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Potential source for [[:Image:Xenophontos Monastery.jpg]]: [http://inathos.gr/athos/en/athos.asp?n=56&c=3&t=0]. Site looks to be [http://inathos.gr/athos/en/Credits.html under copyright]. —[[User:Magda|<b>magda</b>]] ([[User_talk:Magda|talk]]) 12:28, June 21, 2006 (CDT)
== On Misunderstanding ==
Dear Dcn. Andrew,
Look - I'm not misunderstanding you deliberately!!! But I do sometimes find you shading just ever so slightly towards a disingenuous pedantry - which can rouse me to vexation, irony or hyperbole (depending on my mood). (That said, the only time you ever really annoyed me that time with the unexplained POV tag on wikipedia.) I also have something of an antisyzygy about me which rebels against punctuation-correction. Of course, I was being more than a little rhetorical with the Scotland thing. But the underlying point is genuine. (BTW, Scotland is, technically, not part of a state - it is a stateles nation; the state is the UK.) And I do appreciate it when you pull back something I've said carelessly or with an air of flippancy on POV grounds.
The thing that does worry me - and what got me into all this wiki stuff - is the Sourozh business. The pro-Basil people are going around blatantly misrepresenting the situation, pretending its an indigenous V Russifying clash, a poor local bishop V evil Patriarchate, etc. Which, in fact, is just not true. There are far more shades of grey. Now, I'm sure that certain of the Russians are doing exactly the same thing on Russian sites - but I don't read Russian. All I can see is what is wrong with the stuff I do read. But what is being hidden is (a) the 'ambiguities' about the canonical aspects; and (b) the snobbish exclusivity of the 'English' Basil/Oxford-group that is a LARGE factor in the history of the problems. And, of course, this schism is doing and going to do a huge amount of damage to the Church in Britain. E.g. probably now we're going to have a Bishop and possibly several priests defrocked by Moscow, whilst serving for Constantinople. This is going to be very painful, and will split the faithful. But, all I see from the Basil-group is a hero-mentality ('we are the saviours of British orthodoxy'), propaganda, gloating - web-pages with titles like 'Sourozh destroyed' - and question-begging 'justifications' of why they are totally spotless and right, etc. etc. And then they spread this misinformation, and it becomes the received truth, and then appears on sites like wikipedia, etc. And they call this Orthodoxy! That's what gets my wick.
Anyway, that tells you a bit about where I'm coming from. We share lots of interests in common, and so I'm sure we'd have lots to talk about, and if I keep editing things, then I'm sure we'll keep on bumping into each other! And if I'm bombastic, I'm most likely not entirely serious...,
Regards,[[User:Maxim|Maxim]] 01:44, June 29, 2006 (CDT)
