Theological troublemaker. Orthodox Christian.
Dear Matthew,
May I call you Matthew? I would prefer that over “Mr. Heimbach.” When you are “Heimbach,” you are a white supremacist SOB. When you are “Matthew,” you are a young man who is going through hell right now. So I am going to call you “Matthew” to remind me, in my weakness, to act like a Christian. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Matthew Heimbach”
On Friday, December 29, the Orthodox Church commemorated the slaying of the infants in Bethlehem by Herod, the puppet-king of Judah.
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. (Matt. 2:16)
This is the part of the story we don’t include in the Christmas stories we tell our children: The birth of Christ involved an act of mass murder. All hail the Prince of Peace. Continue reading “Slaughtering the Innocents”
What to do about LGBTQ individuals connected with the Orthodox Church (or who want to be connected to the Orthodox Church) is the biggest doctrinal issue we are dealing with today. The pat answers we have are inadequate to the questions we have because, while the mechanics of same-sex acts have not changed over the centuries (or so I imagine), the social conditions under which same-sex desires and relationships are lived out are drastically different. In Greek times, same-sex acts were tantamount to child abuse. In Roman times, it was about the exercise of power. Degrees of condemnation varied in Christian Europe, ranging from scolding youthful mischief to prescribing penance for marital infidelity or fornication. It was not until the Victorian era that “homosexuality” came to be considered a kind of diagnosable and thus treatable condition. Continue reading “How Not to Talk about Homosexuality in the Orthodox Church”
A few days ago, George Demacopoulos, co-director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham and co-editor of the Public Orthodoxy blog tweeted the following:
It is telling that the 6-7 essays (out of 150 total) Public Orthodoxy has posted about marriage and sexuality have an outsized readership.
— George Demacopoulos (@GDemacopoulos) September 2, 2017
I wanted to ask my friend if she happened to see any Orthodox clergy standing with her, but I think I already know the answer.
A friend of mine recently moved to Charlottesville. She was at the protests over the weekend, or I guess you would say she was a counter-protester. (I am hesitant to say “counter,” though, because it implies that the white nationalists had anything worth protesting.) A photo of her came across my timeline, posted by Jill Harms Photography. When Brandy (my friend) commented on this photo, she explained that they had just faced down a group of club-wielding white nationalists who were trying to access Emancipation Park, and they were steeling themselves for a second confrontation.
Continue reading “Orthodox White Nationalism at the Charlottesville Protests”
Public Orthodoxy is making waves again, this time by daring to talk about…women.
Actually they aren’t even talking about women. They’re talking about Greek. The GOA (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) made it about women when they opted to approve a revision of the creed from “for us and for our salvation” to “for us men and for our salvation.” The problem with this revision, the authors (Aristotle Papanikolaou and John Fotopoulos) is that it makes gender exclusive language that was originally gender inclusive. Greek, like many other languages, has gendered nouns. Anthropos is a masculine noun. But that does not mean that anthropos is male anymore than German a German girl is an “it” (das Mädchen is a neuter noun). Anthropos refers to humanity in general. Anér means “man.” Continue reading “Inclusive Language in the Liturgy”
