Orthodox Reflections

Masterclasses are all the rage right now, so we’ll hop on that bandwagon for a moment and say that if anyone wants a masterclass on why Evangelical Protestants shouldn’t be in charge of United States foreign policy, he will have a difficult time finding a better one than the opening segment of American Family Radio’s Today’s Issues for Monday, 18 Aug. 2025.

We have a lot of respect for AFR’s parent organization, the American Family Association, for its work in promoting Christian culture by combating abortion, pornography, the LGBT cult, and so on. But the political and religious programming on AFR can be a real trainwreck sometimes. So it was on Today’s Issues.

The segment in question featured a discussion of the Ukraine-Russia war in the wake of the meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin, and the commentators, who are supposedly well-informed on current events, couldn’t stop mouthing the dishonest talking points that permeate the mainstream Western press
https://orthodoxreflections.com/evangelical-protestants-should-not-be-directing-us-foreign-policy/

Nostalgia for the old days when America was “great” infects a good deal of Christian teaching, most especially among the various Protestant groups. As in the 1950’s, the risk here is creating a civil religion in Christian garb but hardly Christian at all in substance.

https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-kingdom-of-beaver-cleaver-overcoming-christian-nostalgia/

At each Divine Liturgy, Orthodox Christians read a minimum of one passage from an Epistle and one from a Gospel. These two passages are in addition to the text of the Divine Liturgy, much of which is drawn word-for-word from the scriptures. The priest’s homily is typically focused on explaining and analyzing either the Gospel, the Epistle, or both. The two daily readings are often supplemented with additional scripture readings, depending on the Feast Day, season, etc. It is, in fact, quite common for Orthodox services to feature multiple readings from both the Old and New Testaments. It is impossible for an Orthodox Christian to go to Church and avoid the Bible. Scripture readings are at the heart of everything we do.
https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-orthodox-study-bible-and-christian-private-school/

When I was a new homeschooler, I remember being pulled this way and that by each new shiny curriculum and method. Years ago, a veteran homeschool mother mentioned a curriculum to me, and I naively responded: “Is that a living books curriculum? I am planning to only use those.” Well, two neurodivergent kiddos later (currently a 2nd and 8th grader), I have put aside my idealism and now strongly believe that the best homeschooling method is the method that works best for the homeschooling parents and their kids! I have always been an “eclectic homeschooler” pulling ideas and curriculums from each of the major homeschooling approaches.


One of the reasons I created the Orthodox Christian Morning Time Curriculum the way that I did was so that it could easily be added on to any curriculum, whether a traditional all-in-one curriculum, Charlotte Mason style or even online coursework. Right now, there is not much in the way of academic Orthodox Christian homeschool curriculum available, so my hope is that the Orthodox Christian Morning Time Curriculum can help families to add an Orthodox Christian element to their schooling more easily, whichever curriculum they use.

https://orthodoxreflections.com/thoughts-on-orthodox-christian-homeschooling-and-the-orthodox-christian-morning-time-curriculum/

My son cried all the way to Divine Liturgy. When we had walked in and lit our candles, my son asked to see the priest. Fortunately, I was able to catch him between hearing confessions and the start of the service. After a hushed explanation from me, he came over to the chair along the back wall where my son was sobbing quietly. The priest, a father of five himself, put his hand on my boy’s head and gentled tousled his hair. My son looked up and asked, tears streaming down his little face, “Father, will I ever see my dog again?”

Our priest bent down, looked straight into my son’s swollen, splotchy face, and said, “Don’t you believe God loves you and wants you to be happy?” With that, the priest straightened up, and went to commence Divine Liturgy. https://orthodoxreflections.com/animals-in-the-resurrection/

It is the last words of both of these writers that are most curious and most disturbing. Pro-family, Christian groups like Focus on the Family waged a veritable crusade against Abercrombie and Fitch several years ago for dressing up their models in skimpy, suggestive clothing. But now, because we live in TrumpWorld, when women dress up in, forgive us, slutty-looking clothes, we are to celebrate that borderline pornography as ‘busty’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘traditional values’.

We can already hear the reactions so far: ‘Walt, you old prude, you need to relax a little and just celebrate a win over the woke Left.’ That’s fine; we can take the arrows. And there is a certain amount of truth in such criticism. A change in corporate advertisements away from transgender models, effeminate men, etc., is certainly welcome.

