I hope the non-US Orthodox bloggers rise up to overthrow the US/Mostly Rightwing Hegemony on the net.

By way of defending “my country”, certainly some Anglicans outside the USA *seem* to think the American Christian Right is a good thing. I imagine that there might be others, albeit very quiet ones, even in the UK and the EU. But I also know that when I try to discern a religious right in e.g., Canada, while the politics may be similar (in terms of morality or social policy) the methods are so vastly different as to not warrant comparison.

I don’t think that the alleged polarity and my counter polarity are culture specific. What pertyains to Orthodoxy in America and differently to Europe has more to do with the growth of the religious right in America … which as a phenomenon we simply do not have at all.

I hear what you’re talking about in inconography but I also remember the self-identified Orthodox man who wrote to my former (Episcopal) parish and lectured us on the real meaning of icons and accused us of blasphemy because of our Dancing Saints icon.

Perhaps we will see a different perspective when the home-country-Orthodox get us off their asses, renounce their spiritual racism and speak up. Eventually I think that these will tire of their ignorant or even hate-full compatriots and speak up. I do hope so.

In the UK and Europe though it is very, very different.

I do agree that the dogmatic definitions arose in response to perceived heresy. But that “heresy” was largely also part of the same evolutionary process that brought us Orthodoxy as we have it today. It took imperial politics to force a choice.

Clark plays on the myth that we got this stuff “directly from Jesus” when there is lots of evidence otherwise - development, evolution, change. The idea of “therapy” is, itself, so anachronistically applied to the simple reformation of Judaism that Jesus taught, that I’m speachless. I’m also amused at the idea that modern Orthodox have “strict adherence” to the decrees of the councils. I’ll only point at divorced clergy once, or the overlapping jurisdictions…

Speaking as someone in recovery from convertitis,… short answer is it’s amusing and sad in the way that one in a 12 step programme looks at a drunken comedy on TV. I may be able to hear it differently later.

However, great iconographers within this canon are highly creative. Andre Rublev and more recently Gregory Kroug come to mind.

Perhaps the division is between those who won’t embrace the dialectic between tradition and innovation and those who will.

Faith and Philosophy is the podcast.