Let No Man Join Together

An Orthodox Christian View of a Beseiged Sacrament

by Vigen Guroian

In recent years, homosexual persons and their supporters in North America have argued that marriage should be redefined to include the union of two persons of the same sex. Increasingly, this argument has been cast as a civil liberties issue: homosexual persons seek constitutional rights and liberties that have long been denied to them, key among these being marriage.

Same-sex marriage, however, is not just a legal matter. It is also a religious issue. For millennia, Western civilization has strictly understood marriage to be the union between a man and a woman. This definition, grounded in biblical beliefs about . . .

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Vigen Guroian was, until his retirement, Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His books include Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (2002) and The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World (Baker Academic, 2018).

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