But to end one’s analysis at that point is to make a critical error. It assumes that a political/cultural victory over wokeism via the exaltation of a woman’s shapely breasts and buttocks is tantamount to ‘salvation’ for the US/West. It is not. https://orthodoxreflections.com/winning-battles-losing-wars/

One of our parish’s young men just returned from Army Advanced Camp. An enlisted national guardsman and university Army ROTC cadet, this was his last big hurdle to getting a commission as a lieutenant next May. He plans to serve out his duty obligation in the National Guard. When the subject of Church at camp came up, he reported going to Roman Catholic Mass, along with at least 14 other Orthodox soldiers. They had impromptu gripe sessions after each mass about how weird Roman Catholicism is, before dispersing back to their own barracks. Novus Ordo routinely fails to impress Orthodox Christians, but it appears to be better than either staying in or suffering through Protestantism. These, unfortunately, were the only three options these men had.

During the conversation, he got really serious and said, “Why are there never any Orthodox chaplains? Why doesn’t anybody care about us?” That is a sentiment we hear echoed again and again by young men and women in uniform.


https://orthodoxreflections.com/american-orthodox-soldiers-deserve-better/

Sad to say, we have come to expect attacks on the Orthodox Faith in many areas of the world. Taybeh, a peaceful Christian village in the West Bank, has been repeatedly attacked by Zionist settlers. Both Christian Churches in Gaza, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, have been attacked with fatalities. Syria is a killing zone for Christians, Druze, and Alawites. The regime in Kiev continues its campaign against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In Nigeria, 200 Christian villagers were slaughtered by heavily armed Fulani jihadists in July 2025. This is just the latest massacre. All across Africa, Asia, Ukraine, and the Middle East Christians, and Christianity, are attacked, maligned, and silenced.

But anti-Christian slander in Sweden? Multicultural, friendly, innocuous Sweden? Unfortunately, yes.

A Swedish public broadcast (SVT) presenter named Laura Ukaj has compared the Orthodox Christian blessing gesture – the three-finger sign representing the Holy Trinity – to a Nazi salute, stating: “It’s the same as hailing Hitler.”

https://orthodoxreflections.com/is-the-three-finger-orthodox-blessing-a-nazi-salute/

The Internet, at least as we knew it, is dead. As Orthodox Christians, we need to take careful note of our current situation and what we can do about it, because the current Internet is going to hide a lot of good Orthodox content. The new components of the Internet can also lie about, or misrepresent, the Orthodox Faith. The vast majority of all content posted to the Internet will get almost no traffic. None. No matter how erudite, educational, and spirit-filled the Orthodox content may be, chances are no one will ever read it or listen to it. An average blog gets less than 10 visitors a month. Most content may as well not exist. It is also now possible to use AI to rapidly generate an untold number of pages and social media posts misrepresenting the Orthodox Faith. Those pages would be optimized for search engines to find them, whereas faithful content is likely to be buried.

So what is happening? A lot actually. None of it good. Let’s explore the Dead Internet.

https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-dead-internet-the-ai-memory-hole-and-orthodox-content/

The project of Americanism is heretical. It had its birth in the transference of the ability to confer salvation from a religious body, Christ’s Church, to a political body, the United States. This spiritual disease was initially limited to the New England colonies, but it gradually spread elsewhere, eventually infecting all the colonies/States as a result of various events: the Great Awakening, the French and Indian War, the War for Independence from Great Britain, the War between the States, WWII, etc.

Because the political body of the US has replaced the Church, we must not expect to find saints in the usual Christian sense of that word – holy men and women and children who are overflowing with God’s Grace. Instead, the ‘saints’ of the US will be those who either exemplify the worldly, post-Christian, American ideals of liberty and success or who sacrificed in some way to uphold the salvific political system of the States (or both).

https://orthodoxreflections.com/a-false-martyr-and-a-true-martyr/

The project of Americanism is heretical. It had its birth in the transference of the ability to confer salvation from a religious body, Christ’s Church, to a political body, the United States. This spiritual disease was initially limited to the New England colonies, but it gradually spread elsewhere, eventually infecting all the colonies/States as a result of various events: the Great Awakening, the French and Indian War, the War for Independence from Great Britain, the War between the States, WWII, etc.

