I wonder.

or: Gossip is a sin.

In a discussion of a recent article, people began discussing the intimate details of the personal lives of some parishioners somewhere and how this intersected with their sacramental life. Now, the Church itself did not comment on this, because it cannot and will not comment on the anything even approaching the seal of the confessional and it would be wholly inappropriate to discuss private individuals openly on the internet for everybody. That would be evil, that would be gossip. And so, to the clergy of a certain city who wrote a complaining letter about something, and to others who talk on the internet about private individuals, I have a handful of questions:

How are you so familiar with the intimate details of the personal lives of these parishioners? And why are you sharing it with the world at large? If you're sharing it with the world at large, you surely didn't hear it in the confessional, but that would surely also mean you don't know their sins, so why are you discussing them so surely?

And then, just as a reminder, the bishops of the church frequently and continually refer to their encyclicals on marriage which clearly state the Orthodox teaching on the matter. In fact, they seem willing to sign their name to these declarations and encyclicals at every opportunity to comment. But this seems not to be enough, they want the bishops to discuss how they deal with private individuals and to do so publicly on the national stage. I believe some important guy somewhere once said something along the lines of, "What is that to you?" once, and this seems like it would be an appropriate response.

A note about a certain Orthodox facebook group

I have had enough of the Takfiri Orthodox. If all your religion does for you is give you more and better ways to be an asshole, you're doing it wrong.

I mean, I know I'm an asshole. I don't pretend that my assholishness (except for this precise moment) is in any way virtue or an exercise of religion.

This is not just about a facebook group. There is a certain strand of Orthodoxy in America that needs to be right, and it's willing to fight for what is right, but it seems to confuse being an asshole for being right. And so they do assholish things in the service of fighting some battle that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're justified because they're right. The Fathers were polemical, you know. So they feel free to trot out personal details and drag them through the mud, for instance, in the service of their petty battles for the phronema. cf the little, little man Rod Dreher demonstrated himself to be a few years ago. cf in the Arida matter, some people are bringing up familial details of people nearby - this is not kosher. I realize that, for the LARPodox, this is all Serious Business, and therefore the tactics appropriate for a knife fight in a phone booth apply. For the adults in the room, however, a better path presents itself: repenting and following the gospel of Jesus Christ.

HUMBLE YOURSELF.

A few useful resources for Russian-style Orthodox music in English

Particularly for those in the OCA. Choirs in small parishes often have to cobble things together from scratch in a rush. To that end, here are a few useful free resources, particularly for those in the OCA. However, I do strongly suggest purchasing resources (and if any of the resources below are not free for liturgical use, please acquire the rights to use them before using them). These resources here are also interesting in that they give some insight into what other people are doing with their choirs, which sometimes we don't get a good sense of. I mean, there are few places in your life that you're going to spend enough time at to get a good sense for how many different settings of the Cherubic Hymn they use, or perhaps you might not realize until you see Podoben.org that there are a LOT of different settings of the anaphora and perhaps some places use quite a few of them. Or perhaps you knew of the existence of some of these acrobatic settings, but never expected a choir to actually use them.

• The OCA site itself has a lot of material. The Divine Liturgy section has a good chunk of the SVS liturgy book (which, by the way, you can sometimes find used for very cheap - I paid $3.98 for mine). However, not to be missed is the 16th AAC page, which has a link to all the music they used in the AAC.
  
• The Canadian Archdiocese has a lot of material. There is almost enough to put on everything, though not necessarily all of your favorite settings of things. Between these two sites, you can perform vespers and liturgy with a fair amount of variation in everything. This site also has a goodly portion of the material needed for Lent, Holy Week, Pascha, and beyond. Several other OCA dioceses have some additional material on their sites.
  
• Podoben.org A lot of everything. Quite fantastic. The first place you should look for variety.
  
• The Saint Romanos the Melodist Society, not to be confused with the Society of Saint Romanos the Melodist. We need a few more saintly musicians... They have some wonderful and relatively complete stuff in more ROCOR translations for both vigil and liturgy.
  
• Speaking of ROCOR music, the Chicago Diocese has a site.
  
• Some parishes have put their choir binders online (or a good portion). For instance Dayton, St Seraphim, Salem (includes some mp3), the Riggs' site (quite a lot, not OCA translations), Merseyside, St John the Baptist in DC.
  
