I suppose that most pastors have had the experience of a young parishioner approaching them privately and confiding in them their suspicion or decision that they were gay, bisexual, or transgender. Such confusion is in the air, has the Nihil Obstat of both secular culture and governmental sanction, and also bestows a kind of odd popularity, making the person part of a privileged minority of the nobly oppressed. Adolescence has always been…
Lately Giacomo Sanfilippo posted on his Orthodoxy in Dialogue blog a response to “a professor at an Orthodox seminary” whom he styled “Ross Douthat’s Orthodox admirer”. I am not sure why the reluctance to engage in persons directly and name Dr. David Ford as his target. Let us nobly assume that he is motivated by a noble desire to deal with issues and not personalities, and not by a desire to make the anonymity…
Recently Sr. Vassa Larin (famous for her “Coffee with Sr. Vassa” podcast) has attracted much and varied attention from a correspondence she published in which she replied to a question from a woman of a fourteen year old boy about how to handle her son’s “coming out”. (The mother’s question and Sr. Vassa’s response may be accessed here.)  Her advice, prefaced by a disclaimer of sorts that it was but her “personal…
