And one other thing:
There have been various errors floating around, such as Arianism or gnosticism; the question at a particular point in time is not really whether there are common errors, but which errors there are, and how prevalent. The Church Councils were not convened for bishops to congratulate themselves on how smoothly things were going under their care; they were a kind of a last measure taken when the problems were particularly bad. (Orthodoxy may see the councils as golden, but I have not heard of an Orthodox suggesting that the problems the councils were responding to were golden.) And history has born certain things out: Arius gets it harder in the Liturgy than Judas Iscariot, and now, well over a millenium later, we have not only the (Anglican) Archdruid of Canterbury Rowan Williams writing a rehabilitation of Arius, but Protestant friends have told me essentially that in their neck of the woods Arianism is the preferred "brand" of Christianity.
I have had extended contact with what my spiritual father called "LGBTs, or whatever they are called this week." I knew a gay man who called himself my friend without consulting me, and felt free to answer every new posting to my website with criticism that delivered pain, took me down quite a few notches, and clearly placed him even more notches socially. After I had enough, I asked him to stop criticizing me about my writing. He responded by brutal criticism about my person. I asked him not to send me any further criticism at all; he said "I will not send any further criticism, but I will take emails from you as a solicitation for response," and responded with more brutal criticism. He told me very judgmentally that I do not have the right to post works publicly without receiving anything he wished to post in my inbox; the situation stopped only when I copied email administrators, at which point he abruptly stopped his stream of criticism.
I think of one professor, a bisexual Jesuit, who seemed to enjoy making me sexually uncomfortable in front of the class, on top of a drainingly lewd environs of humor: hence the only way to explain that one philosopher owed a debt to another by saying he "s___ed at [Martin] Heidegger's t__s."
And I think of my extended formation in the "theology" of feminism-which-morphed-or-rebranded-into-gender-studies, with concepts such as sexual minority front and center. In one text I read, from what is called "Radical Orthodoxy" (to which I would mainly say, "They have some things right but save your money and ask your parish priest for reading recommendations;" part of a parish priest's job is to offer hand-picked books to bookworms), spoke of "the incestuous, homosexual union of the Father and the Son".
And I've seen some dirty tricks on the way. There is a "tar baby" effect to almost any attempt I've made to have a rational conversation.
I've had extended contact with the LGBT Zeitgeist that is simply in the air today, and just as I believe the Orthodox Church was right in her response to Arianism, I believe the Orthodox Church was and is right in her response, crystal-clear, to questions of sexuality. And that trying to make her more politically correct is not an improvement.
