Orthodox Perspective on Ordaining Women Priests

With a nod to the folks over at Vox Nova, who made me think hard enough to write something down.

The Anglican Church has voted to approve the ordination of female bishops, further intensifying rifts caused by the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The teaching I’ve received from my spiritual father, Fr. Matthew, on the matter of a female priesthood goes like this:

On either side of the beautiful gates there is an icon of Christ (right) and the Theotokos (left).

As icons, they represent the spiritual and physical reality of actual persons, and as such reflect the glory of God. They are also icons of perfect manhood and womanhood; that is, the highest calling that any man can aspire to is that of priest, and the highest calling any woman can aspire to is that of mother. Not all men will be priests and not all women will be mothers, but certainly no man will ever be a woman (plastic surgery and hormone supplements notwithstanding) and no woman will ever be a priest because these we are specifically created for different functions.

Fr. Alister Anderson has written a response to the Anglican decision to ordain women in the priesthood and his comments echo the teaching I related above:

We Christians who advocate only a male priesthood as being the only valid apostolic ministry of the Church do not in any way deny that women have equal rights and opportunities to work. We believe that women should be paid commensurately with men for their labor and skill. But certain leaders deprecate the male priesthood as being a bastion of male chauvinism and a violation of civil and equal rights for women. Nonsense! The Church is not a secular institution governed by democratic processes. The Church is a spiritual organism and not just a secular organization. She is a spiritual and supernatural monarchy with God as Her king and supreme judge. We Orthodox Christians declare that while men and women are equal in the eyes of God and under the secular law, they are very different in their human nature because God has created them for different functions. A bishop, priest and deacon have a specific function within the family of the Church. To ordain women to the sacred ministry would only confuse and destroy that function. In terms of human function a woman can no more be a priest than a man can be a mother.

The full article

At long last...an update

It seems people (my dad) check this site and notice when I don't post. Since last I posted, the world has continued to move. Marking such progress, its of special note that the Northwest Passage, long sought at great cost, is open for the first time in recorded history.

I've discovered that there are more Kotineks out there! Hi Lauren, if you're reading.

While I voted for Ron Paul in the primary, it doesn't mean that I've permanently crossed the aisle. I held out hope that if there were a Republican candidate with good plans for foreign policy, trade, and health care it would force the remaining Democratic candidate field into more substantial positions.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy reading the updates and I hope I get a chance to write again soon!

Night Falls on Lake Somerville, July 4, 2008

A Medidation on the Decline of American Power, Part II

All of this doomsday scenario making leads us back to the 08 elections. Is there the possibility of change?

From my perspective, there are three very basic areas in which we need radical shift if we are to stave off the worst of the possibilities I've described:

1) Develop a coherent, workable foreign policy. Isolationism can't work. Jingoism paints targets on our collective chest. Removing ourselves as the coordinators/occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan would be a good start (replacing with U.N. command is a possibility).

2) Develop a fair trade policy. Bring production back to the states, encourage heirloom craftsmanship and buying locally. Use (what little) economic power we have to mandate fair wages and humane working and living conditions for workers abroad (this ought to have an beneficent effect on immigration as well). Don't trade with countries that won't play ball. Don't give personal rights to corporations.

3) Establish universal, centralized health care for all people in the USA.

I recognize that all three of these represent radical shift from the current state of affairs. I also think that we're at a tipping point economically, politically, and militarily. We don't have the luxury of making a slow U-turn. Unfortunately, neither of the presumptive major party candidates has the political will to pull off this kind of sea-change. A McCain presidency is a vote for status quo. Obama will make a good president someday, but not yet (and he agrees with me...waiting on the video from LaueOfficer). I don't think you get to where Sen. Obama is, as fast as he did without being in somebody's pocket, and that scares me (incidentally, I read an article in a magazine aboard a flight to Denver last year that cited specifically whose pocket he's in...but I can find no reference to this now). What scares me most is that someone with pockets that big isn't likely to be interested in much of a shift from business as usual either.

A Medidation on the Decline of American Power, Part I

For quite some time now (perhaps since the Democratic National Convention in July 2004) I've believed that the future of our country will, quite literally, ride on the outcome of the 2008 elections. In 2003, former president Bill Clinton noted, "We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when we're not the biggest power on the block." We have not, in the interim, been exhibiting the sort of humility that President Clinton suggested. To the contrary, we've eroded the trust of our allies and sometime collaborators worldwide, our credit practices have caused the dollar to plummet, and our military--though still the most advanced in the world--is stretched dreadfully thin and cannot sustain the current deployments indefinitely. Domestically, we have sat idly by while watching as our elected representatives have traded in on our fears and expanded their powers; as Ben Franklin observes, perhaps we deserve neither liberty nor safety. Short-sighted attempts to solve the energy crisis with ethanol will make food and fuel prices continue to rise. We're scared of our food, and rightly so, because we don't know its provenance.

