Dissident Mama, episode 79 – Rev. Dr. Brian Patrick Mitchell

The Rev. Dr. Brian Patrick Mitchell earned his Ph.D. in theology from the University of Winchester in the United Kingdom. He is a former soldier, journalist, corporate spokesman, and cabinet-level speechwriter. He was for many years the Washington Bureau Chief of Investor’s Business Daily and is the author of six books on politics and religion, including “Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female,” “The Disappearing Deaconess: Why the Church Once Had Deaconesses and Then Stopped Having Them,” and “Eight Ways to Run the Country,” which has been used to teach politics at Yale and elsewhere. Dr. Mitchell has appeared on dozens of radio and television shows and has been a guest speaker at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Catholic University of America, George Mason University, Rose Hill College, and Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary. He is a convert to the Orthodox Church and a protodeacon of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, attached to St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Mitchell/Fr. Patrick and I discuss the natural and economic order of male and female, the Christian vs the feminist understanding of “subjection,” hierarchy’s role in restraining evil, the real Church history of the “deaconess” and the etymology of the word, the anarchic spirit of the modern age, pro-deaconess advocates’ distortion of theology and their dependence on emotivism and the American sacred cow of “equality,” and the “continental drift between progressive and traditional Orthodoxy.”

Download this podcast, watch on Odysee and YouTube, or listen here.

In addition to the books linked at top, be sure to check out these pertinent works by Fr. Patrick:
• Deacons and Deaconesses: Why the Church Kept One and Not the Other
• Book Review: Church of Whose Granddaughters?
• Male and Female as Archic and Eucharistic Modes of Relation

And lastly, you should take a gander at this:
• GOARCH Insanity: Female Servers, Readers & Deaconesses? – a good primer on Archbishop Elpidophoros’ shove down the slippery slope
• Why Christianity is ‘worth it’ for women: An interview with Carrie Frost – the author of “Church of Our Granddaughters” in her own words in an interview with the Catholic news site Angelus
• Public Orthodoxy – as a professor of theology and religion, here are many of Carrie Frederick Frost’s highly political essays at the online zine of Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Study Center
• Axia Women – I think I said Frost was a contributor to the “network by, for, and about Orthodox women” whose values include “Advocacy for increasing women’s leadership in the Church,” but Frost is really a benefactor and was made “Woman of the Week” back in 2019, and here’s Rachel Contos’ glowing review of Frost’s book at the feminist site.
• St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess – chaired by Dr. Frost, this another “network” of activists whose aim is “revival,” er, I mean, revolution “of the ordained female diaconate” and whose supporters reads like a who’s who of leftydox movers and shakers.