• Some other parish sites have significant resources online, such as St Nicholas in Juneau, Rogers AR puts the weekly variable sheet music online,
  
• The Antiochians put their music online as well, and a good portion of it is from the Russian tradition. I'm not as much of a fan of relying on them, since they have idiosyncratic translations and the good stuff can be found elsewhere, but to each his own.
  
• There are a couple composers out there, like Kurt Sander and David Lucs, who provide good music. Richard Toensing, RIP, still has his site up. This is by no means everybody, but I'm not aware of any other composers with a substantial body of work on the internet on their own site (and welcome correction on this).
  

I know for a fact I'm leaving some resources off, I have a large folder full of bookmarks. I also have a large folder on my computer with a folder for every site containing all the PDFs I have pulled off of them. There are browser plugins that let you do this with the touch of a button, by the way. Of course, these are just the English resources. If you can typeset music on your own (by the way, Lilypond is very easy to learn, especially if you use Frescobaldi as the editor) and read a little Russian, even more scores become available for your use. EDIT: and sometimes you can find recordings of high-quality choirs, like this from November 2nd or November 16th which may give you ideas of what can be done.

Another short note on the second person pronoun.

There is an argument about how "Thou" is informal and denotes familiarity, and is therefore more appropriate. I don't believe this, as has been discussed before. An argument against this that I did not mention before is that in the Greek Bible, this distinction is not used. The forms of the second person pronoun only indicate number in that era of Greek. Further, the translation of the Bible retained the usage of the Greek rather than the contemporary usage which conveyed degrees of familiarity. See Acts 26. A 17th century Quaker addressing a king as "thou" is a political statement, but St Paul doing so is not, it's just good Greek. This does not necessarily refute the argument for retaining the usage based on the idea of an "informal" relation with God, but this usage is not behind the choices in the KJV.

Is teaching Young Earth Creationism in Orthodox harmful and wrong? Is it a big deal?

Contrary to Betteridge's law of headlines: yes and yes. It is simply wrong (science: try it sometime), and because it is wrong it is harmful, and it is a big deal because it is genuinely harmful.

ED. NOTE: this is kind of a draft that I dashed off in an evening - there is some rounding out to do of some of the thought, but it's roughly what I think.

I will not go into how it is simply wrong. There are many other sites on science out there. Just read a textbook: things are pretty one-sided. I am not going to quibble with other "old earth" sorts like the Discovery Institute in this post - I have my disagreements (discussed elsewhere), but they at least take science seriously (somewhat) and don't disregard all the physical evidence surrounding old earth, common descent, etc. They are instead making their own account of it that agrees with the broad outline of undeniable facts.

It frequently comes up that people want peace, that people should be able to believe what they want, this is not necessary for salvation, and a number of other banal statements meant to discourage any discussion of the issues. There is some good to this: we shouldn't engage in open warfare and, in a sense, they do have a point: people can disagree and they're not going to hell because they think one or the other and actively fighting may not be helpful. Even accepting that sentiment, however, I must still disagree.

First, promoting these notions entails an endorsement of what might be called the "conflict thesis" between science and religion. It is all well and good to decry materialism, but doing so in the service of such a false idea as a 7500 year old earth is bad. More to the point, the conflict is not with science as such, but materialism. If we make this about a 7500 year old earth, it is now about science as well. But here is what I want to get at: there is no need for a wall between scientists and Christians, because many scientists are Christians and vice versa. We need ramps, not walls, to refer a concept from David Brooks. If we "keep the peace" internally by having all views, we promote internal division by promoting the "conflict thesis" even as we have faithful Christian scientists in our midst and promote external division by, well, denying obviously true facts that the rest of the world takes for granted.

Further, continuing to teach a false idea of a young earth tells a manifestly wrong story about the relation of the observable world to God. Namely, we can no longer trust the reasonable order of the world and what we observe. This is different from believing that miracles occur or occurred. Would we expect physical evidence left behind until the present when the Red Sea parted, or the water turned into wine at Cana (if both are believed as literal events)? Probably not. The biblical literalism here leaves no evidence where we might expect it, and this cannot be explained away by claiming that The Fall and a lack of "uniformitarianism" change what we would observe and explain... the lack of explanation. Instead, all signs point to the story scientists tell and that the universe behaves nicely and, hopefully, God isn't deceiving us with our sensory data.