Most Americans are literate on some level. More than fifty percent of our economy is based in the service industries. Ubiquitous technologies such as internet and cell phones have made easier migration from family homesteads. Many Americans work to have enough money to have a place to stay and a way to get to work, and we don't seem worried about not saving. We are, in summary, creating a highly-educated, highly-mobile, poorly-compensated underclass. Marx only said that religion was the opiate of the masses because he had never seen TV.

The curious thing about critics of Marxism is that they focus on the failures of Communist states. Though I am decidedly not a Marxist scholar, my brief reading of his and Engels principles suggests that the theory hinges on the dialectical historical process resulting in a shift in the balance of power. Put simply, Marx and Engels weren't creating a business plan so much as making predictions of the future. The ironic part of all of this is that the only place in the world (so far) that has the necessary conditions to play out the Marxist experiment is right here in the good ol' USA. One need not imagine too hard to come up with a scenario that could mobilize a restless underclass: a severe disruption in the activities that take our minds off of our lives, or a steep spike in the cost of food and fuel, which leads to less travel, less eating out, less flying...what made up over half of our economy again? And those nations we bullied, think they'll watch from the sidelines as our country falls apart?

Boycott Beijing 2008?

Anne Applebaum at Slate.com has the right idea, why not boycott the 2008 Olympics?

Unfortunately, the American people have, as a whole, lost the stomach for prosecuting righteousness if it means getting our own hands dirty. Or, more to the point, not getting that Coke at McDonalds for lunch, paying for it with your Visa, driving there in your V-Dub, taking pictures of the kids' soccer game with your Kodak, letting them wear Addidas, or making dinner with your GE appliances. Or doing without a whole host of integral products and services. We wouldn't want of offend anyone now, would we? Yes, we really are that lazy.

Kucinich out of Race, I'm Changing Boats

Effective on Rep. Kucinich's official withdrawal from the 2008 presidential race tomorrow, I will be shifting my monetary, volunteer, and grassroots organizational support to Republican candidate Ron Paul.

The media blackout of Rep. Kucinich in the 2008 contest and the DNC complicity in a system that seeks to anoint an early frontrunner and channel all donations through the DNC is an abhorrent corruption of the democratic process. We Americans should all be ashamed of our system.

The big three issues in this race are our rampant militarism, health care, and the economy, and all three are inextricably linked. As was the case in 2004, Rep. Kucinich was the only Democratic candidate who could stand on a record of not funding the war, providing for an immediate withdrawal of troops, a universal not-for-profit health care system, and an economic policy that privileges working people, not corporations.

I have thought for some time now that the viability of the United States in the next decade would be determined by whether or not the 2008 election would be a real turning point, and none of the democratic "frontrunners" provide hope for substantive change. I'm not interested in changing the name of who is in power in Washington; I'm interested in changing who is in power in Washington, and that needs to be the American people. Since Rep. Kucinich can no longer carry that flag in the presidential race, I'm willing to be blind to party labels and support a man who has that vision.

More Jena 6

After a particularly heated office discussion about whether or not the Jena 6 demonstrations were useful and necessary, a co-worker gave me a copy of this article which suggests that the story is far more convoluted than what was generally represented in the news media (go figure).

Among the conclusions that our discussion came to, the following ideas are underscored in this article: there is more to the story than what we heard on the news and in the paper, and none of the young men involved can be characterized as innocent.

But, the legal response to the Jena 6 story, the outpouring of emotion, the creative response, and the thousands that converged on Jena, LA and demonstrated in their own towns and schools suggest a reason why we did take to this story with the fervor we did.

Strange Fruit

"Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"
- Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol)

-tshirt image courtesy of Glenn Bracey

September 20, 2007

Nationwide protests today bring a new generation of activists into the ongoing fight against entrenched racist power structures in the U.S. The "Jena 6" are accused of conspiring to murder a white high school classmate (who spent a total of 3 hours in an emergency room as a result of his injuries). These six young men--Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, Mychal Bell, and Jesse Beard--were in fact responding to a racially-charged tensions in the small Louisiana town of Jena (pronounced gee-na)that heightened after two black students had the audacity to sit under "the white tree" on school grounds for lunch.

The following day, several nooses were found hanging from the tree, an all-too-clear message from white students intent on preserving the Jim Crow privilege of their favorite eating spot. When black students protested the hateful display, District Attorney Reed Walters threatened, "I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen."

