AOI

One of the great things about a blog is that it’s a conversation, not a monologue. The Observer is a moderated blog, but we keep it fairly open to encourage this conversation and the learning that goes on here. Those of us associated with AOI are grateful for your readership and the constant feedback.

I have noticed, however, that in recent weeks some of the comments on this blog have veered off course. Nothing disastrous, but it’s time to recalibrate. Now and then, a course correction is in order.

What we set out to do on The Observer is discuss how the social witness of Orthodoxy can be an effective force in transforming the culture. The focus here is decidedly domestic (American) but we also bring in currents from other Orthodox cultures where they may be instructive.

A couple requests, in particular. First, I’d like to avoid further ruminations on the anti-Christ and other apocalyptic figures. Let us, with the Church, leave these theological excursions to others equipped to handle them with the proper caution. The Observer isn’t the place for that. And, no, I don’t think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ.

Secondly, may we please forever cease these punctilious, Old Calendarist controversies about priestly beards, head coverings and such? We take, here, the cue from Metropolitan Philip who, in his podcast, voices frustration with bishops in “Turkish hats” and priests with long beards and ponytails. What, the Metropolitan asks, do these have to do with the evangelization of the culture? From my point of view, I don’t see why our bishops can’t go among their flocks in a suit and collar, and leave the monastic garb to those who actually live as ascetics. But if you’d still like to discuss these things, I recommend that you start a blog for such purposes.

As always, we want The Observer to be a place where Orthodoxy and all of the big social questions facing American culture can be discussed and debated in a spirit of reasonableness and Christian charity. We owe this to each other. Where this is not in evidence, or where the comments again veer off path, they will be deleted in the future. That is the editor’s prerogative as blog despota and will require no justification or explanation in such cases.

The Observer has had a great start. We are grateful for your readership and your comments, which help us all work through these problems together. I’ve learned a lot on this blog in a short time. Please keep it going.

In light of the recent exchanges on The Observer about converts, cradle Orthodox and the future of American Orthodoxy, we are republishing Terry Mattingly’s essay that touches on these important issues. This article was adapted from an address titled “So What Do the Converts Want, Anyway?” given at the 2006 Orthodox Christian Laity conference in Baltimore. Terry Mattingly, an advisor to AOI, is director of the Washington Journalism Center, editor of the www.GetReligion.org website, and a weekly syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service.

What Do the Converts Want?
By Terry Mattingly

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference
between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some
pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there
are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to
spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday
nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.

Baptists worship at several different times during the week — at least
they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist
pastor’s son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early
1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the
typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is
rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox
parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.

Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers
services. But the similarities don’t stop there.
Continue reading →

Turning Cows into Ideas
Roger Scruton, philosopher & farmer, tells us how to make farms profitable even if no one buys a thing:

Very few farms are profitable, and ours exists more…as a rural consultancy and ideas factory. Our neighbors turn grass into milk and make a loss; we turn grass into ideas and make a profit. We keep horses of our own, which we look after, and allow our neighbors to use the pasture for their cows: cows too, viewed from the window, can easily be made into ideas. We also keep chickens, and occasionally pigs, which we turn into sausages, after their brief time as ideas.

Aging, Individualism, and Our Middle-Class Dreams
Peter Augustine Lawler, ethicist and critic, tells us how caring for the old competes with our work-a-day society’s love of freedom and laboring:

Surely there is little worse than to have Alzheimer’s and be alone…Yet the currents of our time push us almost inescapably in this lonely direction. Lives moved by a veneration of independence threaten to leave us unprepared for depending and being depended upon, and so actually to increase the burdens of long-term care for the dependent in our society. The inability to think clearly about the basic human need of caregiving—and so the inability to provide effectively for it—may be the price paid for all the undeniable and wonderful technological success that characterizes our time.

Vigen Guroian on Flannery O’Connor’s Iconographic Fiction and Christian humanism.

Stephen Gatlin decipher’s Francis Collins’ chatter about God.

T.L. Reed’s short story “Weight on Lilies” depicts aging and things left undone.

Bart Fleuren finds the endangered species Homo Economus Christianus in some Third Ways.

Adrienne Su’s poem “Fear of Flying” reminds us of what we know we know.

Read the announcement of Clarion’s Web launch on Christian Newswire.