In short, it teaches a false hermeneutic for physical data. You might be able to guess where I am going next: it imposes a further false and overly simplistic hermeneutic for reading the Bible. Rather than having to confront and cope with the problem of reading the text in light of the vastly divergent reality of creation and exploring the meaning of the text in our tradition besides the literal, we suddenly have no "difficulties": the story in the Bible is actually more or less how it went and, contrary to anything else we could find out about, essentially, anything else ever, it turns out that human life really is only a few thousand years old. Ta da! And all those think-y types who might try to present otherwise are just woefully misled.

It gets even worse than that: the purveyors of this viewpoint unfortunately often espouse a similar simplistic and misleading type of patristic fundamentalism. I think this is the most harmful part of it all specifically for Orthodox Christians because it is so very tempting: "The Holy Fathers" all teach creationism, so it must be what Orthodoxy teaches! Case closed. Period. I'm also pretty sure that all of them that talk about child discipline talk about hitting children with sticks, most of them probably as the only method of discipline that they mention. However, this glosses over some rather difficult hermeneutic issues that I do not think will hold up - so I am tipping my hand here that I simply do not find the sort of neo-patristic synthesis that Fr Seraphim Rose is so fond of to be very convincing in general. Some issues to consider are:

• What does it mean to say that the Holy Fathers 'teach' something?
  
• What does it mean to say the Church 'teaches' something?
  
• What evidence do you have to amass before stating either of the above?
  
• When you state either of the above, how certain is this statement, and can you express your uncertainty?
  
• There are many things which individual Fathers or even large groups of Fathers, perhaps throughout time, have taught but which we do not say either of the above about - how can we distinguish those matters from matters that the Church or the Holy Fathers 'teach' with certainty?
  
• How do we reconcile conflicts among the Fathers?
  

Those are some softball questions off the top of my head. The patristic fundamentalists, of course, have answers: they're fundamentalists, it's what they do. Discern the phronema with your nous! They just aren't the right answers, and some of the evidence of this is that they got the wrong answer on the age of the earth. The harm here is that, instead of looking the truth in the eye, asking the hard questions, and struggling to find the right, Orthodox answers, we have this ready-made cookie cutter answer that frankly dodges reality. It prevents us from working on the real theological problem here: given that the earth is old, humans have existed for a long time, and given the theological truths we also know as Orthodox Christians, how do we synthesize them, what does it mean for us as we live, etc.

So the harms here are that our vision of God must be God Himself, and we cannot be satisfied with anything less. Knowingly embracing a falsehood because it simplifies things is not going to work. We have to work with, instead, the complexities God gives us and not be happy with anything less than God's truth, which is unfortunately not to be found in an overly simplistic reading of the Bible or a similarly credulous reading of the Fathers without reference to external reality. It creates an unnecessary wall of division which alienates true allies that are seeking the truth diligently by impugning their efforts as inherently contradictory to the faith (though they'll allow it). This young earth nonsense is, in short, harmful and wrong for Orthodox Christians to indulge in.

I do not understand why this is so hard

The point of the scriptural passages is broadly that discipline and punishment are necessary for, among other things, children - I do not think the precise means of discipline is what they are getting at. If it were, we should definitely beat our children with rods. And fools, too. The textual evidence, if we are to read it that way, is quite unanimous. Few are advocating for that. Then why be wedded to retaining the "inflicting physical pain" part of the passage? We should discipline children, hitting was an extremely common and primary method of discipline until very recently, so hitting (with a rod) is what was mentioned in the text. Hitting with a rod, in fact, seems to be the only method of discipline mentioned in the text - should it be the only method we use? Hitting - perhaps still with rods - was also the primary method of discipline in the patristic period, hence their continued mention of it when discussing discipline for children. I do not expect to go back in time and lecture St Augustine about this. But this seems to explain why hitting with rods is mentioned - not because it is the best and only way or that this specific method is mandatory, but that it was the most common way to discipline at that time (it is still widely practiced now - perhaps not as frequently with the rod, though) and - for whatever reason - they wanted to talk about discipline. But if we are going to read the injunction to discipline as requiring some use of corporal punishment, we have to go back to the plain meaning: hitting them with rods, staffs, etc, and doing so in a manner that, in modern times, may be viewed as abusive.

However, if the point is chastening and correcting the children or fools, perhaps we should instead use the most effective means of doing so. Research (here we go again) suggests that corporal punishment is not more effective than other methods and has worse side effects. "Abuse" is universally condemned. So what is wrong with this reading?