When a white student continued to taunt black students, a fight ensued and D.A. Walters got a chance to make good on his threat. Perhaps saddest of all is that even if "justice is served" and the young men are exonerated, the damage is incalculable. Mychal Bell, the young man whose conviction is currently under review stands to lose out on his pick of college scholarships. Worse still is the hard lesson these young men have had to learn at such an early age that the system is stacked against them. The thousands of people who are traveling to be a part of the protest illustrate that the problems these young men face aren't unique, but in fact systematic oppression still occurs and has mobilized the next Hero Generation.

Visit the following sites for more information and to support the defense efforts of these young men:
http://www.freethejena6.org/
http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/

To Be, or Not To Be

I'm having an epistemological, ontological, existential crisis with regard to my doctoral program. In a recent course geared toward helping students prepare our dissertation proposals, I discovered a huge gap in my education.

The opening essay to Conceptions of Giftedness, by James Borland, makes a compelling case for dismissing with the notion of defining giftedness. My very first reaction was a feeling of validation since I found correspondence between Borland's points and some ideas I had been developing independently since my introduction to the field. One such issue is the need for an umbrella term to describe giftedness and retardation (my suggestion is lamentably uninspired: "differently abled"). I suggested the need for such a term since there seems to be some emotional baggage attached to the term "gifted" that leads some administrators and teachers to believe that gifted students will fend for themselves in an average educational setting. The other point of correspondence that I found was with my idea that early entrance programs are an imperfect solution to the need for accelerated learning opportunities for gifted students. I suggested that instead we should have an educational system that provides access to suitable learning opportunities for students from birth through college, regardless of age.

Borland's solution is simple and elegant. If the end goal of programs to serve gifted students is ability-appropriate educational opportunities, the amount of time and energy we are spending on identification is a ridiculous waste of time, not to mention a process fraught with uncertainty and inequity. Instead, we should spend our resources ensuring that all students have an ability-appropriate education. In so doing, the gifted constituency, however one wants to define it, has their needs met, as do all other students, including those that might have been otherwise marginalized.

Which leads me to my crisis/es. Most of my chosen field has taken up the banner of one or another definitions of giftedness, and usually, some method of concluding that a person meets those criteria. I don't think that we can accurately say what giftedness is, figure out how to determine who is actually gifted, or continue to have a viable field while recognizing the ethical, political, and professional implications of being so unsure.

Ive come to the conclusion that I'm not satisfied with the rigor of my doctoral program so far. I don't have a good command of the literature (as evidenced by my startling discovery), I'm not confident in the soundness of some of the major theories in my field, and I'm not convinced of the viability of my degree. I need to immerse myself in the literature and find my way back out.

Radicalism as a Democratic Social Indicator pt. II

A few more thoughts on the subject. Unpolished. Let me know what you think..

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The more firmly entrenched persons in positions of power tend to be, the less likely they are to be willing to share power and access to power. In shoring up their positions, such persons tend to choose as their successors persons of like mind and intent. Maintenance of the status quo (i.e. classical conservativism) is a tool of those who would consolidate power. Such a process is inherently un-democratic and leads to ideological inbreeding.

Radicalism, understood in the socio-political sphere as agitation (e.g. demonstrations, proselytization) and pursuit of change that is inimical to centrist positions because its end is widespread social change (hopefully for the better). Understood in this light, the claim to be apolitical and/or not vote is, in fact, a vote in support of the status quo.

Political parties, no matter their stripe, that have massive infrastructure and resource needs that extend past an immediate election, campaign, or mission can fall prey to this underlying principle.

Full Circle

NOWisNOW is a band whose sound you're not likely to have heard unless you frequent small, hip venues on the eastern seaboard or are a SKEMER. If lead singer Mitch Alden has his way, though, that might change. Mitch is petitioning the director for a (hopefully) upcoming big-screen production of The Dark Tower to include his original music in the soundtrack of the movie. In his blog, Mitch writes:

King's office told me that once the deal is set, more often that not, the Director, not the author, chooses the music for their movies...and here is where I could really use your help - getting JJ Abram's attention. I'll be sending his office a CD with a letter and all that stuff, but having the outside hype concerning these tunes would be an added bonus. If any of you guys know of message boards or other areas where folks talk shop about JJ Abrams &/or "Lost," or "The Dark Tower," would you be into starting some threads about getting these tunes in the production? I'm thinking during the outro credits, the tunes would be used best, but I'll leave that opinion to your tasteful ears. And if you're not into message boards, Of course, you could always write JJ Abrams or Stephen King directly :)The 3 tunes are "other worlds", "daydream", and "wheel."

The Dark Tower inspired tunes can be found here.

Listen to the songs, and if you feel so inclined, help spread the word on Mitch and NOWisNOW and help the inspiration for these songs come full circle.