Tuesday, May 24, 2011

More hits in the last month than all the rest of history.

Largely from including the URL to this site in my signature on the Venuleius web-log, it seems. And then there was the link which did not actually work from Pactum Serva. Between those two, that's 1/3 of everything. I didn't know that many people read Venuleius. I got about 300 hits from there, and that's just people who followed my random link in my own signature, not a direct link from him.

EDIT: Oh, it seems I'm one of the few links on his front page. Well, whatevs.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Two methods of interpretation.

I'm not going to comment much on this except to point it out. By the way, if you don't care about the OCA's internal workings (really, why should you?!), you can ignore this post, though I suppose you can find something in here of interest.

Two different sites, on opposites sides of some dispute, posted a copy of a speech Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the OCA. One interpreted it as a sign he was wrong, another as an example of how awesome and right he is. If it were merely a matter of interpretation, I suppose this would be quite justified, and on some level it is a matter of interpretation, but there are a large number of matters of fact which are at stake between these two interpretations. I certainly don't have sufficient access to the facts to make a decision between one party or the other, but I am forced to wonder at times what state of affairs could make the pro-Jonah side (note: the other "side" is not anti-Jonah) ever change their mind. There surely must be some somewhere, since there is, at some level, a basis in matters of fact. It could be something that they're 99% sure isn't going to turn out to be the case, as long as there's something other than, "My Metropolitan, right or wrong."

Disclaimer: I am pro-Jonah, pro-Synod, and (most of all) pro-Matthias. I want the lot of them to be able to work together and play nice. I can't believe either the simplistic pro-Jonah side or the nuanced interpretation put forth by Stokoe is the whole truth, but I certainly have neither the access to information nor the inclination to discern necessary to develop an informed opinion on the matter. Therefore, I won't form or express an opinion directly on the matter and confine my comments, as usual, to how much I dislike OCA Truth and the Monomakhos web-log.

EDIT: Though one "matter of fact" which I am fairly glad that Stokoe did address is the matter of Metropolitan Theodosius's retirement. The people on OCA Truth and Monomakhos constantly harp on it, and Met. Jonah mentions it, but he retired suddenly due to health problems after 25 years of service and well before the scandals caught up with him. Several of the people writing those web-logs were barely here for +Herman's reign, much less +Theodosius's, so they have no institutional knowledge of this sort of thing. I was (barely) not around for +Theodosius, though I did meet him in the (I think it was) '04-'05 school year when he was in town, he hung out with the OCF for the evening. And another note, it felt to me like +Herman promoted Sanctity of Life Sunday and the other stuff around the Pro-Life cause more than +Jonah, but it could just be that, after +Job's repose, we didn't have a bishop relaying that push. But it's pretty much the only thing I really remember about +Herman's primacy.