Because the political body of the US has replaced the Church, we must not expect to find saints in the usual Christian sense of that word – holy men and women and children who are overflowing with God’s Grace. Instead, the ‘saints’ of the US will be those who either exemplify the worldly, post-Christian, American ideals of liberty and success or who sacrificed in some way to uphold the salvific political system of the States (or both).

https://orthodoxreflections.com/a-false-martyr-and-a-true-martyr/

And here is the issue: experience is not in itself an authority! It is one of the means, along with our reason, that we receive what is given to us by the authority of Scriptures and Holy Tradition. Moreover, Scriptures and Tradition point to the One who is the authority—the Word and Wisdom who is God. I am surprised, as a scholar who has embraced Orthodoxy for several decades now, to find in an Orthodox writer that same emphasis on experience that is so widely accepted in Protestant circles—an emphasis made famous by Albert Outler, and erroneously called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Wesley would not have recognized himself in Outler’s insistence that Christian bodies should make decisions based on Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, all equally authoritative. Moreover, Outler himself in later life, seeing how his contemporaries had run with his idea, and turned experience into a trump card (in matters of debate) that gave an “empirical means of knowing,” regretted the way that he had framed the matter (Outler, “The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in John Wesley,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 20.1, 9).

https://orthodoxreflections.com/experience-prophetic-faithfulness-and-orthodoxy/

Seraphim Rose (who reposed in 1982), before he became an Orthodox priest-monk, when he was still simply Eugene Rose, developed an historical outline explaining the rise of the demonic Revolution all over the world. The outline consisted of four stages and was included as a chapter in his little but profound book, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. The four stages begin with liberalism and then run through realism, vitalism, and nihilism.

Liberalism is a society’s indifference to Truth, to Christ; realism is the rejection of higher, spiritual truths in favor of those that can be ascertained only through the physical senses, natural science, and the like. Vitalism is a reaction against the sterility of realism, an attempt to imbue human life once again with some level of tradition and spirituality. It is likewise very much focused on energy, power, movement, adventure, the heroic, newness, and on the subjective experience of individuals to determine what is true and right for themselves. https://orthodoxreflections.com/praxis-nation-tech-bros-discover-vitalism/

Since WWII, the United States has sought global dominance, primarily though an attempt to control oil. Though not mentioned in the above quote, control of oil was made all the more important after the Nixon Administration took the U.S. Dollar off the Gold Standard in 1971. Oil replaced Gold as the collateral for the U.S. Dollar under the Kissinger “Petrodollar” scheme, necessitating a major U.S. commitment both to the security of Saudi Arabia, and to the domination of the entire Middle East.

After Vietnam, U.S. policy makers had realized that both a draft and major foreign wars were intolerable to the American public. U.S. military presence in Vietnam peaked in April 1969 at approximately 543,000 personnel, drafted from a population of a little over 200 million. We all remember what the anti-draft (not really anti-war) movement looked like in the States, even if only from movies about the period. American strategists needed to learn how to exert control over key oil producing areas on the cheap.

That meant the U.S. needed proxies to do the dirty work, especially in the Middle East. These proxies could be ethnic minorities (fighting wars that possibly resulted in small, controllable statelets), could be jihadists dedicated to overthrowing secular regimes (who are often based in nationalism, a threat to foreign dominance), or movements that were both ethnic and jihadist. Preferably proxies would create controllable puppet regimes, but exploitable chaos worked for American purposes just as well. A failed state could not very well be trusted to mind important strategic assets such as oil, right? Further, the U.S. was already seeking to carry chaos and conflict into both Russia and China by triggering ethnic / religious minorities to rise up. Direct war against either Russia or China would go nuclear. A proxy war, however, would not. https://orthodoxreflections.com/why-does-the-u-s-fund-jihad-while-christians-are-murdered/

Egypt is an American client state. Annually, American tax payers gift Egypt approximately $1.44 billion dollars. That is roughly 20% of all U.S. foreign military assistance each year. Since 1946, Egypt has received over $87 billion in U.S. foreign aid. A billion here, a billion there, and sooner or later you are talking real money. We all know why Egypt gets so much from the U.S. The Egyptian government has been bribed into peace with Israel. Even when Trump temporarily suspended foreign aid – Egypt was exempted along with Israel.

