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Let me offer you a thought experiment.

Yesterday on the Orthodox Church in America’s website there was an interesting press release recounting a “discussion between members of the Holy Synod of Bishops [of the OCA] and a number of congressmen during a late-January 2010 meeting in the US capital” (OCA Holy Synod members share human rights concerns with US congressmen).

The meeting addressed, again in the words of the press release, a

variety of issues affecting traditionally Orthodox Christian lands — among them, the situation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Turkey in light of His All Holiness, Patriarch Bartholomew’s widely acclaimed December 2009 interview on “60 Minutes”; the plight of Orthodox Christians in Kosovo and Coptic Christians in Egypt; human trafficking; and other human rights issues.

Let me first say, I think it is a good thing for the bishops to speak with representatives of the US government; it is a very patristic thing actually.  It also speaks well of the Holy Synod that instead of bring their own, relative narrow concerns to Congress, they went not as advocates for Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians and for human rights more broadly.  Generally and except for pro-life issues, Orthodox social witness has typically focused on matters of immediate interest to the Orthodox community.  The Holy Synod speaking on behalf of human rights generally, and doing so in a face to face meeting with members of the US Congress, is in my view something we should welcome.  Not only that, by our words and prayers we should encourage the bishops to build on this latest meeting.

For such a witness to be fruitful will mean that we must learn how to speak to a broader audience then those sympathetic to the Tradition of the Orthodox Church.  Though not without there own challenges, speaking to traditional Anglicans or Evangelical Christians investigating Orthodoxy is not the same as making a case for human right before the US Congress.  As I have argued here before, and as I will continue to argue, we cannot limit our witness merely to inviting Christians from other traditions to join the Orthodox Church.  We must learn to speak more broadly.  As part of this we must learn how to established collaborative working relationships with those who share our concerns but WHO ARE NOT INTERESTED in becoming Orthodox.

And now, the thought experiment.

Let me suggest that learning to work collaborative with those who are not interested in becoming Orthodox will, on balance, be a good thing for the internal life of the Church.  The more skilled we become in establishing and maintaining collaborative relationships with those outside the Church, the more skilled we will become in establishing and maintaining similar relationships among ourselves.

It is to our benefit as a Church to learn how to make our case without having to depend on a shared tradition.  While a good thing, at least in an American pastoral context our shared tradition has resulted in Orthodox Christians–where ever they are in the ecclesiastical hierarchy–making arguments from authority .  To our determinate we are many of more inclined to coerce then persuade.

Absent a way of enforcing my authority such arguments are little better than the posturing of school yard bully.  While my authority might secure your compliance in the short term, it comes at the cost of the long trust between us.  The harm however does not end here.

Consistently arguing from authority–or what is just as bad, preaching to the choir–increasingly restricts my vision of the tradition.  Whether we are talking about a person or a community, with restricted vision comes rigidity, fear, distrust and anger. All of these compromise not only our witness but our shared life.

To be effective, persuasion requires not simply that I constantly meditate on the tradition but that I also make the effort to know you evermore fully.  Yes, I might be tempted to sophistry–but this is hardly an argument for coercion and besides  arguing from authority is equally prone to sophistry.

Are there risks involved in the Church broadening her witness beyond the immediate concerns of Orthodox Christians?  Will we be tempted to compromise the Gospel for political gain?  Yes.

Riskier still, however, is to refuse to work together with others of good will–Christian or not–”in behalf of all and for all.”

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory
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Soon after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the roof of St. Andronikos church in Kythrea caved in and fell into its sanctuary. No one came by to clear the rubble, so there’s a heap of ruins on the ground covered with tangled greenery. From where I stand, on top of that heap, I can see that the walls, once known for their frescoes, have been stripped white and are now marked with black and neon graffiti. In some places there remain a few painted figures, including ones of Saints Peter and Paul, but their faces are chiseled out and their bodies have been pockmarked by bullets. Cars roll by every so often, but the one persistent sound is the hum of bees coming from a smashed clerestory window.

I came across this church off a road near the Agios Dimitrios crossing point on the Green Line, the boundary running through the island of Cyprus and keeping it cloven in two radically disparate parts: the free, government-controlled area of Cyprus, and the upper third of the sovereign territory of the Republic that Turkey seized in 1974. Turkey has since held that part under illegal military occupation, and turned it into a rogue breakaway “state” called the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), recognized by Turkey only.

