Orthodox Christianity and Rights

 I do not enough about Orthodox Christianity to answer the questions raised in Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America. The issues stated are as follows:

First, the global disagreements among the Eastern Orthodox about the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of hierarchs, and the tension between synodality and primacy, especially in the case of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Patriarchate of Moscow  remain unresolved. This state of affairs percolates downward into the local churches as well and leads to even more fragmentation in a fragile and demographically small Orthodox presence in North America. The persistence of ethnic Orthodoxy challenges both Oriental and Eastern Orthodox to ask how committed they are to a North American church. 

Second, confidence in what counts as the reasonable, most probable, agreed-upon standards of truth and evidence—what the commentator Jonathan Rauch has called the “epistemic crisis” (that is, what counts as knowledge, who says so, and why should we defer to those who claim to know)—threatens to elude especially younger readers, Orthodox or not. Too many are increasingly disinclined to be shaped by the tradition of paideia, the foundation of “liberal arts” education that for centuries provided the forum within which the Church itself must work toward consensus about what the Orthodox understand by rights. 

Last, the pastoral obligation to protect the rights and dignity of the married, the celibate, the unborn, women, and minorities within the received Tradition of the gospel remains fraught and underdeveloped. But that pastoral witness also holds the potential for the Orthodox to shape the future of North American society. Alongside fellow citizens, Christian and non-Christian alike, an Orthodox perspective on rights needs to be heard. Most Americans remain unaware of what the Orthodox believe and teach about the questions posed to them by Witte and Alexander. But are the Orthodox themselves interested enough, curious enough, to go about discovering their Tradition’s grappling with such questions?

My own training delineates rights between government and citizens, and between individuals. I would like to think Orthodoxy would uphold the most important right of people - the right to their dignity.

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