Fine. We spend money expropriated from American pay checks to bribe corrupt Egyptian leaders into cooperating with Zionism. But is that all we can expect for our money? For all that cash, can’t we expect the Egyptian government to at least protect historic Christian holy sites, maintain free access to those sites, and guarantee the safety of Christians there? You would expect that to be a minimum set of standards in exchange for getting over a billion dollars a year from country with a super-majority of Christian citizens.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. The update below is linked to a petition demanding international protection for the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai.

https://orthodoxreflections.com/saint-catherines-monastery-in-sinai-is-not-safe-speak-out/

Isaiah 7:14 is a famously contested verse, quoted in Matthew 1:23, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. [KJV] Only Jesus could fulfill this prophecy, that a woman who never had carnal love could produce a child. Surely such an impossibility would mean that this child would be a miracle from God.


The Jews claim that this word “virgin” actually just means “young woman” and that this prophecy was fulfilled just a little further down the text in chapter 8:3-4:


And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria. [KJV]


https://orthodoxreflections.com/virgin-or-young-woman-looking-at-both-the-hebrew-and-greek-reveals-the-perpetual-virginity-of-mary/

The modern Western world is absolutely bonkers. Supposedly representative governments are at war with their own cultural traditions, traditional religious confessions, and even their own legal structures (often for the benefit of migrants over their own native born citizens). Putatively democratic regimes void elections and ban candidates as in Romania, actively ban unapproved opposition parties as in Germany, and wage ‘lawfare’ on unapproved candidates such as in France (among many other places). The message is that voting is all well and good, but there are limits which popular sovereignty is not allowed to transgress. Even mild forms of traditional patriotism are rapidly branded as ‘nationalism’, which the elites assure us must be suppressed with extreme vigor in favor of a Globalist ethos. Opposing open borders, because a citizen wishes to bequeath to his own children a nation much like the one he inherited, is decried as the most despicable form of racism. Anything that smacks of tradition is immediately treated as suspicious. Family structure, gender roles, even the concept of biological sex itself – all seem to be in the crosshairs of the modern liberal state.

Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Woke, Transgenderism, Transhumanism, Progressivism, Environmentalism, open borders, unorthodox religions, suppression of antisemitism, antiracism, and various forms of Marxism – are not disconnected movements. These are weapons wielded by Western Ruling Elites in a war on their own societies. https://orthodoxreflections.com/perpetual-war-on-hitler-the-open-society-consensus/

If you want to truly see how vast the social engineering dreams of our elites really are, and how close we are to their realization, then we highly recommend the new documentary from Oracle films called, The Agenda: Their Vision – Your Future (2025). The official trailer is below. The full documentary will premiere on 6/4/2025 at 1900 (7 p.m.) BST on the Oracle Films YouTube channel. If you are reading this post after that date, go watch it now!

https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-agenda-their-vision-your-future-june-2025-release/

His Grace is absolutely right. Not only does he not normally comment on what is being said about Orthodoxy in the media, but neither do his brother bishops. It is somewhat heartening that a bishop did choose to attempt to dispel the MSM-crafted narrative that a vibrant, growing Orthodoxy in the West is an outpost of ‘right-wing’, Russian influenced ‘extremist’ politics.

However, in light of where we truly are, this response from His Grace Bishop Irenei comes across as remarkably tone-deaf to many American Orthodox men. Perhaps, as he serves in Great Britain, the response was deliberately crafted for his home country? Regardless, many American Orthodox men feel that he wasted this opportunity by speaking out in a way that was entirely too tepid, given the current state of American society.

Which brings us to a very important point. His Grace, as a successor to the Apostles, is free to respond to anything he sees fit. However, since this type of article keeps appearing about parishes in the United States, it is simply unconscionable that American hierarchs have so far had nothing to say about them. These attempted hit pieces are targeting American priests, parishes, and young male converts. For American hierarchs, this is their flock. Good shepherds would speak out forcefully in their defense, and in defense of Holy Orthodoxy’s teachings in all fullness. https://orthodoxreflections.com/a-message-to-orthodox-hierarchs-on-masculinity-from-three-orthodox-christian-men/