….seminaries are afflicted with the disease of intellectual effeminacy.

Fr. Andrew Phillips clearly highlights the essence of the problem in Threats to the Real Thing

Level Two: The Threat of the Pseudo-Intellectual Academicism

On a second level, but linked with the first, there is the emergence of paid ‘Orthodox’ academics. Like Arius of old, they cultivate the speaking circuits, reducing the faith to mere hairsplitting booklore and the indoctrination of the naive and ill-informed, like Uniats. Constantly in search of ‘reforms’, they subtly suggest the ruination of the Tradition of the Church, in imitation of the academics who destroyed many of the remaining Orthodox traditions of Roman Catholicism fifty years ago. The irrelevance of their academicism and compromise is obvious to the faithful.

Know it all-ism

Linked with the above are the know-it-alls, often newcomers to the Church. They pretentiously think that they know more and better than the old generations who have carried Church Tradition through thick and thin, protecting it from Communism, Nazism and Capitalism alike. Having resisted both fanatical left and fanatical right, modernists and sectarians, the bearers of the Tradition now face those who think that they know everything, but certainly understand nothing, because they do not have the key to the faith – the living experience that only comes with time.

It is not enough to say “I love families.”

To me a lot of it comes down to addressing the male-female synergy and finding ways to promote and model the proper interrelationship. There are a lot of sacred cows that would have to be challenged in order to achieve this, not the least of which is the structure of our current economy which at all levels pressures the family and encourages the continued non-production of children or proper care of those we do have. Our utilitarian/industrial/global/consumer model for the economy is extraordinarily harmful to families.

Of course, the lie of ‘sexual freedom’ and ‘sexual expression’ would have to be addressed as well. The ‘enviromentalist/zero population growth’ link will have to be destroyed. The list is lengthy. The real question is how each of us can change our own lives to support the over all goal.

George,

The problem is a certain contingent of the leadership in our seminaries are afflicted with the disease of intellectual effeminacy.