Comments on: Stephanopoulos, Pelecanos & Argyros To Highlight Conference

By: George Michalopulos

George Michalopulos — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:16:07 +0000

Andrew, thanks for retrieving that. The guy’s an absolute twerp. How far have we fallen that any normal man would twist himself into a pretzel on national TV in order to defend such a reprehensible creature.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:17:04 +0000

In reply to George Michalopulos. Excellent reminder George. Here is Torchbearer of the Faith, George Stephanopoulos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYaZVZKBhW4

By: George Michalopulos

George Michalopulos — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:44:47 +0000

Did anybody catch Stephanopoulos on Hannity last week? He was bending over backwards to support Jennings, the “School Safety Czar.” it seems that several years ago, a 15 year old boy who was meeting a man for sex in a bus station bathroom came to him for advise. Jennings told the boy in question that he should be using a condom. Sex with 15 year olds is a crime. Stephanopoulos went to bat for him big time. It seems like the boy was really 16 years old.

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:00:14 +0000

Yes the mention of the two together in the title is cause for concern.

By: Fr. Johannes Jacobse

Fr. Johannes Jacobse — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:45:30 +0000

They might be very active in their parishes for all we know, but that is not the real point of the piece. The real problem is the conflation of the Orthodox faith and “Hellenic Heritage” by means of the ethnicity of the person being celebrated.

The definitions of both Hellenism and Orthodoxy in this formulation are impoverished because either will represent only ethnic trappings. Hellenism apart from Orthodoxy is a false construct. Orthodoxy incorporates Hellenism through the Cappadocian synthesis. Unifying them in the way we see in the press release (through ethnic personage) is not historically sound.

From the other direction, if you want to redefine Hellenism as a separate track alongside Orthodoxy and yet posit both as equally authoritative, then you are left with a question yet unanswered: Which source narrative is authoritative? — pagan mythology or Holy Scripture? Here the the Cappadocian synthesis is functionally ignored (leap-frogged essentially), and the new point of contact (the new synthesis) between Orthodoxy and Hellenism occurs in the person of the successful Greek. No wonder there is such confusion between morality and politics in Constantinople — which trumps the other?

I don’t begrudge the success of the men celebrated and I have no idea about their Christian lives. The distortion of the tradition is a bit hard to swallow though.

By: paleocon

paleocon — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:29:13 +0000

Argyros is an archon of the EP. Don’t know to what extent that speaks against the nominalism of his faith. I only know of him for losing lawsuits: one brought by thousands of former tenants who had been cheated out of security deposits by his company and one in which he unsuccessfully challenged the county’s finding that he had engaged in tax evasion.

By: orrologion

orrologion — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:46:49 +0000

I know it’s tempting to assume all or many of these award winners are only nominally Orthodox. I don’t know if that is the case, or not. Is anyone aware of their involvement in their local parish? Or, are they, in fact, being recognized primarily for being “Torchbearers of Our Hellenic Heritage” rather than “Our Faith”? In many ways, I hope they are very active, very quietly. There is something that rubs me the wrong way about successful or famous people in a church body being paraded forward as exemplars of the faith.