Dilapidated churches like St. Andronikos are a common sight here. As the journalist Michael Jansen observes, the north, full of 12,000 years of history at a key crossroads in the Mediterranean, now looks like a “cultural wasteland.”

Read the rest here Bare Ruined Choirs

One more than one occasion I have been critical of the involvement of Orthodox Christians in the environmental movement.  Most recently wrote an essay critically of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s own opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which His All Holiness not only offered his support of international environmental regulations but also sought to justify theological his own involvement in the environmental movement.

Publicly and privately, many Orthodox Christians criticized me for my disagreement and assume (wrongly) that I oppose our involvement with the environmental movement.  While I see why they draw this conclusion, I would argue not that we withdraw but that that the Church involve herself more fully in the environmental movement.  I would publicly encourage and support the involvement of those Orthodox Christians who they believe God is calling them to do.

At the same time, however, I would also challenge my brothers and sisters in Christ to a more critical engagement of the environmental movement as a whole.  This would include not simply a careful examination of the science of climate change but also of the political, cultural economic and yes, environmental, consequences of the various national and international public policy initiatives being advance. Continue reading →

The president of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Fr Michael Sweeney, OP makes some interesting–and I think correct–observations about pluralism and totalitarianism in relation to certain cultural trends.  The following remarks come from his talk, “Expressing the Good,” that he delivered at the recent Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture Conference.  You can read the whole of his talk HERE but I wanted to bring the following points to the attention of all of you.  I am particular interested in what people think of Sweeney’s thought both in itself and how (if at all) you would see it helping the witness of the Orthodox Church both in the public square and in explaining the importance of such a witness to Orthodox laity, clergy and bishops. I am especially interested in your thoughts because Sweeney’s argument is  Thomistic in content and methodology.  I am aware that many Orthodox Christians are inclined to dismiss Thomism. But I have found it to be  very helpful an approach to philosophy and theology and it is a school of thought that held a prominent, and fruitful, place in my own education and spiritual formation as a Catholic.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

I think that it is imperative for us to realize that appeals to “pluralism” are not any longer merely denoting the social fact that different faiths and customs are represented in most contemporary societies. Rather, given the premises that all knowledge is contingent upon one’s worldview, and that one’s worldview is largely a product of social construction, pluralism must be insisted upon in order to relativize previous social constructions –worldviews or belief “systems”– in order to achieve “progress” in society, which effort consists in positing a new ideal toward the construction of the social order.

What will such an order achieve? Always it will promise to maximize advantages to the individual for the sake of achieving a new order in society. This holds, I think, for two reasons: first, the “individual” who must always seek, like Sisyphus, for an elusive autonomy, is a creature who is isolated from history, and therefore particularly susceptible of ideals and possibilities; such a one must look forever forward, not back. (When he does look back it is see evidence for an evolution of society organized around the idea of freedom as autonomy). Second, the autonomous individual is not a social animal; he is not rooted in a community, but is taught to identify himself according to certain preconceptions that he has inherited –his “belief system”– from which he can be easily detached. Continue reading →

Often I find myself being criticized for taking up political themes in my writing or speaking. Typically (in an America context at least) I am chastised for aligning myself with the political or Religious Right. While there is some truth to this, I think as the Catholic journalist and commentator John Allen points out in a recent essay (“Spain takes a page from the US pro-life playbook” ), critics conveniently ignore “the fact that the church’s political alignment in a given culture often depends on factors beyond its control. In both Europe and the States, one such variable is how open the political left is to pro-life sentiment. To put the point bluntly, if pro-lifers (including Catholics) can’t find a home on the left, many of them are obviously going to end up on the right.”

Allen’s observation about the Catholic Church’s response to political currents I can certainly claim as my own. Additionally, I think his view of the centerist inclination of the Catholic Church here is applicable to the Orthodox Church. “In politics, as in most everything else, the genetic disposition of Catholicism is to seek the sane center. When the church careens away from the center, it’s often because external circumstances have shoved it in that direction.”

What might this means for the Orthodox Church’s witness in the Public Square and for her internal life? Continue reading →