Tag Archives: Orthodox tradition

Africa’s New Deaconess: What’s the Bother?

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on May 8, 2024

Maybe you’ve heard the old Bolshevik saying, “The worse things get, the better things are.” It makes sense for revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the existing order: The worse things get, the more dissatisfied people will be with things as they … Continue reading →

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Male and Female as Archic and Eucharistic Modes of Relation

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on May 15, 2023

Is not personalism merely a form of individualism—more humane (perhaps) than old-fashioned, rights- based individualism, but not humane enough to keep from reducing the human person to an inhuman abstraction stripped of the concrete particulars that define every human life, … Continue reading →

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Special Pleading for Helenism

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on January 20, 2022

“Immanent critique” is a Marxist method of analysis arising out of the notorious Frankfurt School of subversive scholarship. In theory, the immanent critiquer enters intellectually into a targeted culture to develop its thinking along its own lines so as to … Continue reading →

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The “Mark of the Beast” in Orthodox Tradition

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on August 12, 2020

The following was written recently for Parish Life, the monthly newsletter of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church in Washington, D.C. A parishioner posed the question; I was asked to provide an answer. QUESTION: How should we … Continue reading →

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The Church once had deaconesses. So what?

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on January 18, 2018

For many people, the fact that the Orthodox Church once had deaconesses, somewhere at sometime, is enough to justify having them again. After all, they say, we Orthodox believe in tradition, and deaconesses are part of the tradition. Are they … Continue reading →

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Orthodox Deaconesses?

by Brian Patrick Mitchell Posted on October 11, 2017

Remarks by Protodeacon Brian Patrick Mitchell At the St. Phoebe Center Conference on “Renewing the Male and Female Diaconate” Irvine, California October 7, 2017 Thanks, Helen [Theodoropoulos], for the introduction, and thanks also to AnnMarie Mecera and everyone else at … Continue reading →

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