Christ and culture

A very interesting post by Fr Gregory Jensen Koinonia: Orthodox Christian Faith in the Public Square:

Having spent more than a little time with the recent sociological studies that examine the attitudes of Orthodox Christians, I can confirm that for a significant percentage—and in some cases, a majority—of Orthodox Christians draw their understanding of morality not from Holy Tradition but popular American culture.

As with our brothers and sisters in western Christian traditions, many, even most, Orthodox Christians too 'have uncritically accepted the dichotomy between public and private, between fact and value, between knowledge and meaning.' For all that we might imagine that we are preserving Hellenism or the 'other worldliness' of monastic life, we live lives structured on the same 'dichotomies [that] are deeply entrenched in American religion and culture and are closely associated with what is often described, and frequently decried, as American individualism.'