St Augustine says that friendship worthy of the name, requires that our friends love what we love the way we love it. While there are significant points of disagreement between the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and OST. One example is their defense of male and female as biological facts rather than mere social conventions:
Gender identity ideology is leading to increasing numbers of children and young adults being medicalized for not conforming to sex-based stereotypes. All current evidence suggests this group is massively, disproportionately same-sex attracted (LGB). Known as “gender-affirming care,” this medicalization takes the form of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures on a person’s genitalia or breasts. These drugs and procedures serve no physical medical purpose, but rather are undertaken to try to resemble the opposite sex, ostensibly to treat clinically significant distress that a person experiences as a result of not appearing “masculine” or “feminine” enough. These drugs and procedures can lead to sterilization and adult sexual dysfunction; the children who “consent” to them are simply too young to meaningfully consent to permanent impairment of fertility or of adult sexual experiences that they cannot yet comprehend …
More on gender ideology but this time from Orthodox Christan Benjamin Cabe who writes:
The confusion around this topic, even in Orthodox circles, was made manifest to me as I sat in a seminary classroom in 2017 where this question was asked by a fellow seminarian: “are souls gendered?” The conversation that ensued was concerning. If our future priests were confused about this subject, how are they going to teach the people? After being asked by several classmates to write about the topic, I did in what became my Masters Thesis and later my first book: On Gender and the Soul. If you happen to be interested in theological anthropology or what the first 1000 years of Christian writers have to say about gender and its relationship to the soul, you may find it of interest.
While the traditionalism and conservativism of Orthodox Christianity are well deserved, we would do well to remember Chesterton’s observation “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The Church is not immune to social influences and so like Chesterton’s Conservatives we can find ourselves in the strange position that “when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.” It isn’t enough to know a philosophy is wrong or even why it is wrong; we also need to know what it gets right and—more importantly—why it is attractive.
Br. Anthony Maria Akerman O.P. argues that it is impossible to separate” a natural law regime” from divine law since the latter is the fulfillment of the former. He writes:
…the natural law itself is inextricably linked to the positive divine law. At least in the majority of contemporary situations, a purely natural law regime is not a possibility. The bulk of my argument is based on Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on law. I’ll conclude, however, with an examination of some magisterial texts, particularly from Leo XIII and, even, Benedict XVI to confirm that this strictly natural temporal power is neither proposed nor defended by the Church.
While noting his qualification “in the majority of contemporary situations,” OST would also hesitate to embrace an “imagined via media” between “true liberals, for whom even appealing to the ‘natural law’ is excessively partisan” and “the integralists” for whom “positive divine law ought to direct the temporal power.” I leave it to the reader to determine how—if at all—Orthodox Christians would square symphonia1 with Brother’s rejection of the Catholic via media.
Among the most fruitful fathers (for me at least) for OST in St Justin Martyr2 who teaches us to look for the seminal presence of the Logos in the culture.
Within this Wonka World of hyperabundance, I believe a new economy must emerge. The Ascetic Economy will be built on the premise that people will pay for products and services that protect them from the corrupting excesses of the consumer economy, and equip them to lead lives of spiritual maximalism.
“Why are young men so angry?” Here’s at least the beginning of the answer:
Acknowledging that the basic physical privileges young men enjoy have not gone away, young men are being treated as if they have attained a status they have not yet. And this embodies a level of insensitivity and indifference to male experience that can only be enraging – while the fact that members of this group has indeed been historically dominant plays no role in the impact of this being their experience right now.
The young man wants to establish themselves professionally too. But even if you do know what you want as a young man, you may have no idea how to obtain it. Perhaps you haven’t met the right people; perhaps you spend most of your time commuting, overall you’re not formed. This is why the poet Thom Gunn said that young men identify with Hamlet: ‘They’re unhappy in an a formless sort of way… [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.’
This is the root, I suspect, of why profoundly unhappy young men look for a cause and even a bad one will do.
Mariia Kravchenko, What should Russia do with Ukraine? [Translation of a propaganda article by a Russian journalist]
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not only illegal under international law, but the willingness of Patriarch Kirill to justify the war is an offense against the Gospel. What is often overlooked by many in the West is Russia’s goal in the war is the eradication of Ukraine and Ukrainians as a recent article published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti makes clear:
Unlike, for example, Georgia or the Baltic States, history has proved it impossible for Ukraine to exist as a nation-state, and any attempts to “build” such a nation-state naturally lead to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construct that has no civilizational substance of its own, a subordinate element of an extraneous and alien civilization. Debanderization alone will not be enough for denazification: the Banderite element is only a hand and a screen, a disguise for the European project of the Nazi Ukraine, which is why the denazification of Ukraine means its inevitable de-europeanization
In order to put the Ukraine denazification plan into practice, Russia itself will have to finally part with pro-European and pro-Western illusions, acknowledge itself as the last authority in protecting and preserving those values of historical Europe (the Old World) that deserve to preserve and that the West ultimately abandoned, losing the fight for itself. This struggle continued throughout the 20th century and found its expression in the world war and the Russian revolution, which were inextricably linked with each other.
Yale professor Timothy Synder writes
The word "terrorism" gets overused, not least in Russia itself, where two artists were recently arrested on charges of "supporting terrorism" because of a theatrical production. This is how Russian propaganda works: we hesitate to use the word "terrorism" because the terrorists themselves use it to describe something that is not terrorism.
We have to work to preserve the concepts needed to characterize Russian behavior even as the Russian state strives to make them meaningless. It is certainly terrorism to launch missiles and drones at a city. What if, for no reason at all, the United States launched ballistic missiles at Toronto? Certainly this would be terrorism, among many other things.
And what if American leaders and propagandists, in this hypothetical scenario, gave senseless reasons for such an action? What if they claimed that Canadians and Americans were actually one people, and that Canadians who did not realize this had to be killed? That the U.S.-Canadian border was illegitimate because of Joe Biden's personal views about the past? That English speakers in Canada needed to be united with their true American homeland? That Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was a Nazi?
All of these senseless claims, which are (mutatis mutandis) precisely Russia's justifications for attacking Ukraine, just make matters worse. Indeed, it is at this point that the terrorism becomes fascism.
For example, compare this For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church:
…cooperation for the sake of the common good was enshrined within Orthodox tradition under the term “symphonia” in the Emperor Justinian’s Novellas.[12] This same principle was operative in the constitution of many Orthodox nation states in the post-Ottoman period. And today, as well, the principle of symphonia can continue to guide the Church in her attempts to work with governments toward the common good and to struggle against injustice. It cannot, however, be invoked as a justification for the imposition of religious orthodoxy on society at large, or for promotion of the Church as a political power. Rather, it should serve to remind Christians that this commitment to the common good—as opposed to the mere formal protection of individual liberties, partisan interests, and the power of corporations—is the true essence of a democratic political order. Without the language of the common good at the center of social life, democratic pluralism all too easily degenerates into pure individualism, free market absolutism, and a spiritually corrosive consumerism (II.14).
“We have been taught that Christ is the First-born of God, and we have declared . . . that he is the Word of whom every race of men were partaken, and those who lived reasonable are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.” Apologia, I, 46.1-4.
“All right principles that philosophers and lawgivers have discovered and expressed they owe to whatever of the Word they have found and contemplated in part. The reason why they have contradicted each other is that they have not known the entire Word, which is Christ.” Apologia, II, 10.1-3.
“The seeds of truth are the formative principle of right knowledge and right living.” Apologia, I, 44.