Leadership Amidst Cultural Change by David LaDow

In “Orthodox Leadership in a Brave New World,” Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse provides an Eastern Orthodox analysis of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s address to Harvard University as a way to address the various issues that we face as a culture in the West. Solzhenitsyn criticized what he saw as an increasing acceptance of philosophical materialism in the West. What he meant by this was that human beings had become the measure of all evaluations; there was not universal standard by which one could assess anything. According the Fr. Jacobse, this has, in turn, led to a “moral deconstruction” within American culture. Words traditionally associated with Christian patterns of thought have been co-opted and used to justify moral stances that are not at all in line with a Christian sense of morality. Fr. Jacobse thus calls on orthodox leadership to recover the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From an Orthodox perspective, this means looking towards the great Orthodox Christians of the past, whose lives formed and shaped the makeup of Western Culture that we have received.

I do agree that when we understand our past, we can better appreciate the heritage from which we have arisen. What is lacking in this article, however, is any clear and tangible way that we can move from an historical knowledge of the past to a re-appropriation of our moral heritage, either within the Church or within the larger culture as a whole. Furthermore, it is not at all clear to me how appropriate it is for Christian leaders to work towards the Christianizing of a non-Christian culture.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles7/JacobseLeadership.php