One other detail that came to mind:
At UIUC, I heard the worst sermon in my life. It said, essentially, "You have your own life and your own decisions, and I have mine, and I can't tell you much of anything." At that point, still a Protestant, I realized that every previous sermon in my life, without exception, assumed three tenets:
- There is real Truth.
- I know something of that Truth.
- I can share some of that Truth to you.
Previous sermons occasionally contained royal mistakes after that point, but in my perhaps spoiled experience with Protestantism, pastors almost always got those three points down cold before they (potentially) started making mistakes.
That was the one time I left a "Christian" worship service in literal nausea because the sermon was so bad.
I don't know if Orthodoxy was then represented on my college campus; I believe it may have been, but I was not aware of it. However, in my searching of a dozen plus "Christian" groups, the one group I found that was in any sense alive was the vibrant Koinonia.
One or two homilies (I think this was hit on more than once) said, "Catholics have the best sex lives". What went into that was that study after study done in advocacy of alternative approaches to sexuality researched which sexual mavericks had it best, and to the consistent surprise and consternation of the people in charge, people living within marriage in the traditional Christian sense were found to have much better, more enjoyable, and more satisfying sexuality than any stripe of maverick.
Turning to another source, The Friendship Factor may be the most liberal title I've endorsed, but at one point, relatively briefly, the author states that working as a counselor in California he has seen people in almost every living arrangement you would imagine, and possibly a few that you would not, and he said that the more he has seen of creative living arrangements, the more he has concluded that God's guidelines were intended not to hurt us but to help us.
