Part of my ongoing Correspondence series, featuring replies to people who contacted me and asked questions.
Based on your research, Is it true that one of the ordaining bishops of Metropolitan Petros was with the “New Calendar but under the ROCOR” like I have read?
You’re getting things mixed up a bit—Metropolitan Petros was ordained by ROCOR Bishop Seraphim of Caracas and Archbishop Leonty of Chile. (more…)
I don’t celebrate Halloween, out of obedience to my bishop and because my conscience does not permit me to engage in anything that makes light of the dark powers (which, when I was involved with occultic things as a teenager, I witnessed with my own eyes).
That being said, a few points:
1) A lot of the anti-Halloween stuff is derived from Protestant Fundamentalist nonsense, and should not be taken seriously or used in Orthodox arguments against Halloween. We really don’t know what Druids did, what their religion was like, or what the pagans of the British Isles really did on Samhein, apart from a few unreliable testimonies of the Romans, who deliberately fabricated and hyped them up to justify their annexation of Britain and destruction of the British people’s traditional social structure. Recall that the Romans were just as pagan as the British were, but had an “enlightened” form of paganism, so the more inchoate and natural paganism of the Druids and Celts was seen as backward and uncivilized. But the real fact is that the Druids were powerful in that society, and their power needed to be broken. (more…)
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At the onset, I want to say that I have an extreme dislike for engaging in polemics. Nowadays, I normally do not engage in public refutations of false accusations; I spent too many hours of my life doing so in the 2000s, and it caused me a lot of consternation. Perhaps some good came out of it, but I found it impossible to answer every critic, and every argument. Nowadays, I don’t mind writing broadly in article or book format to address trends and events, but the point-by-point refutation style of responding so common online is something I do not have the stomach for anymore.
That being said, yet another person has contacted me and asked me about the accusations found on the website of the soi-disant Archbishop Gregory of Colorado pertaining to the GOC (referred to there as “GOC Kallinikos”).[1] I was preparing to respond in private, when I decided that if this individual has these questions, and others like him have had these questions in the past, then there are probably yet still more who wonder, but have not expressed their doubts. For this reason, I am going to write a public response, in point-by-point fashion. (more…)
Those active in Orthodox Christian “corners” of Facebook have likely heard of or interacted with His Grace Bishop Christodoulos of Theoupolis, who joined the site as soon as it became open to the public in 2006 (in fact, I joined Facebook when he invited me). Bishop Christodoulos, a vicar bishop in the GOC, quickly reached the Facebook limit of 5000 friends, and while he primarily used it to interact with his spiritual children and promote videos on the YouTube Channel Greek Orthodox Christian Television, he also used it to become one of the most accessible Orthodox Christian bishops online, fielding questions about the Orthodox faith, and directing people to the nearest Orthodox Christian parish. (more…)