French Revolution

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This essay is outstanding. It represents the quality of thought that should be coming from all Orthodox Churches; the words that speak to the foundational questions of culture as I wrote yesterday. Frankly, the Orthodox in America are capable of contributions of this depth and importance. I have my doubts however, that Constantinople will ever achieve this level of creative engagement with the culture. I wish it were different but I have not seen any evidence that it is.

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by Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia

A religious way of life – in our case, a Christian-Orthodox way of life – is distinguished by its foundation in the tradition of the Church. Tradition presents itself to us as a collection of truths that by means of the witness of the holy apostles were accepted by the Church, are preserved by her, and are developed in relation to the challenged posed to the Church in the various historical periods. In short, tradition is the vital flow of the grace of faith in the life of the Church. Tradition is a normative phenomenon, it is nothing other than the norm of faith. […] Only a life that corresponds to tradition as norm of faith can be considered a truly Christian-Orthodox life. […]

Preserving this norm and affirming it in society as a fundamental ontological value is a task of every member of the Church. […] This norm is stable and fragile at the same time. The experience of contact with other cultural and social models tells us that from that contact, this norm can emerge damaged or even destroyed, or unharmed and even strengthened. […] When the models of life different from our own are also based on their respective traditions, then most of the time they do not constitute a threat to the values on which the Christian-Orthodox way of life is founded. Historically, the Orthodox have coexisted, coexist and interact in Russia with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and other Christian confessions. They have always lived peacefully beside the members of other confessions and religions; except for the cases in which a faith or a way of life seen as foreign has been imposed on our people by force or by means of proselytism. Then the people have risen up in defense of their own faith and their own norm of life. As a rule, these are cases that have taken place following aggression on the part of foreign powers. […]
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