The Clarion Review is published by the American Orthodox Institute, a research and educational organization that engages the cultural issues of the day within the Orthodox Christian moral tradition.

When a recent coffee hour conversation turned, unexpectedly, to politics and what if anything the Church has to say about public issues and then all of the “God talk” in the current presidential contest, a friend said, “Oh, that’s politics. The Orthodox Church shouldn’t get involved in politics. Nothing good can come of it.”

Well, yes and no.

If we’re talking about partisan politics then yes, of course, the Church must stay out of it. The Church was not founded to endorse candidates for office or advance a political ideology. But if we’re talking about the political dimensions of important moral issues, then yes, of course, the Church may quite properly speak to these. Did we notice that there is something going on in California about marriage? Were political institutions involved? Do we recall the 2003 Statement on Moral Crisis on Our Nation issued by SCOBA?

I wonder if some Orthodox Christians wish that the faith could somehow remain removed from politics and other worldly issues. That it stand apart, a walled-off sphere of piety that you visit for a couple hours a week as if you were visiting some sort of Museum of Religion. To be clear about it, the Church does not exist to issue opinions about every political or policy question under the sun, nor is it competent to do so. But on significant moral questions, it’s voice must be heard. Does that drag the Body of Christ into the mud of politics? Here’s a better way to ask the question: Is abortion a political issue? (Remember something called Roe v. Wade?) How about war, or poverty, or the death penalty, or business ethics, or pornography, or the morality of popular culture. Any of these affected by politics?

I have a theory, or really just a hunch, about the reticence among some Orthodox Christians to discuss political or policy issues through the lens of Church teaching. Maybe it’s because these discussions will lead to conclusions and positions that look a lot like those of other conservative Christian groups. Dare I say it? The Christian Right. Wouldn’t that throw the Orthodox in with the wrong sort of conservatives? What would our progressive co-members at the National Council of Churches say to such an unvarnished display of conservative sentiment? Where is the nuance!

In his “455 Questions and Answers” book, published by Light & Life in 1987, Fr. Stanley Harakas took on the subject of the Moral Majority, and the lack of support among Orthodox Christians for its programs. But, paradoxically, he also pointed out how many of its moral positions on issues were consistent with the moral tradition of Orthodoxy. A clear divergence, however, was the Moral Majority’s uncritical support for Israel, something that Fr. Stanley said is opposed by many Greek, Lebanese and Arab Orthodox Christians.

He concludes his observation with this:

The main point I have tried to make is that I think that it is time we Orthodox Christians formed our own organization to speak to these public moral issues from an Orthodox Christian perspective. I would very much like to hear from priests and lay people about this idea.

Well, Fr. Stanley, your wish has come true. The American Orthodox Institute was founded “to speak to these public moral issues from an Orthodox Christian perspective.”

Olivier Clement, in an essay published in 1973, warns us against an “orientalized” or ritualistic conception of the Church:

The Orthodox Church again is by no means a museum of the first thousand years of Christianity. The dimension of fatherhood, so strong in Orthodoxy (which, thank God, frees it from any evolutionist idea of Tradition) may tempt her to think that the Fathers have said everything and that is only remains to repeat them. This doubtless explains the excessive confidence of some prelates for whom truth is an object possessed. But Father Florovsky reminded us, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of Palamas, that the notion of ‘father’ is not at all limited to the period called ‘Patristic,’ that Saint Gregory Palamas was a ‘Church Father’ in the fourteenth century, and The Fathers beget us in the faith that we in our turn might become fathers, that is free creators, in the continuity of the same Spirit. The word of the Fathers is a logos spermatikos: it does not crush, it fertilizes.

You fertilize things that are alive and growing. You do not fertizile things that are dead or petrified. And if the Tradition is to make sense to us in the here and now, we must till the soil and plant the seeds of a living faith. It is a big garden. It is not a museum.

A note to readers: The AOI team is preparing to launch an all new Web site for Clarion Review, with new features and exclusive online content. We are also working on a redesign of the main site, less than a year from its initial launch. The Monitor, the new AOI newsletter which will debut in the coming days, already has a hundreds of readers opting in for free subscriptions (you can sign up on the AOI main page), And you will see this blog is expanding its reach with new writers and timely posts on Orthodox Christian life in the “public square.” Stay tuned!