Culture Archives – Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Tom Holland’s Dominion: A Review

November 26, 2019November 26, 2019 · Fr. Stephen De Young 5

Christianity emerges as a system of interacting with understanding the world, described in teachings and lived by the actual human persons of every era. This way of thinking and seeing has been bred into the bones of every person born in the West for centuries, though today it may go unnoticed like the air which we breathe.

Scripture: Myth or History?

July 4, 2019 · Fr. Stephen De Young 26

The scriptures call us, rather than attempting to reframe the scriptures and tradition of the church within the context of the things which we as modern people "now know," to reframe our own understanding of our lives, our personal histories, and the world as we encounter it in terms of the fullness of God's creation and the reality of Jesus Christ himself.

Ss. Paul and Constantine

November 15, 2018 · Fr. Stephen De Young 6

It is commonplace for many modern Christians, even Orthodox Christians, to consider St. Constantine a problematic figure. Even the fact that he is considered a saint within the Orthodox Church is seen as difficult. Obviously, the end of Christian persecution by the Roman Empire was a great benefit to the Church and to the Christians of the day. But it is not…

Anatomy of a Foreword: Metr. Kallistos on Sexual Morality

June 16, 2018September 27, 2018 · Fr. John Cox 28

In the past few days Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has generated more discussion of his thought than at any other time in recent memory. The venerable Metropolitan wrote the foreword to the newest edition of The Wheel, a journal ostensibly dedicated to questions of Orthodox theology and praxis. More specifically, this edition of The Wheel focused on human being and sexuality, particularly questions…

The Church and Homosexuality: A Meditation

June 13, 2018February 17, 2020 · Hieromonk Herman (Majkrzak) 29

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. —Romans 8:18 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” At that saying…

David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Review

May 8, 2018May 8, 2018 · Fr. Stephen De Young 21

That David Bentley Hart was asked to produce a translation of the New Testament may at first seem counter-intuitive. His field is philosophy and philosophical theology, not New Testament or Greek language (though he reads Greek). Further, with the wide range of New Testament translations available to a general audience in English, not to mention the variety of Greek critical editions available…

Two Surprising Statistics about Orthodox Christianity in America

May 10, 2017 · Seraphim Danckaert 22

Plenty has been written about the Pew Research Center’s second Religious Landscape Study, published in 2014. Relatively little commentary has focused on what the findings tell us about Orthodox Christians in America. In part, the lack of attention is due to the very small sample size of Orthodox believers in the study — so small that the margin for error is somewhere…

Bourgeois “Conjugal Friendship” and American Ethnophyletism

May 5, 2017May 9, 2017 · Alfred Kentigern Siewers 20

Public Orthodoxy’s recent post by Giacomo Sanfilippo on “Conjugal Friendship” claimed to take a postmodern approach to sacramental conjugality in Orthodox Christianity, but ended up falling into ethnophyletic and gnostic heresies from an Orthodox standpoint.

A Helpful, But Uneven Contribution: Review of “The Benedict Option” by Rod Dreher

April 26, 2017April 26, 2017 · Rev. Fr. Joseph Lucas 3

On April 2, 2017, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option debuted at number seven for hardcover non-fiction on the New York Times’ bestseller list (promptly to drop from the list the following week). This new offering from Dreher is a summary of his life experience, a sort of manifesto for the conservative Christian seeking meaning in a world inundated by progressive agendas, commercialism,…

The Problem of Authority: How Do We Know What Is True?

January 7, 2015January 7, 2015 · Guest Author 33

By Mark Meador When formerly Protestant converts to Orthodoxy (or Roman Catholicism) recount the theological reasons for their conversion, it is not uncommon to hear among those reasons that they were persuaded by “the authority of the Church.” Once you become convinced of the Church’s authority, the telling goes, everything else falls into place. While this seems to be sufficient for the…