(Seems to be a little funkiness going on with the video at Youtube. Try this link, if you can’t get the video to play:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw-b_NFW3iI
How to Not Be Very Orthodox: A Public Service Announcement
Wednesday, 9 April 2008 by Benedict Seraphim
21 Responses
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Your humor never ceases to amaze me. I wonder where that gene came from. It was good to see your beautiful face here in Kansas.
Witnessing tracts…heh. Nice. You are a funny man.
ooo – snarky!
- Just another Convert from Protestantism
I love it!!!
That was brilliant.
And we’ve never seen your face before here in England. Beautiful? Well, that’s what mom’s are for.
Oh my! Wit AND sarcasm! And so very, very right. All the elements of brilliance have converged in this nice instructional video.
Very well done.
Cheers!
-Justinian
ROTFLMBO! This is your calling… drop everything else immediately.
Wow!! Funniest thing I have seen in awhile. Try to add some songs to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, and you will rival Fr. Joseph Honeycutt. Northodixie, perhaps??
Oh, by the way, your beard is neatly trimmed. That is not very Orthodox, my friend!
I’m enjoying all three activities simultaneously: Reading my Orthodox Study Bible, while listening to Ancient Faith Radio, and drinking my Starbucks (with soy milk, of course).
And now back to our regular programming… “How to be Really Orthodox,” playing at a blog near you.
Oh. My. That was hilarious. Thank you.
I’m especially proud at my not-Orthodoxness since I have perfected the Starbucks point. I’m really very good at it. I even throw in some Half & Half sometimes for extra effect.
Great post Clif
Harf! Making people laugh during Palm Week — that is NOT very Orthodox. I’m so conflicted!
Gotta admit, though. I spent the first couple minutes being distracted because videotaping this the way you did, you look so much like Achenar from the Myst games. (If you haven’t wasted your time playing it, you can get the idea in THIS SPOOF .
Oops, looks like it didn’t record the URL. Well, it’s at
This is cute and all. I confess, I giggled at the content the delivery is top-notch. On the other hand, it does distract from the harder questions of whether or not instructional booklets from Conciliar Press properly fulfill their function or, heck, if the OSB is good rather than, say, bad.
I feel a bit ashamed for being the one to raise this point, but it’s difficult to bypass the irony of someone who took the name of Fr. Seraphim Rose upon Chrismation playing into the notion that we shouldn’t be mindful of what gets printed, distributed, or sold as “Orthodox”; perhaps some of it simply fails to cut the mustard. In defense of those potential hyper-converts you may be targeting here, some of them have raised very good points on AFR, CP, and the OSB which, to the best of my knowledge, have not been adequately addressed. Perhaps in another post you could put some emphasis on that and redirect some of our potentially off-base concerns.
As a final point, I mention “our,” not because I am an ex-Protestant but certainly because I have engaged in what you seem to believe to be senseless bashing of American Orthodoxy’s “iconic” media outlets and products. For my part, I don’t see it as bashing. My base of comparison is only what has already been produced by other Orthodox publishers. In any other age, I would have thought that meant I had some standards and taste. I suppose today it just makes one a rabid polemicist who refuses himself to be blinded by “good intentions”
[Note: I turned this comment into its own post today.]
Gabe:
Well, brother, one of the dangers of satire is that the point will be missed for the form.
My criticism–which I had hoped to have been clear–was not on whether or not there were legitimate criticisms of the items mentioned, but, rather, that in a large swatch of the overall criticisms there was a rather large failure: to focus on externals.
Even Fr Seraphim–who, you rightly point out, would insist on the highest quality of publication output–was quite willing to encourage convert efforts at publishing, including efforts which would appeal to Protestants, just so long as those things retained the savor of Orthodoxy. Indeed, Fr Ambrose (ne Fr Alexey) was brought quite to task for writing a favorable article on the Shroud of Turin–especially because he used “Roman Catholic” terminology. And while Fr Seraphim did regret some of the terminology, he did not criticize the effort or the article. The same sort of thing happened when Fr Ambrose printed an article on evolution–after all, what did that have to do with Orthodoxy? But Fr Seraphim rightly knew that this was an important cultural and spiritual matter, and did not balk at all at such an article.
In other words, much, though not all, of the criticisms focus on easy (and easily distorted) external matters. Very little is focusing on the more difficult internal matters, what Blessed Seraphim would call the “savor of Orthodoxy.”
If we look at externals, yes, of course, we could say that Fr Ambrose’s newspaper is much different in form than, say, Again magazine. But can we really say that it does not have the savor of Orthodoxy?
Furthermore, Fr Seraphim himself would agree that American Orthodoxy has to seek its own incarnated form. For decades it has been kept in its ethnic forms–and nothing wrong with that–but because of it, it hasn’t had a chance to permeate the American culture. We are only now beginning to see some of the efforts at that–and there are light years to go.
So what if a bunch of crazy evangelism minded former Protestants are leading the way and using Moody Bible and pop evangelical forms to infiltrate the culture? Are we so fearful of the paper thin weakness of our Orthodox Faith that we think the forms will overwhelm its divine substance?
I, for one, am not.
Yes, we should be constantly mindful, but I have no fear that the Orthodox Faith we hold will correct the forms with which it is being communicated. After all, the conversion of a nation has to start somewhere. I somehow don’t think the Rus’ were instantly conformed to Orthodox forms upon the nation’s conversion. Yet, somehow, they became Orthodox and Orthodoxy molded the forms of their culture and not the other way ’round.
Shame on you.
[...] 28 July 2008 by Benedict Seraphim Apparently this–How to Not Be Very Orthodox: A Public Service Announcement–helped sell some Orthodox Study [...]
Funny video.
I agree that true cultural forms can often be adopted to mediate Christian meaning and sentiment.
The whole deal with pop culture is that it is not really culture in any sense we’ve seen before. It’s more like an anti-culture. That’s what people who study culture tell us. Pop culture, unlike true culture, does not arise from the heart and soul of a people, but descends from the dictates of mass marketing. As such its forms, if they have any meaning at all, target the passions, not the inner man.
Therefore history only has so much to tell us about our present circumstances.
Starbucks and radio are examples of technology, not form. It IS a bit ludicrous when people get worked up about technology. That’s the sense in which the video is funny.
The sens in which it’s not funny is that there are a lot of plague victims littering the steps of the Orthodox Church right now – people like me, fleeing from the spiritual, cultural, moral, and emotional poison of contemporary evangelicalism. I suppose we might have a tendency to say more than we really know about what causes the plague that even now is eating our families alive and from which we feel we are barely escaping. All the same it’s odd to have people snickering at our terrors this way.
When I was a Calvinist I believed that because God’s saving grace was more powerful than sin, therefore a man who was destined to be saved could do nothing to counteract grace. Orthodoxy tells me that’s not exactly true – that we can void the subjective, if not the objective conditions of salvation, that we can close our hearts to the benefits of free grace. This case seems similar. Of course the Orthodox Church will not be prevailed against by the gates of hell! It doesn’t follow that the Orthodox community in America is proof against any practice that we choose glibly to import from our former dying churches into our healthy new ones.
Someone has to do the hard work of distinguishing between true American cultural forms, that are capable of recieving the baptism of Orthodoxy, and the mere anti-forms that are so good at making people popular but so poor at making them holy. Maybe when that has been done, I will feel like laughing.
Hilarous! Great work!
oh, make it stop! lol
The videos are gone from Youtube. Too bad as I thought they were excellent.