Ecumenical

Maybe the essay below will help St. Vladimir’s Seminary (SVS) understand why the conferral of a doctorate on Dr. Rowan Williams has been met with criticism from those outside the academy. For most, the issue is not whether Dr. Williams merits the honor as an academic, but that his refusal to act against the moral deconstruction of Anglicanism shows that he does not comprehend the destruction that the licentiousness championed by liberal Anglicans causes in the larger culture. The author rightly condemns feminist ideology as a source of moral confusion in the culture, and clearly the capitulation to feminists is a major reason for the Anglican collapse.

I am the father of a fourteen year old girl. I’ve worked with teens for twenty-five years. What the author below reports is happening in the teen culture in America is true. Don’t flinch at the brutally frank tone of the essay. Not all teens fall victim to the prevailing culture of course, but all face it.

I could tell you many stories of teens who fell off the cliff. Filled with regret and shame they come for healing. Fortunately we have confession and they get a chance to start over. A few weeks ago I heard a story of a fourteen year old girl who gave oral sex to a boy hoping to win his approval. It devastated her. Other girls found out and she went around asking for forgiveness afraid she was going to lose her friends. She is too young to be dealing with these emotional demands. But she lives in a sexualized culture where there are too few adult voices to guide her and so she becomes prey to the exploiters who dominate her world.

It’s concerns like this that inform the criticism and leads to this question: Why is an Orthodox seminary giving an award to a leader who did little to stop the legitimization of licentiousness in an institution that was charged with the defense of the Christian moral tradition?

Is it fair to reduce all of Dr. Rowan’s ministry to this failure of leadership? No, of course not. But the issue here is not Dr. Rowan. It’s the conferral of the degree. To the critics, the conferral implies an approval beyond Dr. Rowan’s academic achievements. This is because the seminary possesses an imprimatur that reaches far beyond its walls. The seminary must exercise its authority with greater discretion especially when it touches problems that people outside the academy deal with concretely. The distance between poor leadership and destructive consequences is not that great.

The American Thinker Pam Geller

A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America’s moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, "If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex." In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.

One girl sums up the new attitudes: "Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?"

Azam said that this was going on in good homes right under parents’ noses: "The prettiest girls from the most successful families [are the most at risk]. We’re not talking about marginalized girls. [Parents] don’t want to know because they really don’t know what to do. I mean, you might be prepared to learn that, at age 12, your daughter has had sex, but what are you supposed to do when your daughter has traded her virginity for $1,000 or a new bag?"

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