Open Theological Discussion
by Gregory Tucker At the conclusion of the “Bridging Voices” conference in Oxford in 2019, I thanked the distinguished group of participants for restoring my confidence in the church as a discursive society bound by love of and in Christ. Our meeting was demanding, at times very tense, and inconclusive, but commitment to working through…
Continue readingThe OCA Holy Synod on the Russian War in Ukraine
On the Dubious Silence of the Shepherds
American Orthodox leaders, inevitably on one or other side of the widening Greek–Slavic divide in world Orthodoxy, typically echo the voice of the peculiar foreign “Mother–Church” to which each hierarch is canonically bound. So Archbishop Elpidophoros, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (GOA) in the USA, although expressing his sympathy for the hapless Russians being…
Continue readingOpen Letter to the Synod of the Orthodox Church in America on the War in Ukraine
His Beatitude, Metropolitan TikhonMembers of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America Dear Archpastors: We[1] write as painfully concerned, truth–seeking, and truth–committed Orthodox Christians: we are chagrined clergy and lay members of the Orthodox Church in America, who as American citizens value religious and political freedom. Conscience compels us to speak. The unprovoked…
Continue readingThe Liturgical Consent to War
by A. Edward Siecienski In a famous scene from A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More defended his silence on the Act of Supremacy by citing a maxim of the law, “Qui tacet consentire videtur” (Silence betokens consent). His argument was that by saying nothing, the court must assume he agreed with the Act regardless…
Continue readingOur Mission and Voice and Presence in America
by Protopresbyter Leonid Kishkovsky | български | ελληνικά | Русский | Српски In the months before Fr. Leonid’s passing, he was working on a revised version of the following address to publish on Public Orthodoxy. As he was unable to complete it, with his family’s blessing, we are posting the entirety of the keynote address he…
Continue readingA Reflection on the Church in the Political Arena
by Fr. Robert M. Arida Democracy and the separation of church and state are relatively new for the Orthodox Church. From both derive the many challenges the Church in America encounters as it stands unfettered in the political arena. Paraphrasing the British historian and theologian G.L. Prestige, the concept, let alone the reality, of a…
Continue reading