Titled Chastity, Purity, Integrity: – Orthodox Anthropology and Secular Culture in the 21st Century, this visionary conference, perhaps the first of its kind in North America, features speakers and a planning committee who hail primarily from Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary (ROCOR, Jordanville NY) and St Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (OCA, South Canaan PA), both of which are unique in North America among Orthodox seminaries for being linked to and deriving their traditional Orthodox ethos from the monasteries out of which they grew.

Confronting in a firm and direct manner the raging cultural heresies of the day, yet with love and compassion befitting a truly Christian endeavor, the conference features presentations with such traditional Orthodox titles and teachings as these:

• Orthodox Anthropology: Encountering the “new gnosticism” of transgenderism, pansexuality, and post-humanism
• Nurturing Christian Purity and Chastity among Young People Today
• The Mystery of Male and Female
• The Relevance and Application of Orthodox teachings of Purity and Chastity to 21st-Century America: Culture, Families, Parishes
• Leavening American Society with the Moral Teachings of the Church

This conference clearly is intended to present in a living and engaging manner the divine-human Orthodox phronema, the Mind of Christ and His Church on the nature, calling, and destiny of mankind.

Unlike certain academic platforms, cut off as they are from the living Orthodox tradition, and which therefore spread heresy and error and seek to overthrow the divine teachings and commandments of Christ and the Scriptures regarding man and woman, marriage and sexuality, and to reimagine and subvert the living tradition of the Orthodox Church, this Jordanville Conference, deriving as it does from two of the oldest and most stalwart Orthodox Christian monasteries in the entire Western Hemisphere, offers not just Orthodox teaching on the nature of Mankind, but presents the Way of Life, as distinguished from the way which leads to death (see the Didache, esp. ch. 1 & 2).

Rather than reproduce the lovely aerial photo of Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary featured with the conference announcement, I think it more appropriate to use one of my favorite images from The North American Thebaid, my photograph of the entrance to Jordanville, its domes faithfully shining beneath dark and threatening skies, a metaphor for the Orthodox Christian presence shining in the midst of the dark age we have entered into here in America.

More info and links on the Jordanville Conference are below the photograph: