Michael Fitzgerald writes a terrific article on the curious economic effects of religion in the Boston Globe
A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies - and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.
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It stands as one of the more intriguing findings in a growing body of recent research exploring how religion might influence the wealth and prosperity of societies. In recent years, Italian economists have presented findings that religion can boost GDP by increasing trust within a society; researchers in the United States showed that religion reduces corruption and increases respect for law in ways that boost overall economic growth. A number of researchers have documented how merchants used religious backgrounds to establish one another’s reliabity
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On a larger scale, religious denominations affect economics by creating bonds of trust and shared commitment among small groups, both necessary qualities for lending and trade. In the Middle Ages, studies show, monk-run estates outperformed those that used serfs, thanks to religiously inspired cooperation and frugality. The Quakers of 18th-century Britain, renowned for their scrupulous honesty, came to dominate British finance. Ultra-orthodox Jews similarly dominate New York’s diamond trade because of levels of trust based on religion. Modern religious kibbutzim on average outperform their secular rivals, in part because of trust built through engaging in communal religious rituals.
Back in 1985 German-born Cardinal Ratzinger who was to become Pope Benedict XVI presented a paper entitled ``Market Economy and Ethics'' at a Rome event dedicated to the Church and the economy in which he predicted that a decline in ethics ``can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse.''
It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group — indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state — but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength. The political formation of a will that employs the inherent economic laws towards this goal appears, in spite of all humanitarian protestations, almost impossible today. It can only be realized if new ethical powers are completely set free.
On his visit to the White House, Pope Benedict quoted his predecessor Pope John Paul II
he reminded us that history shows, time and again, that "in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation", and a democracy without values can lose its very soul ...Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent "indispensable supports" of political prosperity.
But there's more to it. Arab societies are strongly religious in their profession of Islam. Yet Arab societies, apart from oil money, have not developed economically as they should have. Joseph Loconte strongly suggests that economic prosperity requires religious liberty in Economic Prosperity: A Step of Faith
Christian reformers of the seventeenth century, in fact, were among the first to grasp the importance of freedom of conscience to the stability and economic well-being of the state.
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Henry Robinson (1605-1664), a merchant and son of a wealthy London tradesman, traveled widely on the Continent...Robinson regarded the right of private judgment in matters of faith as essential to human flourishing, akin to the right to private property or private enterprise. These rights were connected, and the repression of religious freedom produced blowback in the economic realm.
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These facts still seem to be lost on many Muslim intellectuals. They complain about the “deprivation of human capability” in the Arab world, but exonerate regimes that deprive people of their inalienable rights. They link economic growth to new forms of “social cohesion,” but tolerate political arrangements that guarantee social strife. They even call for a “fundamental rethinking” of how Arab states should approach cultural and religious diversity—yet refuse to rethink their assumptions about the nature of religious belief or the moral demands of human dignity.
It requires no leap of faith—just, perhaps, a little historical memory—to realize this is not the road to economic development. It is the long and fractious and familiar detour to permanent stagnation.
the Wigstownshire Astronomical Society
From the soon-to-be official Dark-Sky Park, in Galloway Forest, registering Bortle 2 on the international darkness scale.
Not far away comes the traditional Scottish prayer.
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
The Anchoress had, by far, the best roundup on Pope's Benedict decision to set up a special provision for Anglicans to come over to Rome and enter into full communion with the Catholic Church as whole communities with their married priests and gorgeous liturgy. But I like best what Richard Fernandez had to say in The lighting of the beacons.
For that reason Benedict is picking up stragglers, having judged the Anglicans already shattered. But its real foe, upon which Rome’s eyes are fixed, are the socialist/communists. Osgiliath is driven in and the orcs are hard behind. Roman Catholic Archbishop Nichols, the primate of England, put it bluntly.
He claimed the Pope had made the decision because he wants worshippers to unite in the face of increasing secularism rather than form numerous smaller churchers. … Quoting the Pontiff, he said: “As he has written: ‘In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God.’ “
The Roman Catholic Church is living through an extraordinary historical moment. It is facing two religious competitors. From one side, there is the religion which pretends to be a political movement — socialism/communism. From the other flank there is the political movement which pretends to be a religion — Islam. Both religions have massive amounts of money, heavy weaponry and great cultural power. Pope Benedict has probably looked at the ancient but fragile ramparts of Rome and realized that unless something turns up, they may not hold. Indeed, any normal assessment of forces would conclude that Benedict’s Church is doomed. The future looks like a face-off between socialist secularism and unbending Islam. How can Christianity even hope to keep the field? The full power of political correctness are marshaled on the one hand, and the multitudinous throngs of the Jihad are arrayed on the other. Never mind Canterbury’s end. What odds would you give Rome? An observer would give none, but for this cryptic prophecy in Matthew 16:18.
And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
It's so interesting that this comes after the widely successful tour of the relics of St. Theresa de Liseux across England, the announcement of a papal visit to England next year where he will stay with the Queen in Buckingham Palace, and the canonization of the great Cardinal John Henry Newman next year, the most famous Catholic convert from Anglicanism in the 19th century.
I never heard of Jack Rushton who, some 20 years ago while body surfing with his son was picked up by a wave and thrown onto a rock breaking his neck and injuring his spinal cord.
"I learned within days after my accident that any quality of life I would have from that point on would be centered in the mind and the spirit," he said.
Rushton compared it to leaving mortality and entering the spirit world -- having to, in essence, leave his functioning physical body behind.
"Yet my mind was consumed by cherished truths I think maybe I had taken for granted for much of my life," he said. "They brought great peace of mind to me and helped me to deal with a future that looked black and almost impossible to comprehend."
But when I saw his YouTube video, I couldn't believe how funny he was and how inspiring.
He writes the blog Observations to leave behind for his 6 children and 17 grandchildren. Here he writes about the enormous effect of receiving loving kindness from others.
There was an African American nurse that worked the night shift from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. about three nights each week. She radiated a spirit of love and light that penetrated my dark world every time she was with me. Every morning before she would leave to go home, knowing that with the shift change I would probably not see another nurse for at least an hour, she would get a basin full of hot water and with a washcloth she would wash and massage my face in a most loving and caring way. It was not doctor's orders and no other nurse ever thought to do it... but she did, and she did it every morning she was there. No one can know how good that felt, especially when you can't feel anything in your entire body except your face and the top of your head. But as good as it felt physically it even felt better emotionally to have someone, really a stranger, show that kind of love and concern.
Another flash of light that always brought hope and made the worst of times a good time was the care given to me by an African-American nurse's aide. He was a big man, muscular, an Afro hairdo, ear rings, various tattoos, and a loud voice. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley late at night. Poor Jo Anne was afraid to leave the hospital that first night that he was to be a participant in my care. How true it is that looks can be deceiving. I was never treated with such respect, kindness, and tenderness by anyone at Rancho than by him. He couldn't do enough for me. I always rejoiced when I realized he was to be my helper during a 12 hour period. It was obvious to me that what he was doing was not being done out of a sense of duty but out of love and deep concern for me and the other young men in our spinal cord injury unit. He had a great sense of humor and made me feel good in spite of myself and the trauma I was going through.
The power of faith is quite extraordinary.
Catching up on all the stories I wanted to post about, here's how one remarkable elderly woman of faith saved herself and possibly her attacker.
I have great respect for Catholic nuns and the extraordinary work they have done and continue to do to educate, take care of the sick and dying and serve the poor, so I very pleased to see their self-sacrifice recognized by the House of Representatives.
A few excerpts from H. Res. 441, September 22, 2009:
Whereas Catholic sisters established the Nation's largest private school system and founded more than 110 United States colleges and universities, educating millions of young people in the United States;
Whereas Catholic sisters participated in the opening of the West, traveling vast distances to minister in remote locations, setting up schools and hospitals, and working among native populations on distant reservations;
Whereas more than 600 sisters from 21 different religious communities nursed both Union and Confederate soldiers alike during the Civil War;
Whereas Catholic sisters cared for afflicted populations during the epidemics of cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza during the 19th and early 20th centuries;
Whereas Catholic sisters built and established hospitals, orphanages, and charitable institutions that have served millions of people, managing organizations long before similar positions were open to women;
Canadian born Conrad Black was at one time the third largest newspaper magnate in the world, publishing The Daily Telegraph in London, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, Canada's National Post and hundreds of community newspapers in the U.S. through his interest in Hollinger International.
In June of 2007 he was convicted of fraud based on charges of diverting funds for personal benefit from Hollinger when the company sold certain publishing assets. His conviction is currently on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now he writes from prison in Florida on How I woke up from spiritual slumber and inched at a snail's pace to Rome.
Former Telegraph proprietor Conrad Black was an agnostic until his 20s, but, after trips to Rome, Lourdes and Fatima, found he could not shut out a sense of God.
My religious upbringing was casually Protestant, a respect for Christian tradition and high religious tolerance, but no encouragement to be a practising or seriously believing Christian.
I am attracted to conversion stories and Black's is quite interesting, particularly as he sets the context with his observations on Quebec as it changed from a religious culture.
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When I moved to Quebec in 1966 I was astounded by the omnipresence there of Roman Catholicism....
My research revealed that only the Church had sustained the French language in Quebec, the demographic survival of French Canadians, and the prevalence of literacy, provision of health care, and even most capital formation (as in the caisses populaires and credit unions attached to almost every parish), for nearly two centuries after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759....I saw the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec, and later in most other places, as fiercely dedicated to the kingdom of God, resistant to opportunistic fads, concerned to modernise without eroding faith, armed with intellectual arguments quite equal, at the least, to those of their secular opponents or rivals, and almost always a champion of human rights when it wasn't in common cause with less altruistic elements against the anti-Christ of Communism.
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The almost exclusive Church provision of education and health care to French Quebec was overly prolonged and averse to competition, but the resulting savings in salary costs of teachers and nurses enabled the government of Quebec to devote most of its budget to what is now called infrastructure. Duplessis built thouands of schools, the new campuses of Laval and Montreal Universities, the University of Sherbrooke, hundreds of hospitals and clinics, thousands of miles of roads, the first Canadian autoroutes, and he brought electricity to 97 per cent of rural Quebec. Quebec was even a pioneer in disability pensions and day care.
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to a secular one
Now the same people were performing the same educational and paramedical tasks in the same buildings for the same population at 10 times the cost to the Quebec taxpayers, and were frequently on strike, as taxes and debt soared, the birth- rate collapsed, the separatists advanced, and the cultural rights of the non-French were re-defined as "revocable privileges".
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Now the impecunious parishes, scanty congregations and the apparent anachronism of the contemporary Church seemed to produce a sharp division between those clergy buoyed by the challenge, feeling themselves like the monks of the Dark Ages squatting in forests and on mountain tops, agents of spiritual and cultural preservation, and those who were just the detritus of the old Church, parched, wizened, and passing slowly on. In Quebec as in France, those who persist in the practice of the faith are not the oldest, poorest, most desperate, though those are there, but a very random group, including elegant young women, evidently successful men, bright students, unselfconscious, curious, and assured. The spiritual edifice of the Church functions obliviously to market share, and there is a common strain of intelligent and hopeful faith, regardless of fashion, age, or economics
In tune with the apocalyptic mood of our times, here's a new archeological find in Saudi Arabia that threatens to change the dynamics in the Mid East with consequences no one can imagine.
It may be the biggest archaeological discovery to date, but it is also the most dangerous
Alleged Discovery of 'Real' Mt. Sinai in Saudi Arabia
A quick look at what has been found easily explains all the fuss. Dr. Moller points out that the site at Nuweiba he identifies as the Red Sea crossing point has an underwater land bridge, upon which damaged [6] chariot parts and bones remain, engulfed in coral. The top of Jabal al-Lawz, the alleged real Mt. Sinai, is black [7], as if burned from the sky as described in Exodus 19:18, where it says “the Lord descended upon it in fire.” This feature sets it apart from all the other surrounding mountains which do not have darkened tops. The BASE Institute’s film shows Cornuke, who snuck onto the mountain, examining the rocks he cracked, observing that they are not merely black rocks and that only the outside had become darkened by whatever had occurred at the site. Moller has a photo of one of these rocks, which he identifies as “obsidian or volcanic glass, a mineral formed at high temperatures.”
Is Jabal al-Lawz the real Mt. Sinai where Moses encountered God?
One of the greatest — and most doubted — miracles of the Exodus is the story about God instructing Moses to hit a large rock with his rod, which resulted in a flow of water for the Hebrews to drink from. Near Jabal al-Lawz is a large rock, standing about 60 feet high, split [8] down the middle. The edges of the split and the rock underneath it have become smooth, as if a stream of water had poured forth from the rock, creating a river. Given the annual rainfall in Saudi Arabia and the fact that the erosion is only present on that rock and no other ones in the surrounding area, it’s hard to find a plausible explanation for this remarkable find.
Is this the rock Moses struck to bring forth water in the desert?
I'm certainly going to keep my eye out the new documentary, The Exodus Conspiracy .
The religious sense remains alive.
Not even Alzheimer's can erase God
Four galaxies are involved in this pile-up 280 million light years from Earth. The bright spiral galaxy at the center of the image is punching through the cluster at almost two million miles per hour.
When I saw this photograph, the word that came to mind was a Greek one, "perichoresis" used to describe the joyful dance of love that takes place within the Holy Trinity.
Thaddeus J. Kozinski calls the Pope A new St Benedict for the new Dark Ages
We tend to associate barbarism with images of primitive savages looting and pillaging villages, razing the walls of cities, and enslaving women and children. However, the Holy Father is suggesting here an entirely new kind of barbarism, one with a distinctly spiritual character. Civility is the quality of soul and society by which we recognize not only that other people exist, but also that they have the right to our courtesy, dignity, and respect. Civilization, then, as the opposite of barbarism, is founded upon the recognition of the dignity and rights of the other. Thus, a culture in which "the highest goals [are] one’s ego and one’s own desires" is the very definition of barbaric.
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Today’s barbarism is of a distinctly spiritual nature. It is not so much a physical as a philosophical barbarism that has overtaken Western culture, a barbarism of the soul that is camouflaged by a quite "civilized" bodily façade.
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The philosophical barbarian does not wish to have any external demands imposed upon him, for he desires all of reality to conform to his presuppositions, prejudices, and plans. He is unwilling to open his soul fully to the objects and entities around him, for he does not trust that any good will come to himself from such vulnerability. Instead of accepting the imposition of an objectively real world with infinite plenitude and profundity, he imposes upon it his paltry perspective, thereby rejecting a rich, resplendent reality for a scanty and superficial one. He reduces reality to the size of his shrunken soul. Since the less there is to know, the less there is to love, the end result of this barbaric state of soul, tantamount to staring at one’s spiritual navel, is perpetual, relentless boredom.
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Boredom is the telltale sign of the starving soul, and today’s barbarians are starving for the two staple soul-foods: knowledge and community. Modern secular culture feeds its denizens plenty of "knowledge" in the form of technological know-how, scientific facts, ephemeral trivia, and politically correct aphorisms, but this is paltry fare with little nutritional value compared to the sumptuous banquet of truth they could have if they only recognized their hunger for it: they desire "know-how" regarding their souls; they pine for the meaning of things, not just for facts; they yearn to partake in the complex and elegant conversation with "the best that has been thought and said" that we call the Great Books, not politicized and pre-digested cant.
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Most of all, these barbarians are starving for friendship, for intimacy, for communion. Growing up in dysfunctional families as orphans in their own homes, in neighborhoods where no one knows each other, in rootless communities in perpetual emigration, and in cities and suburbs where the empty blandishments of consumerism and mall shopping are what passes for festival; their desire for authentic friendship—to know and be known—has become rapacious.
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Caritas in Veritate, "Charity in Truth." Our new Benedict’s encyclical is out, and its essential message, the power of love in truth and truth in love, when practiced, is precisely what could convert us love-sick and truth-starved barbarians.
Hal Colbatch, writing in the Australian, says
I WROTE here in April that Britain appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state, but it seems I didn't know the half of it.
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales have warned that religious schools and care homes could be forced to remove crucifixes, holy pictures or other religious symbols or icons from their walls in case they offend atheist or non-Catholic cleaners. Under the terms of the bill, Catholic institutions could be guilty of harassment if they display images offensive to non-Catholics.
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Andrew Summersgill, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales, says: "The practical consequences of this are that a Catholic care home, for example, may have crucifixes and holy pictures on the walls (that) reflect and support the beliefs of the residents. A cleaner may be an atheist or of very different religious beliefs. Nonetheless, if a cleaner found the crucifixes offensive, there would be no defence in law against a charge of harassment."
There is no test of reasonableness in the draft legislation; instead, the test is completely subjective.
"It is tailor-made for people to come up with objections because it puts the emphasis on the person being offended rather than on an objective test of what ought to be considered reasonable,
No surprise that this bill is largely the creation of the Harriet Harman, the Equality Minister, perhaps the most committed of left-wing social engineering activists
London priest Tim Finigan says: "For the government to promote this agenda in extreme form at a time when the political system is suffering unparalleled contempt and the far-right groups have their best opportunity for years is stupid beyond belief."
Xavier Le Pichon has a remarkable article up (Speaking of Faith @American Public Media), Ecce Home (Behold Humanity)
A geophysicist, Le Pichon writes of the fragility and evolution of our humanity beginning with a small child dying in Calcutta through the poignant tale of his father taking care of his mother through her long and painful decline.
Who is this child that the tidal wave of human misery has deposited among the dozens of other “dying destitutes”, as announced on the board at the entrance: “Home for dying destitutes”. Why did I have to travel over ten thousand kilometers to meet him so that he would completely reorient my life?
Suffering has suddenly swept my soul: it has washed away everything in me. How so much suffering that I had not even noticed could be present next to me? As I had been standing on the crest of the advancing wave of our scientific and technologic civilization, I did not even glance at the debris left over by its flow. I was looking ahead. And suddenly, among the debris of my civilization, this child becomes for me a person, the most important person in my life.
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Contrarily to what is often assumed, the weak and imperfect parts are often those that allow the evolution to occur without any revolution. This is true for the evolution of life, which is in great part based on the occurrence of coding errors during the duplication of the genetic information. One can ask whether it is not also true of our societies. We tend to dissociate the individuals who are well adapted to our social life from those that have difficulties to follow the pace that is imposed on them by our life style. Yet a society that separates the producers from the others considered as dead weight, even as marginal or excluded individuals, is a hard society, characterized by conflicts and often by complete rejection of minorities. It is sad and pessimistic. On the contrary a society where all are well integrated has a much more adaptable structure, with a different, easier and more conciliatory mode of life. It is often happier and more optimistic.
He finds that even Neanderthals fed and looked after severely handicapped members of their communities who were too disabled to contribute to the quest for food.
this experience of welcoming the suffering of our neighbor is at the very heart of our identity of humans since the origin.
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Thus human societies have reorganized themselves about a new pole governed by the presence of suffering and death, which is related to the realization of the fragility and vulnerability of its members. Actually, we tend to judge the degree of humanity of a society through the way in which it takes into account in its organization the presence of suffering and death.
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Taking care of fragile and vulnerable individuals has revealed to humans their own fragility and vulnerability. It has forced them to enter this dark world of fear in order to learn to live with it. They have realized that the human individual is a unique reality that keeps its unity under widely changing aspects from the fetus to the aged person at the end of his life.
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Father Thomas Philippe co-founder of L’Arche with Jean Vanier said: “If we take away from someone who is suffering, any meaning to his suffering, if we make him feel even indirectly that his suffering is useless and is a burden to the community, what is left for him? Despair.” We must welcome each person in such a way that she retains her full dignity and still have a sense of having something to offer to the community.
He learned from the deep transformation of his father's heart and the suffering humanity of his mother a deep mystery
What my mother and father experienced together during her long and painful illness helps us to understand a little better the nature of this mysterious transformation of relationships which comes when we welcome handicap, suffering and illness. If this welcome is made with dignity and love, the person we welcome becomes the one who leads us into a new deepening of our true humanity. That person changes us deeply as she also changes the nature of the community around them. My mother who had played such an important role during her active life to form the bonds that unified our family had at the end of her painful life an even greater influence in maintaining our unity and in deepening the heart of my father while she appeared to be utterly powerless. One can say that she radiated much more love than what she had received. She had revealed to those who had welcomed her with love a new depth of their humanity. They now better understood that they had a heart and could only find happiness in love.
Reading Body, mind and Chinese medicine, I was struck by what Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School had to say in 1993 about the Chinese medical system because it's so similar to what I believe.
The whole Chinese medical system is based on the notion that the way you relate to other people, the way you think, and your emotions govern your health and illness -- what kind of life you'll have and what kind of death you'll have... I think the entire Chinese culture is based on the notion that there is a correct way to live, and that how you live ultimately influences your health. It's not just diet or exercise, it's also a spiritual or emotional balance that comes from the way you treat other people and the way you treat yourself. That has always been the highest goal of living in all the Taoist and Confucian traditions. And since that's the basis of their culture, it spills over into their medicine.
In a quick search to find what is going in these days in Western medicine, I came across Dr. Harold Koenig. A pioneer in the field of faith and health, Dr Koenig is co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center where he also serves on the faculty as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Professor of Medicine.
In this interview with Beliefnet, Dr Koenig talks about how prayer and attending church can have a powerful effect on our mental and physical well-being.
Putting aside the ability to be able to prove it or not, do you believe that prayer can heal—specifically help someone, for example, recover from cancer?
Absolutely. I believe that on faith and I also believe it because I've seen that happen with people, including personal friends. Of course they knew they were being prayed for, by their families and their churches, and those people have had remarkable recoveries. ...*** So there's no doubt in my mind that prayers help people—those who are prayed for and those saying the prayer.
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Beyond the effects of prayer, do you believe religious practice can lead to other health benefits? What are they?
Bear in mind that these benefits are not intended, they're kind of a consequence of going to church or praying or reading the Bible or being religiously committed. They're kind of a side effect of being religious for more valid, more intrinsic reasons.
The benefits of devout religious practice, particularly involvement in a faith community and religious commitment, are that people cope better. In general, they cope with stress better, they experience greater well-being because they have more hope, they're more optimistic, they experience less depression, less anxiety, and they commit suicide less often. They don't drink alcohol as much, they don't use drugs as much, they don't smoke cigarettes as much, and they have healthier lifestyles. They have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, probably better cardiovascular functioning, and probably a healthier hormonal environment physiologically—particularly with respect to cortisol and adrenaline [stress hormones]. And they live longer.
The same benefits do not accrue to those who profess a vague spirituality.
I think the word "spirituality" is much more inviting and it includes religion. But from a research perspective, it's really religion that's studied and been shown to benefit health— not the less definable, more vague, and individualized spirituality.
Glastonbury Abbey
In a 2005 interview with Bob Abernethy of PBS, Koenig remarked on the exploding research on the relationship between religion and health since 2000.
In the past two and a half years, there have been over 1,800 articles written -- research studies, discussions on the topic of religion and health. Comparing the three-year periods 20 years apart, there has been, literally, an 18-fold increase in the amount of attention this subject is being paid.
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Having faith and being optimistic can definitely influence one's outcome. However, what this research shows is that having faith specifically in religion helps people more than having faith in other things. That's what we're studying. We're comparing people with faith in religion versus faith in family or work or hobbies, and the religious people seem to do better.
If you lived a healthy lifestyle, if you had a strong family and lots of friends, if you had a belief system that helped you cope with death and life and suffering and religion had no part of it, you'd have the same health benefits. The problem is, most people aren't in that situation. Most people don't have a worldview that makes sense of death and suffering and loss, don't have a ton of friends that are supportive or a family that encourages and supports them, and don't live a healthy lifestyle because they're simply human and are pulled to these various kinds of temptations that affect our health. So religion is a package of things that brings together all of those different areas in a person's life.
Cologne Cathedral at sunset
Now in the London Times, God will save you - believe in him or not.
Interviewing survivors around the world, I have noticed a remarkable pattern. Overwhelmingly, they share a belief that God and faith sustained them through their trials. As many as 75% or 80% cite a higher power as an important reason for their survival. Either they face their crisis with strong faith or they discover it in the crucible, believing God had a plan for them and gave them the strength to overcome.
In trying to find out what this all means, Ben Sherwood interviewed Dr. Koening:
Koenig replies that belief is the most powerful survival tool in the world. Faith and religion, he says, empower you with “the kind of strength that nothing else that I’ve ever seen can give”.
Dr. Harold Koenig is the author of several books including "The Healing Power of Faith: How Belief and Prayer Can Help You Triumph Over Disease" and "Faith and Mental Health: Religious Resources for Healing" and "Faith In The Future: Healthcare, Aging and the Role of Religion"
In trying to understand the situation in Iran, I've been reading a lot more about what was going on that country.
First, Sex, drugs and Islam from Spengler
Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.
But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the "decadent" West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed
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Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.
First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women.
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Second, according to a recent report from the US Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran serves as the major transport hub for opiates produced by [Afghanistan], and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts." That is, 5% of Iran's adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.
From a review by Spengler of the book Predicting the death of , The crisis of Islamic civilization by Ali A Allawi, a "prominent Iraqi politician who recently served as minster of defense and finance in the American-backed Iraqi government".
Muslim countries could join the modern world. But the differences between Islam and the Judeo-Christian West run far deeper than the political surface, Allawi argues, and they begin with a radically different view of the individual, or more precisely, the view that the individual human being really does not exist to begin with.
"Islam departs from the mainstream of modern constructs of the individual and the group," Allawi observes. The notion of a human individual is absent from Islamic thinking and impossible to describe in the Arabic language, he argues. Only God has individuality and uniqueness; the individual is merely an instrument, as it were. Many Western readers will skim uncomprehending over this material, and thus miss the radical thrust of Allawi's argument. Western political scientists do not learn theology, whereas Allawi argues that in the Islamic world, politics is theology.
Both of which were referenced in Spengler's piece today Hedgehogs and flamingos in Tehran.
I had to review once again the Origins of the Shia-Sunni split and the linked article from NPR by Mike Shuster was invaluable. Even better, and absolutely essential for seeing the problem was the Shia-Sunni map which can be found at the same link. With greater understanding, I could turn to the Hedgehogs article.
Why did the mullahs fix the election? And why so obviously?
The trumpet which dare not sound an uncertain note was a call to Tehran's Shi'ite constituency, as well as to a fifth of Pakistani Muslims. Religious establishments by their nature are conservative, and they engage in radical acts only in need.
Tehran is tugged forward by the puppies of war: Hezbollah in Lebanon and its co-sectarians in Pakistan. With a population of 170 million, Pakistan has 20 million men of military age, as many as Iran and Turkey combined; by 2035 it will have half again as many. It also has nuclear weapons. And it is in danger of disintegration.
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Against a young, aggressive and unstable Pakistan, Iran seems a moribund competitor...Collapsing fertility is accompanied by social pathologies, including rates of drug addiction and prostitution an order of magnitude greater than in any Western country.
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Iran's aspirations for a restored Islamic civilization cannot exclude Pakistan's 30 million Shi'ites. The Taliban's insurgency inside Pakistan is directed against the Shi'ites more than any other target, and to make matters worse, Pakistani intelligence is agitating among Iran's own Sunni minority.
Are we looking at a civil war in Islam?
Roger Scruton on the humanities, Farewell to Judgment
People of my generation were taught to believe that there are human universals, which remain constant from age to age. We were taught to study literature in order to sympathize with life in all its forms. It doesn't matter, we were told, if Shakespeare's political assumptions do not coincide with ours. His plays do not aim to indoctrinate; they aim to present believable characters in believable situations, and to do so in heightened language that would set our imaginations and our sympathies on fire. Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.
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Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?
Deconstructionism and Post-modernism reigns in today's universities, yet no one is happy or could be happy with the poverty of spirit on offer.
Scruton in an interview
The rhetoric of deconstruction is not so widely adverted to today as it once was. But that is not because its tenets are no longer embraced but rather because they have become so familiar that they no longer seem shocking. The nihilistic assumptions of deconstruction have not been jettisoned, they have been internalized: more and more they are simply taken for granted as part of the accepted and expected intellectual furniture of the time.
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The most flagrant example is the university, an institution that was entrusted with the task of preserving and transmitting what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said" but that since the 1960s has become a refuge for radical political activism
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Dostoyevsky once claimed that if God does not exist then everything is permitted. Considerable ingenuity has gone into proving Dostoyevsky wrong. To date, though, the record would seem to support him.
It just so happens that a British biographer, novelist and man of letters, A.N.Wilson who had made it his business to skewer faith as irrational has recently converted.
A.N. Wilson explains himself in Why I believe again
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level.
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love....Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
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My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again.
From Look who's a believer now.
Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."
Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience.
Even the left-wing German philosopher Jürgen Habermas stunned his followers lately with this statement:
“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
With increasing frequency, we're seeing Christians being persecuted in the U.K.
One 43-year-old woman wore a gold crucifix around her neck as many Catholics do. She was told at a disciplinary meeting that her job as a phlebotomist under the Gloucestershire NHS Trust was at risk unless she removed the crucifix because they claimed her one-inch crucifix could be used as a weapon or could be a source of infections
She told the Gloucestershire Echo: "I just feel it is so wrong - I have always worn my cross inside my uniform and it means a lot to me. They have told me I can carry it in my pocket but it isn't the same.
"My faith is important to me but I'm not a bible basher and don't push it onto colleagues. Now I have to choose between my job and my faith. It is an awful situation."
Christians risk rejection and discrimination for their faith in the U.K., a study claims
The first poll of Britain's churchgoers, carried out for The Sunday Telegraph, found that thousands of them believe they are being turned down for promotion because of their faith.
One in five said that they had faced opposition at work because of their beliefs.
More than half of them revealed that they had suffered some form of persecution for being a Christian.
The abuse in the marriage made it hard, but the mother, a committed Catholic, made sure her son, only 5, was enrolled in a Catholic school. When the marital abuse led to a nervous breakdown, and the mother was unable to care for her son. Social workers took custody of the boy and placed with a homosexual couple who run the hotel in which they live.
Catholic mother's fury after mental breakdown sees son fostered by gay couple
‘She would prefer a Catholic couple, but if that is not possible, at least a heterosexual one. But social services have given her no choice. She cannot understand how he can be looked after by two men she’s never met.
‘Her belief is that they could encourage him into a lifestyle that is against her religious beliefs.
‘The other day he asked her, “Mummy, are you lesbian or gay?” She had to tell him she was neither.’
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Last night, a leading Catholic lawyer, who asked not to be named, said: ‘I have to ask, would a local authority put a ten-year-old atheist child into a devoutly Catholic home? I think not.
‘Or would it place a ten-year-old hijab-wearing devout Muslim girl with two gay men? Again, I think not.’
Two quite interesting posts on prayer from two of my favorite bloggers.
Gerald Vanderleun "While You Were Out"
We don't know much about God. Indeed, there are many among us who make it a point to know even less -- until they are proud, damned proud, to know nothing at all. Once they achieve this brainfade, they encourage the rest of us to follow suit in a paroxysm of self-willed ignorance.
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We know that God is not finished with us yet in many ways, but the most obvious sign is the fact that, if God were finished with us, we'd have a third set of teeth that would come in around age 45.
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Since we see, in small ways in our own lives and in larger ways in the realms of the world and history, that prayers are, from time to time, actually answered,
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In fact, whole elements of religion are centered around having you find and keep a personal relationship with God. But just because you have a personal relationship with God (and you should), doesn't mean God has to have a personal relationship with you. He is, after all, God and He's got a whole universe to run. It's a big place and He's just one God and He's busy.
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For the most part, God lets the Evolution Factory handle reality. The Evolution Factory is one of his better projects. Brilliant really.
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As I was saying, prayer -- with or without God -- makes us stronger and our desires and abilities more focussed just by happening. As a result, things you pray for tend to happen to you more often than things you don't pray for simply because your abilities are more concentrated on the outcome. Pretty clever wiring for a God who does not exist.
Doctor Bob in The Prayer of Java
Of course, it is not the prayer itself, but the power it unleashes, which accomplishes such things. Gravity worked the same for Cro-Magnon man as it does for a modern physicist; understanding the force changes it not one wit.
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And here’s the rub: the power behind prayer is not an inert physical force, but an infinitely wise and caring God. Whether you believe in Him or not, He exists, He listens — and amazingly (given our reprobate nature), always has our best interest at heart. As I look back at my own life, were I to have received a tenth of the things I asked for in prayer, my life would be an unmitigated disaster. God knows when to say “no”, where to say “wait”; He knows how to listen to what I ask for and give me instead what I really need, and truly want.
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If you’re new to this prayer thing (or even not so new), start small. Praying for world peace or a cure for your cancer is fine, but a bit grandiose for starters. Pray about your misplaced car keys, finding a parking spot, the wisdom to deal with that difficult patient, or co-worker, or child, or situation. Then open your eyes, your ears, your heart for the response. You won’t hear it every time — but I bet you’ll be surprised how often you do, and you’ll learn something about God, about yourself, and in some small way about how this spiritual world works.
If you've lost something, pray to St. Anthony of Padua who is the Catholic patron saint for lost or stolen items,
"Holy Tony please come round, Something's lost and must be found."
He's a philosophy professor who asks whether the traditional philosophical idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation is really so ridiculous.
Simon Critchley in Happy Like God.
For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view.
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Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time
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As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”
But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hubristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.
I wondered for some time why some very smart people, the kind that reads The New York Times, are so abysmally ignorant about religion. And why, in the words of Bill Schneider, "The press...just doesn't get religion."
Stanley Fish talks God in the New York Times and gives the NYT readers what for.
According to recent surveys, somewhere between 79 and 92 percent of Americans believe in God. But if the responses to my column on Terry Eagleton’s “Faith, Reason and Revolution” constitute a representative sample, 95 percent of Times readers don’t. What they do believe, apparently, is that religion is a fairy tale, hogwash, balderdash, nonsense and a device for rationalizing horrible deeds.
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Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
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Some readers find a point of vulnerability in what they take to be religion’s flaccid, Polyanna-like, happy-days optimism. Religious people, says Delphinias, live their lives “in a state of blissfully blind oblivion.” They rely on holy texts that they are “to believe in without question.” (C.C.) “No evidence, no problem — just take it on faith.” (Michael) They don’t allow themselves to be bothered by anything. Religion, says Charles, “cannot deal with doubt and dissent,”
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What I say, and I say it to all those quoted in the previous paragraph, is what religion are you talking about? The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair. Whether it is the book of Job, the Confessions of St. Augustine, Calvin’s Institutes, Bunyan’s “Grace Abounding to The Chief of Sinners,” Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” and a thousand other texts, the religious life is depicted as one of aspiration within the conviction of frailty. The heart of that life, as Eagleton reminds us, is not a set of propositions about the world (although there is some of that), but an orientation toward perfection by a being that is radically imperfect.
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So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion — it is an inferior way of knowing — is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion’s content — it’s cotton-candy fluff — is the product of incredible ignorance.
The mitzvah of Gary Krupp, a Jew who was knighted by Pope John Paul, his wife and their Pave the Way Foundation in rehabilitating the reputation of Pope Pius XII, unfairly called "Hitler's Pope" who, in truth, saved the lives of up to 850,000 Jews, more than all the international agencies put together.
My wife and I grew up hating Pius XII
He is in London because a British television firm is making a documentary about his work on Pius. He is an interesting enough figure to warrant such attention. He is proudly Jewish, a Zionist who, after a successful career fitting hospital suites with new imaging technologies, is spending his retirement battling to restore the reputation of a pontiff maligned as a Nazi sympathiser. Correcting this revision of history is a "Jewish issue", argues Krupp, because Pius was a man who "in just one day hid 7,000 Jews from the Nazis" - nearly six times more than Oscar Schindler saved during the entire war.
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He believes that Pius will eventually be exonerated. All most people know about him is that he was "Hitler's Pope", says Krupp: "But if you go to an average person with the information that we have found they can only come to one conclusion - that this guy was the greatest hero of World War Two. We can prove it. We have something on our side - documented proof - where the revisionists haven't a scrap of paper to support their theories."
To find such proof the foundation has commissioned the German historian Michael Hesemann to search the Vatican archives opened two years ago by Pope Benedict XVI. These cover the period from 1922 to 1939, the years when Eugenio Pacelli served as nuncio to Bavaria and then as Pope Pius XI's "Jew-loving" Secretary of State, as he was referred to by the Nazis.
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One piece, discovered in the diary of a Rome convent, revealed that Pius directly ordered the religious houses of Rome to hide the city's Jews on October 16 1943, the same day his protest at their deportation was ignored.
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Since the Sixties most of the evidence in defence of Pius has been unearthed by Jewish historians, most notably by Pinchas Lapide who used Yad Vashem's records to show that the Church under Pius saved up to 850,000 lives - more than all the international agencies put together.
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In a piece published in the NY Daily News, Krupp called on Jews to Stop persecuting Pius - WWII pontiff is branded "Hitler's Pope," but he did much to save the Jews
I, along with several researchers, have discovered many documents detailing little-known activities of Pacelli. In 1917, for example, he intervened to protect Jews in Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. In 1925 he helped the head of the World Zionist Organization meet with Vatican officials to promote a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We found a confidential U.S. Foreign Service document reporting the Pope's hatred of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and a letter signed by Pacelli moving to overturn a proposed Polish law against kosher slaughtering. We located a nun's diary entry stating that her community received orders from the Pope to protect the Jews.
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More evidence shows Pius secretly moved Jews out of Europe. We conducted dozens of video interviews, among them a witness account of a priest who revealed a secret "underground railroad," directly ordered by the Pope, sending more than 10,000 Jews to the U.S. via the Dominican Republic. Many countries would not accept "Jews," so they were given false baptismal papers to travel as Catholics. Pius successfully stopped the deportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews when he appealed to the Regent of Hungary. Similarly, he desperately tried to impact the deportation policies of many other countries to, in his words, "save this vibrant community."
With German rifles posted beneath his windows
Aware of Hitler's plan to kidnap him and seize the Vatican, Pius formed a government in exile and still managed to directly stop the arrest of Roman Jews on Oct. 16, 1943. In literally one day, the Vatican managed to hide, feed and support more than 7,000 Jews in Catholic institutions and private homes - all with German rifles posted 200 yards beneath Pius' windows.
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Prominent Jewish and Israeli leaders like Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Joseph Lichten, as well as the Italian Jewish community, praised Pius after the war. Upon Pius' death in 1958, Israeli historian and diplomat Pinchas Lapide reported that many had suggested a forest of 860,000 trees be planted in the Judean hills to represent the Jews Pius had helped to save.
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"The most successful character assassination in the 20th century."
The public controversy began in 1963 with a negative portrayal of Pius in a fictitious play called "The Deputy." The highest ranking KGB agent to ever defect recently wrote an article detailing how the KGB planned, financed and edited this play in an operation called "SEAT TWELVE." This illicit KGB effort to discredit the church has been the most successful character assassination of the 20th century.
How the KGB Slandered a Dead Pope
A lovely piece by Vanderleun reminding me that Miracles and Wonders Continue
And so, while the petty politicians bleat, and the small and not so small wars rage on in fits and starts, almost everyone on the Earth will sleep tonight with someone they don't really mind all that much. And tomorrow the kids in the playground across the street will run and skip and jump at recess. And tomorrow our planet, one of many like it or perhaps alone in the universe, will turn full of much more goodness and grace than hate and suffering.
And tomorrow, somewhere in mid-heaven, floating weightless between the Earth and the Sun, men and women will carefully repair and refurbish a telescope so that we might see ever deeper into the whole of creation, and perhaps even, just a bit, into the mind and purposes of God.
In light of the coming debut of Angels and Demons based on another Dan Brown book, the science fiction writer John C. Wright comes out blazing to set the record straight for the history-challenged.
I thought ANGELS AND DEMONS by Dan Brown would turn out to be just an ordinary run-of-the-mill Catholic-bashing hate-fest. But, no, the whoppers told strain credulity. Do people actually know that little about history? It seems that they do.
Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.
Brown claims: “Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.”
Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: “The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.”
Brown claims: Churchill was a “staunch Catholic.”
Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.
Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa “to some obscure chapel across town” because it was too racy for the Vatican.
Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s “obscure chapel”). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.
Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed.
With so much bogus scholarship on the History Channel and from respectable publishers, George Sim Johnston takes us Back to the Beginning in a brief introduction to the ancient Catholic Church.
The Da Vinci Code... has sold a staggering nine million copies. Both the New York Times and National Public Radio seem to think that it is based on historical fact. Even its author appears to think so. But a book that claims that Christians did not believe in the divinity of Christ until the fourth century, that a Roman emperor chose the four Gospels, that the Church executed five million witches, and that Opus Dei has monks is obviously little more than a farrago of nonsense.
We live in a sea of false historiography, and so it is worth asking: What exactly happened during the first centuries of Christianity? How did a small band of believers, starting out in a despised outpost of the Roman Empire, end up the dominant institution of the Mediterranean world? What was "primitive Christianity"? John Henry Newman became a Catholic in the course of answering that question. History, he said, is the enemy of Protestantism. It is also the enemy of the newly vigorous anti-Catholicism that circulates among our cultural elites.
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To paraphrase Hilaire Belloc, there was no such thing as a religion called "primitive Christianity." There is and always has been the Church, founded by Christ around the year 30 A.D. That Church has always been hierarchical and sacramental. And it saved Western Europe from both pagan barbarism and Eastern nihilism.
In fact, almost everything we value in our civilization — hospitals, museums, universities, the idea of human rights — is by origin Catholic. These things did not come from the Vikings or northern German tribes; they certainly did not come from the Gnostics. But our modern secular culture displays a willful amnesia on the subject of our Catholic patrimony.
Here's a short video from Catholics Come Home
Why Israel is the world's happiest country, David Goldman in First Things who formerly wrote as the anonymous Spengler.
If any of you are depressed, morose, despondent, pessimistic, and glum, I have a cost-effective solution. For the price of a dozen sessions with a medicore therapist, you can get on a plane and go to Israel. That will cheer you up. Trust me. Insecurity doesn’t make you unhappy. This life isn’t secure. Shut yourself up in a cave ten miles under the earth with all the distilled water and freeze-dried food you can hoard, equip it with an intensive care unit and a dozen physicians… you still are going to die. Being alive is a very insecure condition as the probability of becoming dead at some future point is — let me check the chart — 100%. Care will slip in through the keyhole, no matter how secure you try to be. But the Israelis have something better than security. They have faith. That’s true even of secular Israelis, for to be an Israeli is a statement of faith.
And that is why Israel is the happiest country in the world. Last year I made this argument in a Spengler essay:
“In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, “It’s easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations.” Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.
In France, Mac Do is MacDonald's, but you'll never guess who Mac De is until you read Why Did They Like Him? over at Brits at their Best.
Marshfield miracle helps sainthood cause
Jack Sullivan, a longtime Plymouth District Court clerk magistrate, says he experienced a miraculous healing after praying for the help of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman. This is wants known as intercessory prayer, praying on behalf of another. Catholics believe that those in heaven, the saints, can intercede for us as well.
Lying in a hospital bed after surgery on his spine, unable to walk and in agonizing pain, Jack Sullivan propped himself up on elbows and prayed.
Not to some vast, unknowable God, but to a specific figure in the Catholic church, vastly respected, yet mortal: Cardinal John Henry Newman, an Englishman who died in 1890.
The healing, as Sullivan tells it, was almost immediate. He felt a tingling all over, was flooded with warmth, and, as easy as that, he could walk.
Now, the recovery that Sullivan, 70, has been describing for almost a decade, a drama that unfolded in August 2001, is on the verge of being deemed a miracle by the Catholic church, and the unassuming Marshfield man, a church deacon and father of three, is at the center of an accelerating campaign to make the late British cardinal a saint.
A panel of theologians, convened by the branch of the Vatican that investigates possible miracles, has concluded that Sullivan's recovery resulted from his prayer, the London Telegraph newspaper reported. A panel of doctors previously researched his claim and found no medical explanation for what happened, Sullivan said. The final decision to bestow miracle status rests with Pope Benedict XVI. If that status is given, as expected, it would lead to beatification for Newman, the last step before canonization, or sainthood.
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'The most important thing was the sense of exuberance I felt, exuberance and confidence that all would be well, all would be rosy, and a tremendous happiness,' Sullivan said yesterday. 'I got up and walked all over the place, twisting my cane like Charlie Chaplin.'"
Farther afield
The would-be assassin of Pope John Paul II, Mehmet Ali Agca, writes from prison that he is now a Catholic
"I have decided to return peacefully to the (St Peter's) square and to testify to the world of my conversion to Catholicism," he says in the letter written in Italian.
"Just for a day, I would wish to return to Rome to pray at the tomb of John Paul II to express my filial appreciation for his forgiveness," he adds.
You may have already seen this but if you haven't, read about Kevin Roose, the student at Brown University who "infiltrated" Liberty University
"As a responsible American citizen, I couldn't just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there," said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. "If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to."
Formed in 1971, Liberty now enrolls more than 11,000 residential students, along with thousands more who study through Liberty's distance-learning programs. The university teaches creationism and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, while pledging "a strong commitment to political conservatism" on campus and a "total rejection of socialism."
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He lined up a publisher — Grand Central Publishing — and arrived at the Lynchburg campus prepared for "hostile ideologues who spent all their time plotting abortion clinic protests and sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls."
Instead, he found that "not only are they not that, but they're rigorously normal."
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Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.
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Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly — for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.
He's even considering joining a church.
From an interview in Newsweek
Did you ever feel guilty about deceiving your new friends?
I did, and I tried to be as honest as I could. When people asked, I told them I'd come from Brown. I expected raised eyebrows, but often what I got was pity. They thought I was fleeing secularism, and they'd say, "Oh, Liberty must be a breath of fresh air." And I'd be like, "You have no idea."
His book is
"The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" (Kevin Roose)
He's also started a blog where he promotes his book and discusses other matters like Bible literacy: Why you need to know the Bible (even if you're an atheist)
For all the talk of America as a nation founded upon Judeo-Christian values, one humbling fact remains: As a culture, we know startlingly little about the Bible. As Stephen Prothero points out in his book Religious Literacy, studies have shown that only half of U.S. adults know one of the four Gospels by name. More than half are unable to identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and 60% can’t name five of the Ten Commandments. Sadly, our collective slide into biblical illiteracy doesn’t seem to be reversing itself among the younger set–according to Prothero, 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.
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By getting a solid foundation in the Bible in my Liberty classes, I gained access to an incredible amount of cultural capital. Suddenly, hidden metaphors in classic works of literature leapt out at me from the page, and I caught the subtle scriptural references embedded in political stump speeches
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Outside the classroom and the newsroom, biblical literacy is also important in our personal lives. For better or worse, America is a nation with a deeply entrenched religious divide, and knowing the language of the Bible can help secular liberals reach across faith boundaries and build common ground with even the most conservative Christians.
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The Bible is, quite simply, the most influential book in history. It’s the all-time best seller, the book whose pages have inspired wars and toppled regimes, whose words have given hope and comfort to billions of believers. And knowing almost nothing about it–as I did before my semester “abroad” at a Christian college–greatly hinders a person’s ability to participate knowledgeably in our country’s most important cultural discussions. Atheist or believer, Jewish or Christian, I hope–and pray–that this holiday season will inspire us all to learn a little more about the book in whose shadow we all live.
What is going on in the sky above that is otherwise invisible to your naked eye outside your suburban Boston Home.
As I grew older,...eventually I made some startling discoveries -- three of them -- and they have changed my life forever. The first of these is the amazing revelation that I am made up of stardust, that every part and parcel of who I am materially was once a piece of a star shining in the heavens. The second discovery is that the air I breathe is the air that has circled the globe and been drawn in and out by people, creatures and vegetation in lands and seas far away. But the most astounding discovery that both awakened and affirmed my early childhood awareness is the fact that I am part of a vast and marvelous dance that goes on unceasingly at every moment in the most minute particles of the universe....
The Exultent is chanted by the deacon during the Easter Vigil
Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
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This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.
O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!
Happy Easter
The Crown of Thorns in the Cosmos
A new Hubble image of NGC 7049, a glittering "oddball" galaxy captured by NASA/ESA in the constellation of Indus
The halo - the ghostly region of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy - is composed of myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the remarkable swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049's core. Globular clusters are very dense and compact groupings of a few hundreds of thousands of stars bound together by gravity.
An astonishing meditation on Good Friday by Richard John Neuhaus, "Father Forgive Them"
But it is just as odd that it should be called God’s Friday, when it is the day that we say goodbye to the glory of God. Wherever its name comes from, let your present moment stay with this day; stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.
By these three days all the world is called to attention. Everything that is and ever was and ever will be, the macro and the micro, the galaxies beyond number and the microbes beyond notice—everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened, with what happens, in these days. This is the axis mundi, the center upon which the cosmos turns. In the derelict who cries from the cross is, or so Christians say, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. The life of all on this day died. Stay a while with that dying.
Schematic diagram From Restoration of the Last Supper
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci finished in 1498 on the refectory wall of of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan
The artist Makoto Fujimara, taking up the invitation to Come and See, travels to Milan to stand under the masterpiece.
"If you want to 'understand' something," said my friend Bruce Herman, "you have to be willing to 'stand under' it." Bruce, an art professor at Gordon College, went on to cite C. S. Lewis' Experiment in Criticism:
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
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Leonardo painted in a grand, dominating scale for a small space. Even standing in the far back of the refectory, it is difficult for the eye to decipher the whole painting all at once. He painted The Last Supper in such a way as to force the viewer to enter the painting, physically and emotionally, and to viscerally become part of the narrative.
Only when the viewer stands under the painting can it be seen as it was intended to be (plate A). Leonardo had a specific visual message for those who stand under the painting. He had the visual sophistication to carry off what very few artists could even dream of doing: he painted the complex psychology of betrayal. It starts with Philip, and ends in a moneybag. Invited to walk into Leonardo's funhouse of mirrors, we are all meant to be part of this narrative, which is refracted within our own dark journeys.
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As an artist, I naturally try to identify the source of light in a painting, because I know that artists often use light to reveal what they want the viewer to see. In this painting, it would be easy to assume that the light is coming from behind from the windows, through which we see a Renaissance landscape. But the source of light in this painting actually is the face of Jesus reflecting on all of the disciples – all but Judas, who is under-painted with black, denied a brightened countenance.
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For him to have painted as he did, he had to be convinced of a center that holds.
So who is at the center? Where does the “vanishing point” end?
It ends on the forehead of the Savior.
And that foundation will hold, no matter how full our moneybags get, nor how little it takes for us to engage in betrayal. To Leonardo, the triangular shape of Jesus literally holds the painting in its visual movement.
A very high resolution photograph (16 billion pixels ) of the painting can be explored here
Timothy Verdon, an art historian and priest explains the profound meaning of the masterpiece from an artistic, theological and liturgical perspective in The Last Supper According to Leonardo published last week in L'Osservatore Romano.
By the use of perspective, the artist focuses the attention on Christ, making him the convergence point of the entire pictorial cosmos defined by the room. In fact, the diagonal lines that draw the eye forward inevitably lead to Christ, everything meets in Him, He is the center of the visual logic of the whole, as well as its narrative logic. He is not the last point, the vanishing point in the perspective; the diagonal lines, instead, converge behind Christ, in the evening sky outside of the window; but that vanishing point remains hidden. Seeking the infinite, our gaze comes to a halt with Christ, as if He were still saying, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).
There are more Christians in China than communists: 100 million believers vs. 74 million members of the communist party.
In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism – a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China’s only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China’s 1.3 billion souls.
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More Robert Reinlund photos here.
Why Christianity has such a hold remains something of an enigma. Many Chinese are looking to fill the chasm left by the collapse in Marxist ideology’s credibility in the wake of the disastrous ultra-leftist 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. It’s also possible that a religion from the West holds a particular attraction for Chinese looking for a more modern faith to complement the stunning success of capitalist-style economic reforms. But the sense of belonging may be the best way to explain why Christianity has been such a spectacular success story in China in the past few years.
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“The future of Christianity in China is very different from in the West,” believes Pastor Jin. “In the West, Christianity is in retreat, especially in Europe, but in China it is growing by leaps and bounds.” He cites the stability the church offers to a population buffeted by decades of wrenching political change as one of most appealing aspects of the faith.
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“China is a land that has been chosen by God. If the government did not interfere then many more Chinese would become followers. Our hearts are thirsty.”
[T]he piecemeal persecution of Christians in Britain is even more damaging—and it has now become routine.
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Jeremy Vine is a highly visible BBC broadcaster and a practicing Anglican. In a recent interview, Vine explained how difficult it had become to speak of his faith on air. It is, he claimed, now “socially unacceptable” to mention one’s Christian faith in public. Society in Britain has become intolerant of the freedom to express the religious views that were “common currency thirty or forty years ago,” Vine added. “The parameters of what you might call ‘right thinking” are closing. Sadly, it is almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God.” All of which is unsurprising, given that last year Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC and a practicing Catholic, issued an edict stating that the BBC should treat Islam “more sensitively” than Christianity.
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The problem is that the government and media of Great Britain have put in place over the last few decades a determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity. It’s a little late now for believers to pretend surprise that such a program exists and has consequences—to be shocked that a community nurse should be fired for offering to pray for a patient or astonished that a culture that set out to devalue its values should find itself awash in crime, sex, and social discord. We need, rather, to do as the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, insisted when he asked his congregants to “wake up” and defend their faith before it is further marginalized. “Christians should reclaim,” as the Anglican bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, recently demanded, their “place in the public square.”
If people who believe in the sanctity of life don't speak up or are afraid to speak in the public square, there will be no stopping such abominations such as the recently proposed directive from the EU. EU 'to put animals before embryos'
The European Union is to radically restrict laboratory testing on animals - by insisting human embryos are used by scientists for research instead.
Toxicology tests on animals will be permitted only after similar research on tissue taken from human embryos has proved fruitless, according to a proposed new directive from the European Commission (EC).
And no one to speak out against people like Patricia Hewitt, former Health Minister under Tony Blair, who wants to see suicide/euthanasia clinics set up across the country
The future of Europe without practicing Christianity is chilling. Theodore Dalrymple in Europe is a Riot
As if this were not enough, the government has done all in its power to ensure that there are no forms of social solidarity that do not pass through a government department—it went to the trouble of de facto nationalizing all the major charities well before it nationalized the banks. Forty-two percent of British children are now born illegitimate, and at least 25 percent can expect to live in a single-parent household, while many others live with serial step-parents, which is perhaps worse still. This is not a form of family life that can exist on a mass scale without state subvention, which if suddenly withdrawn or greatly reduced would plunge large numbers of people into real poverty. It conduces to common criminality, which is now rampant in Britain.
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Not long ago, I had occasion to stay for a few weeks in a once-industrial town in the north of England. The last steel mills had just closed down. I was surprised by the elegance of much of the early 19th-century architecture, now completely overwhelmed by the brutalism of the 1960s and ’70s. The prematurely middle-aged spent their time looking for secondhand clothes in charity shops. Pawnshops had also made a big comeback. Feral young men with an expression of urban predation on their faces stood around on street corners in nylon tracksuits and hoods, muttering f---ing this and f---ing that to one another. About half the people in the street were unemployed young immigrants, mainly of Middle Eastern origin, on the lookout for a bit of small-scale trafficking. Some took advantage of free Internet access in the public library—a concrete building aesthetically suitable as the headquarters of the Stasi—to look at inflammatory political sites or to search for women.
I have seen the future, and it’s riots
The only hopeful words I could find this weekend were those of Pope Benedict in Angola at a Mass for a Million
The words which Jesus speaks in today's Gospel are quite striking: He tells us that God's sentence has already been pronounced upon this world (cf. Jn 3:19ff). The light has already come into the world. Yet men preferred the darkness to the light, because their deeds were evil. How much darkness there is in so many parts of our world! Tragically, the clouds of evil have also overshadowed Africa, including this beloved nation of Angola. We think of the evil of war, the murderous fruits of tribalism and ethnic rivalry, the greed which corrupts men's hearts, enslaves the poor, and robs future generations of the resources they need to create a more equitable and just society -- a society truly and authentically African in its genius and values. And what of that insidious spirit of selfishness which closes individuals in upon themselves, breaks up families, and, by supplanting the great ideals of generosity and self-sacrifice, inevitably leads to hedonism, the escape into false utopias through drug use, sexual irresponsibility, the weakening of the marriage bond and the break-up of families, and the pressure to destroy innocent human life through abortion?
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Yet the word of God is a word of unbounded hope. "God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son ... so that through him, the world might be saved" (Jn 3:16-17). God does not give up on us! He continues to lift our eyes to a future of hope, and he promises us the strength to accomplish it. As Saint Paul tells us in today's second reading, God created us in Christ Jesus "to live the good life", a life of good deeds, in accordance with his will (cf. Eph 2:10). He gave us his commandments, not as a burden, but as a source of freedom: the freedom to become men and women of wisdom, teachers of justice and peace, people who believe in others and seek their authentic good. God created us to live in the light, and to be light for the world around us! This is what Jesus tells us in today's Gospel: "The man who lives by the truth comes out into the light, so that it may be plainly seen that what he does is done in God" (Jn 3:21).
In today's Britain, a woman who was raped by her father and faced a forced marriage, fled her home, became a Christian and now fears for her life.
My imam father came after me with an axe.
We are all too familiar with the persecution of Christians in countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet sitting in front of me is a British woman whose life has been threatened in this country solely because she is a Christian. Indeed, so real is the threat that the book she has written about her experiences has had to appear under an assumed name.
That assumed name is Hannah Shah and her book, The Imam's Daughter, was just published in the U.K. but not yet in the U.S.
The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.
He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.
Hannah Shah says her story is not unique – that there are many other girls in British Muslim families who are oppressed and married off against their will, or who have secretly become Christians but are too afraid to speak out. She wants their voices to be heard and for Britain, the land of her birth, to realise the hidden misery of these women....
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Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”
Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”
Why didn’t you call the police after-wards? “First, I didn’t think the police would believe me. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen in this country – or that’s what they’d think. Second, I didn’t believe I would get help or protection from the authorities.”
When she finally confided in a teacher that she was being beaten, still too ashamed to confide about the sexual abuse, the teacher contacted social services who sent out a social worker from her own community.
He chose not to believe Hannah and, in effect, shopped her to her father, who gave her the most brutal beating of her life. When she later confronted the social worker, he said: “It’s not right to betray your community.
Hannah blames what is sometimes called political correctness for this debacle: “My teachers had thought they were doing the right thing, they thought it showed ‘cultural sensitivity’ by bringing in someone from my own community to ‘help’, but it was the worst thing they could have done to me. This happens a lot.
Her conversion came about because the family who sheltered her were regular church-goers.
She began to go with them and, to put it at its most banal, she liked what she heard.
“It was the emphasis on love.
The Islam that I grew up knowing and reading about doesn’t offer me love. That’s the biggest thing that Christianity can and does offer. I sense that I belong and am accepted as I am – even when I do wrong there is forgiveness, a forgiveness which Islam does not offer.”
Saint Patrick in his own words in his confession
I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of our salvation.
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I am greatly God's debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: 'To you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our fathers have inherited naught hut lies, worthless things in which there is no profit.' And again: 'I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of' the earth.'
March 17, St. Patrick's Day is a legal holiday in Boston, Suffolk County, but not because of the Irish. It's Evacuation Day commemorating the day in 1776 when British forces under General Howe evacuated Boston driven out by General George Washington and his continental army.
The password that day?
"Saint Patrick"
The Myth of Relativism and the Cult of Tolerance
The multiculturalist claims that we should not judge others because moral values are culturally relative; i.e., what is right in one society may be wrong in another.
The concept of right and wrong is, itself, parochial. The enlightened multiculturalist understands that his culture’s values are just as arbitrary as his neighbor’s. If pressed for an explanation for why he follows his culture’s mores, he will tell you he chooses to obey them as an obeisance to his tradition -- that and nothing else.
Notice how condescending this person’s attitude is -- not just to his own culture -- to every culture. Every intelligent and committed Christian, Hindu, Moslem, or Jew (Buddhist’s are a slightly different story) that follows the moral teaching of her religion, not only believes that her values are objectively valid, she can offer arguments, with varying degrees of cogency, for their validity. (Notice also that many of these values and arguments are the same from religion to religion. This fact should tell us something.)
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Of the major religions, Christianity is the most susceptible to this rendition of the siren song of tolerance because it prides itself on not judging others.
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The cult of tolerance is Christianity without the guilt, without the work; it is Christianity without the faith, the hope, and the love. The cult of tolerance is selfishness disguised as Christianity.
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Unlike traditional moral relativism where the strongman rules because “might makes right,” politically correct moral relativism claims to be democratic. In truth, it is far from it. Tolerance, in its politically correct guise, is the imposition of a standardless standard upon the masses.
That quotation is from Barry Kosmin, co-author of the American Religious Identification Study (ARIS) released this week.
Cathy Grossman at USA Today has the best summary: Most religious groups in USA have lost ground.
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.
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"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.
image from Damien Thompson"s Holy Smoke
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or "born again," was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.
• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those numbers understate the groups' populations.
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Meanwhile, nearly 2.8 million people now identify with dozens of new religious movements, calling themselves Wiccan, pagan or "Spiritualist," which the survey does not define.
Legislation was introduced last Thursday (Senate Bill 1098) in Connecticut that would remove bishops and pastors from overseeing their parishes and substituting in their place a boards of directors composed of lay people to whom each pastor would report.
This is unbelievable and undoubtedly unconstitutional - the state attempting to direct how churches should be governed. So much for separation of church and state.
Archbishop Charles Chaput said
"But prejudice against the Catholic Church has a long pedigree in the United States. And rarely has belligerence toward the Church been so perfectly and nakedly captured as in Connecticut’s pending Senate Bill 1098, which, in the words of Hartford’s Archbishop Henry Mansell, ‘directly attacks the Roman Catholic Church and our Faith.’"
"In effect, SB 1098 would give the state of Connecticut the power to forcibly reorganize the internal civil life of the Catholic community. This is bad public policy in every sense: imprudent; unjust; dismissive of First Amendment concerns, and contemptuous of the right of the Catholic Church to be who she is as a public entity," the archbishop criticized.
According to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, called for the expulsion of State Senator Andrew McDonald and Representative Michael Lawlor chairmen of the Judiciary Committee who introduced the bill .
“Bishop Lori is correct to say that the bill ‘is a thinly-veiled attempt to silence the Catholic Church on the important issues of the day, such as same-sex marriage.’ Indeed, it is payback: this brutal act of revenge by Lawlor and McDonald, two champions of gay marriage, is designed to muzzle the voice of the Catholic Church.
“By singling out the Catholic Church—no other religion has been targeted—Lawlor and McDonald have demonstrated that they are ethically unfit to continue as lawmakers. They have evinced a bias so strong, and so malicious, that it compromises their ability to serve the public good. They should therefore be expelled by their colleagues.
The president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty whose mission is to protect the free expression of all religious traditions said
"This bill is doubly unconstitutional. It would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment even if it applied to all churches. but the fact that it applies to only one church - the Catholic Church - makes it unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment besides. This is truly a monstrosity."
UPDATE: After a firestorm of protest, the hearing on the bill scheduled for tomorrow has been cancelled. The bill is dead for the rest of the legislative session,
Following the biggest political firestorm of the 2009 legislative session, a public hearing scheduled for Wednesday on the financial and administrative management of the Catholic Church has been canceled. The bill is dead for the rest of the legislative session.
As soon as word spread about the bill, the Legislative Office Building was flooded with telephone calls and e-mails on Monday. The bill, virtually overnight, became the hottest issue at the state Capitol.
The cancellation came less than 24 hours after Senate Republican John McKinney of Fairfield called for the cancellation, saying that his caucus was unanimously against the bill because they believe it is clearly unconstitutional.
Father Barron on Steroids in Baseball. Why did Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds take steroids when they were already at the top of their game, at the height of their powers? Barron says it's all about concupiscence meaning errant desire or what we would call today the pattern of addiction.
Father Robert Barron, one of the most talented of the new Catholic evangelists, has a series of commentaries on Youtube that deal with current events and movies that are quite enjoyable, even arresting, with a distinctive Catholic take. Take a look at his website Word on Fire.
I love him. And not just because he looks a lot like my brother Billy. A professor and theologian, he's engaging and remarkably clear and insightful. Listen to any one of his weekly sermons and you'll see what I mean. You can subscribe on iTunes.
For anyone looking to know more about Catholicism, this is a great place to hang out. Begin with the trailer to The Catholicism Project, the Catholic story as you've never seen it before. A thematic exposition in ten parts now in production, it promises to show the compelling power and beauty of Catholicism and I, for one, can't wait to see it completed.
David Plotz, an editor of Slate reads the Good Book
Should you read the Bible? You probably haven't. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I've ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.
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And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day when I was Bible-reading. You can't get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David's wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Not to sound like a theocratic crank, but I'm actually shocked that students aren't compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain.
Later in a forum, he explains why he read just the Old Testament
I was giving the Bible a very irreverent, very personal reading. As a Jew, I felt I could do that with my Bible, the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament, more or less). I did not feel I could do it with the New Testament, because I couldn't treat the life of Jesus fairly. I think that Christian readers would have a right to expect a New Testament reading from someone who belonged to the group, not from some outsider chucking spitballs. But maybe I should have kept going: My Christian friends tell me that reading the OT but not the NT is like leaving the play at intermission.
Since I just started reading the Bible about two years ago, I can relate to a lot to what Plotz says. I was spurred to join a Bible study group at my church to fill in what I felt was a huge hole in my education which loomed larger after reading what Camille Paglia said:
“The Bible is a masterpiece. The Bible is one of the greatest works produced in the world. The people who all they have is the Bible actually are set up for life. Not only do they have a spiritual vision given to them but artistic fulfillment,”
By studying the Bible in a group, I learned much more than I would have on my own. I can also recommend Peter Kreeft's book. A professor of philosophy at Boston College, he illuminates the historical and theological themes and offers insights in such clear language, that anyone can use his book as a useful guide.
Ah the wonders of the web where all sorts of connections can be made while I wait to clear the fifteen inches of snow that appeared overnight. Ah, the great pleasures of a snow day.
A while back, I started a draft post on the pre-posthumous memoir by J.G Ballard after I came across this interview about his new book in LA Weekly
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.
"Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography" (J. G. Ballard)
I tucked it away in draft form until this morning when I happened upon Happy St David's Day at Brits at their Best, a favorite blog of mine.
St. David (Dewi Sant in Welsh), a bishop of Wales (c 500-589) became its patron saint (as well as the patron saint of vegetarians and poets). Today the Welsh wear a leek in memory of some ancient battle against the Saxons where Bishop David advised them to wear leeks on their hats to distinguish themselves from their enemies. Knowing that a storm was coming, coincidentally yesterday I made a potato and leek soup (absolutely delicious with lots of bacon bits and parsley as garnish).
Checking with the Catholic encyclopedia I learned that St David was conceived in violence, the product of the rape of his mother, a nun, by Sandde, King of Ceredigion, said by some to be King Arthur's nephew. According to legend the poor woman gave birth on a cliff top during a violent storm.
David founded a number of churches and monasteries among them Glastonbury, Bath and Leominster, all while living a life of austerity (no meat, no beer) and great holiness. His last words 'Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about" has become a very well-known phrase in Welsh 'Do the little things in life'. My little thing for St David.
Here's the famous Welsh singer, Bryn Terfel, who gives shivers to The Anchoress, singing a lullaby, a love song, from Wales, courtesy of the Cat and David, best Brits.
Sleep my baby, at my breast,
Tis a mothers arms round you.
Make yourself a snug, warm nest.
Feel my love forever new.
Harm will not meet you in sleep,
Hurt will always pass you by.
Child beloved, always youll keep,
In sleep gentle, mothers breast nigh.
Sleep in peace tonight, sleep,
O sleep gently, what a sight.
A smile I see in slumber deep,
What visions make your face bright?
Are the angels above smiling,
At you in your peaceful rest?
Are you beaming back while in
Peaceful slumber on mothers breast?
Do not fear the sound, its a breeze
Brushing leaves against the door.
Do not dread the murmuring seas,
Lonely waves washing the shore.
Sleep child mine, theres nothing here,
While in slumber at my breast,
Angels smiling, have no fear,
Holy angels guard your rest.
Was I surprised to that that lullaby was prominently featured in the movie Empire of the Sun, based on the semi-autographical novel of the same name by J.F. Ballard. I'd come full circle
Produced by Steven Speilberg with screenplay by Tom Stoddard, Empire of the Sun, released in 1987, tells the story of a young boy from an aristocratic British family living in Shanghai in 1941 just as the Japanese invaded. Separated from his parents, young Jamie is captured and taken to a Japanese POW camp for British civilians where he comes to admire both the Japanese and the captured American pilots. Jamie is played wonderfully by a very young Christian Bale who is befriended by a laid-back captured American pilot Basie played by John Malkovich.
When I watched the trailer again, I remembered how much I loved the movie. A critical success, it won no Oscars despite several nominations. I just bought it on Amazon for less than $10. You can too.
"Empire of the Sun" (Steven Spielberg)
Realizing they must offer more if they want to replace religion, a new new atheist like Ronald Aronson wrote that the
“the most urgent need” for secularists today: a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one’s life.”
Peter Steinfels examines The New Atheism, and Something More in his review of Living without God
A “new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” he wrote. “It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today.”
“religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something.”
For Mr. Aronson, that “something” is not the ideal of an autonomous individual striding confidently into the dawning future but the drama of an interdependent humankind embedded in complex systems of forces, knit into networks of natural environment, historical legacies, social institutions and personal relations.
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More originally, he argues that this interdependence should summon gratitude — gratitude “for,” even if not “to.” Giving thanks, he recognizes, has been central to religion, and secular culture needs to be enriched with an equivalent.
The emergence of what Max Weber described as the Protestant ethic represented an important point in the evolution of capitalism because it combined a reverence for hard work with an emphasis on thrift and forthrightness in one’s dealings with others. Where those virtues were most ardently practiced markets advanced and societies prospered. And, as Wesley foresaw, what slowly followed was a rise in materialism and a reverence of wealth for its own sake.
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To survive all of this it seems capitalism needs a new dose of restraint. But absent a vast religious revival in the West, which seems unlikely, where will a renewal of the virtues of the work ethic come from? That question becomes ever more difficult to consider because as religious practice fades and our institutions reject traditional values, so too does the memory of the role that these elements played in the rise of capitalism.
Can Free Markets Survive in a Secularized World by Steven Malanga
Dr. Robert Jastrow, an American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist, was the founding director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and Hale Solar Laboratory, a personal agnostic, authored a book called God and the Astronomers which concluded
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“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Big Bang Evidence for God by Frank Turek.
Children happy with spirituality
The spiritual lives of children has come under close scrutiny by two different sets of researchers who reached the same conclusion. Spirituality is a good thing for youngsters, a positive influence.
It makes them happier - and healthier.
"Children who were more spiritual were happier," said a University of British Columbia study released Friday, which methodically quantified the typical ups and downs in a young life.
The study, which questioned 320 children from four public schools and two religious schools about their spiritual practices, revealed that happiness was boosted by 26 percent among those children in touch with an "inner belief system."
To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on What the New Atheists Don't See
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
After catching up on the Internet, here are some articles that caught my eye.
Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom by Janice Shaw Crouse.
The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.
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The authors cited numerous studies that link religious beliefs and practices to a strong family unit and noted the fact that the most noticeable impact of religiosity is during adolescence. The majority of studies found an inverse relationship between religiosity and high-risk adolescent behaviors (drinking, drug use, sexual activity, depression, etc.). Other studies indicate a strong relationship between the family's religious belief and practice and a teen's emotional health and family well-being. This is especially true of teenage boys.
While family communication and interaction is critical to high-quality relationships for children and adolescents, this study suggests that the opposite-sex parent is especially important in making children feel validated and encouraged. This is true of boys as well as girls, but it is especially true of daughters. Fathers have the greatest impact on their daughters' vitality as an adolescent college student. Daughters with a strong relationship with their father are more self-confident, self-reliant, and are more successful in school and career than those who have distant or absent father
The nondenominational evangelist group known as the Gideons have given out 76.9 million free Bibles in 85 languages in 187 countries to hotels, hospitals, schools, prisons, and the military. This year the Gideons celebrate 100 years of Bible distribution.
"This is not a church-sponsored, clergy-led effort," said Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group for evangelical churches and organizations. "It's individuals that go around and distribute Bibles. It's an astonishing accomplishment." "What it's done is actually changed our culture. People expect there to be a Bible in a hotel room. There's hardly anything that's parallel to it."
Power of Wilderness Experiences As a Catalyst for Change in Young Offenders.
The researchers monitored the young people’s psychological health before and after the two wilderness trips, as well as during the months in between. At the outset behaviour was described as disruptive, disrespectful and undisciplined. However, as the programme progressed, the frequency of negative events reduced, criminal activity and substance abuse declined and the young people displayed less anti-social behaviour.
Findings of the self-reported measures of self-confidence, trust, belonging and connectedness to nature showed that after each wilderness experience, feelings increased and during the months in between levels fell, as participants had less contact with nature.
No wonder if the City hurts your brain.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.
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One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
An atheist, Matthew Parris writes I truly believe Africa needs God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
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Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
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Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
In a poll of some of the world's leading choirmasters and choral experts, In the Bleak Midwinter was named as the best Christmas carol.
The lyrics by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) were published posthumously.
1. In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
2. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
3. Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
4. Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother1
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
5. What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
A Coventry Carol from the 16th century
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.
O sisters too, How may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling,
For whom we do sing,
By by, lully lullay?
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.
Herod, the King, In his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might,
In his own sight,
All young children to slay.
Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay, thou little tiny child,
By by, lully lullay.
That woe is me, Poor child for thee!
And ever morn and day,
For thy parting
Nor say nor sing
By by, lully lullay!
Why are men less religious? It may be form of risk-taking, impulsivity just as criminal behavior is.
For decades researchers have pondered a mysterious gender disparity in religious commitment. It turns out they may have been asking the wrong question, according to a University of Washington religious scholar.
Instead of asking why women are more religious than men, they should have been asking why men are less religious than women, said Rodney Stark, a UW professor of sociology and comparative religion.
"When you turn the question around it starts to get us somewhere and the evidence pretty strongly points to physiology, not socialization," said Stark, author of two papers exploring what seems to be a universal trend in religious rates around the world.
Stark said lower rates of male religiousness is a form of risk-taking behavior just as criminality is, and men are far more likely to commit crimes than women.
"Any phenomenon that occurs in many and very different social and cultural settings necessitates explanations that are equally general, which tends to rule out most social and cultural factors," he wrote in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
"Recent studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills."
The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, and so "going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men," Stark said.
Michael Novak on Science and Religion
Of course, many today hold that all this talk about God, Creator, Prime Intelligence, and the Act of Existence is gibberish. Yet even they must admit that it was to their good fortune that, in a small family of cultures, a decisive number of inquirers, scholars, and copyists of ancient manuscripts did learn to expect pervasive intelligibility in the universe because of their faith in an ordering Intelligence. That is why they were willing to invest most of the hours of their humble lives in preparing the way for modern science.
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In other words, the belief shared by (at first) a few million of the Earth’s inhabitants that a light emanates from the Creator of the world, and suffuses all things, gave them a strong motivation for devoting their lives to scientific efforts. They wanted to learn more about God by studying the world He made. (The great scientist Johannes Kepler held that two books teach us about God: the Book of Nature and the Book that reveals what we otherwise could not learn about God.)
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Today, roughly half of all scientists are atheists. Yet, insofar as they are scientists, they share the same confidence that the sacrificing of one’s whole life to the pursuit of asking questions is a noble and worthy vocation. In this conviction, they act as if they believed in God. Perhaps some of them see this old belief in a Creator as a scaffolding that was necessary for building up the edifice of science, but that we can now safely kick away.
But they would do well to recall that poignant passage in Nietzsche, in which Zarathustra hears that God is dead. Contemplating what the death of God means for the death of reason, Nietzsche writes, “Zarathustra wept.”
Happily, now that I have returned to the Catholic church, I pay far more attention to the liturgical calendar and its rhythm through the seasons which reverberate on a far deeper level than the popular calendar. Today is the first day of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas which, if followed, become a way of discipline that makes more joyous the feast of Christmas.
Joseph Bottum on The End of Advent
Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.
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A kind of longing pervades the Old Testament selections read in church over the weeks before Christmas—an anxious, almost sorrowful litany of hope only in what has not yet come.
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What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.
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Maybe that’s what has happened to Christmas. The ideas and the emotions have all broken free and smashed their way across the fields. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s I heard the bells on Christmas Day / Their old, familiar carols play to Irving Berlin’s I’m dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know, there has been for a long time now something oddly backward looking about Christmas music—some nostalgia that insists on substituting its melancholy for the somber contrition and sorrow of forward-looking Advent.
Thanks to the Deacon, I too wait for Advent on my brand new iPhone. The Deacon quotes from the "good people at Mac"
Advent is a time of preparation and anticipation for the birth of Jesus. Advent is a time of sobriety in the face of His return. The rhythm of American life, especially in the holiday season, seldom leaves time for adequate preparation.
Adequate, however, does not imply the amount of time spent, as much as it refers to focus and attention.
Advent08 is a daily devotional tool to help find focus and discipline attention. It is more than just a way to count down the days to Christmas; it is a way to help transform Advent into a journey of faith.
The scientific evidence mounts:
Attending Religious Services Sharply Cuts Risk Of Death, Study Suggests
A study published by researchers at Yeshiva University and its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, strongly suggests that regular attendance at religious services reduces the risk of death by approximately 20 percent.
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“Interestingly, the protection against mortality provided by religion cannot be entirely explained by expected factors that include enhanced social support of friends or family, lifestyle choices and reduced smoking and alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Schnall, who was lead author of the study. “There is something here that we don’t quite understand. It is always possible that some unknown or unmeasured factors confounded these results,” he added.
Others:
Weekly Religious Attendance Nearly as Effective as Statins and Exercise in Extending Life
Improvements in life expectancy of those who attend religious services on a weekly basis to be comparable to those who participate in regular physical exercise and to those who take statin-type medications
Go to Church and Breathe Easier
religious activity may protect and maintain pulmonary health in the elderly.
Religious Attendance Linked to Lower Mortality in Elderly
The current findings build on a series of earlier studies at Duke and elsewhere showing that religious people have lower blood pressure, less depression and anxiety, stronger immune systems and cost the health care system less than people who are less religiously involved.
Research Shows Religion Plays a Major Role in Health, Longevity
For the first time, that extra lifespan has been quantified. While there are differences between genders and races, in general those who go to church once or more each week can look forward to about seven more years than those who never attended.
Separating Christianity from Europe's public life leads 'down a blind alley' Pope cautions.
Though our world and environment continue to change, Pope Benedict continued, “the final aim of all our daily efforts, both as individuals and as a community, remains unaltered: the search for the true well-being of the person and the creation of an open and welcoming society attentive to the real needs of everyone.”
"The values and laws, the shared spiritual 'alphabet,' that has made it possible for our peoples to write noble chapters of civil and religious history over the centuries, is a precious heritage that must not be squandered," the Pope added, but rather “augmented with the contribution of modern discoveries in the fields of science technology and communication, which must be placed at the service of the real good of mankind."
The Pontiff continued by emphasizing that if this rich heritage is separated from the public life, it would “mean starting down a blind alley.” He also stressed that “this is why it is necessary to redefine the meaning of secularism, a secularism that highlights the real difference and autonomy between the various elements of society but that also protects their specific competencies, in a context of shared responsibility.”
The phrase our 'shared spiritual alphabet' is especially apt since so many have become illiterate and ignorant of the roots of the civilization that has cradled them.
Take Oxford for example. No more Christmas lights for them. No indeed. Christmas is now banned in Oxford in favor of a 'Winter Light Festival'. Instead of the traditional Christmas lights, there will be a 25 meter high mobile in shape of the solar system.
Muslims and Jews want Christmas back.
Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, said: 'I'm really upset. Christians, Muslims and other religions all look forward to Christmas.'
Rabbi Eli Bracknell of the Jewish Educational Centre said: ' Anything that waters down traditional culture and Christianity is not positive for the British identity. WinterLight includes all festivals but it also conceals them.'
Is the medical approach to addiction fundamentally flawed?
Mindful Hack reviews Theodore Dalrymple's book Romancing Opiates.
... to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment, so called.
This is a very literate way of explaining a situation often explained - as Dalrymple says - by recovered addicts in a much simpler way: "I just didn't want to live that way any more." In my view, that is a form of spiritual experience - to discover that one need not live "that way" any more.
Dalrymple worked for 14 years as a doctor in a larger general hospital and prison in a poor area of Britain. Here he writes Heroin addiction isn't an illness --and we should stop spending millions 'treating it'.
I had briefly run a drug-addiction clinic in a famous university town, at a time when I accepted what I now know to be myths about heroin addiction.
But as more addicts came to my attention - I see up to 20 new cases a day in prison - I began to think about it more. The medical perspective, that these people were ill and in need of treatment, seemed less and less convincing.
I discovered that most addicted prisoners stopped taking heroin in jail, even when it was available. They came into the prison starving and miserable, and went out relatively healthy.
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There is a strenuous, almost outraged, rejection of the idea that addiction is, at bottom, a moral problem, or even that it raises any moral questions at all.
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To conceive of heroin addiction as such seems to me to miss the fundamental point: it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment.
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Having started with a vague supposition that the medical approach to addiction must be right, I came to a different conclusion: that such an approach, having started no doubt as an honest attempt to help addicts, now represented a combination of moral cowardice, displacement activity and employment opportunity.
The therapeutic juggernaut rolls on. It is easier, after all, to give people a dose of medicine than a reason for living. That is something the patient must minister to himself.
In coming to these conclusions, I felt I was living in a world in which the plainest of truths could neither be said out loud nor acknowledged.
I found Brain Science and the Soul by R.R. Reno most interesting.
These days, cognitive scientists are doing experiments that use MRI technology to visualize the brain while subjects undergo experiences, solve problems, and make decisions. This approach allows scientists to see and theorize about the significance and sources of patterns in our brains, patterns that shape the way we respond to the world. We are learning about the highway system of neurological movement, which turns out to be decisive for the way our minds work.
The new emphasis on patterns of neural activity suggests an important support for the traditional Christian understanding of the soul.
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St. Thomas drew on Aristotle’s philosophy to define the soul as the form of the body. The soul is the pattern or highway system that organizes our bodies, including, of course, our brains.
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Princeton brain scientist Jonathan D. Cohen has looked at patterns of brain activity while subjects respond to moral dilemmas and make moral decisions. It turns out that the brain patterns related to moral decisions need to be trained. The soul must be disciplined.
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Now, contemporary brain science and Cohen’s picture of the vulcanized brain lead pretty much to the same, Aristotelian vision of the soul shaped by virtues—or vices.
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Precisely because a human soul is unstable, and subject to influence, and hardening over time, the Christian tradition has put a great deal of weight on moral and spiritual discipline in order to “vulcanize” the networks that lead to properly ordered emotions, thoughts, and decisions. Now it seems that brain science is showing that the traditional emphasis on moral and spiritual discipline was exactly right.
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The neural patterns between the frontal lobe and the brain stem do not know nice distinctions between the private morality and public morality. It’s a distinction much insisted upon by modern liberal antinomians who want to reassure us that the liberated id will not threaten the public good.
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Maybe the intense moral pressure of traditional morality is necessary in order to achieve the stable neural patterns that prevent our instinctual responses from overwhelming our reasoned responses. Perhaps the common good depends on the presence of virtuous, disciplined citizens who have been habituated to deny themselves immediate, instinctual satisfactions.
Pope says world financial system 'built on sand
''He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand''.
We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God's words are a solid reality''.
The Anchoress notes in The Pope, the Word & the World that a greater battle is being played out just as the Pope began a week-long televised reading of all 73 books of the bible. You can see the live stream here.
The Word being breathed into the air, unabridged, and the Holy Spirit rides on the breath. This is very cool.
And then today, the whole world financial picture runs precarious, and Benedict steps up and says, essentially, “it is better to take refuge in the Lord, than to trust in princes…” (Psalm 118;9)
Prayer may be all we can do right now
Understood properly, the Christian doctrine of sin is a vision of wholeness, and Dante represents this tradition at its best. He does not label people as evil because they've fallen short of some ill-conceived perfectionist goal. Dante's understanding of sin is far more subtle than that, and more humane.
These days, we are likely to say to people struggling with addition or mental illness that their hope lies in a perpetual state of recovery. Imagine for a moment that this is much more severe than anything Dante, or the desert monks for that matter, had in mind.
Their ultimate concern was how, as we deepen our relationship with God, we become to free to love, and more free to choose the good.
The idea that one would be defined forever by one's sin or sickness would have seemed to them excessively cruel, more likely to engender hopelessness than hope.
Kathleen Norris in her new book, Acedia and Me.
The "noble power" of a free will partakes of something even greater than hope, and that is grace. The kingdom of God within us is not something we gain through training, wit or skill. It comes to us as pure gift, and we are free now, as in Dante's time, to curb it or ignore it.
Given the power and resilience of this grace, it is a terrible irony that the despairing so often feel rejected by a distant and uncaring God. We are convinced that we are beyond the reach of grace, acedia has don its work. John Cassian states that acedia's whole purpose is to "sever us from thoughts of God"...Thomas Acquinas describes acedia as a "wanton, willful, self-distressing that numbs all love and zeal for love" and makes us unable "to rest in God." Even worse, it divides us against ourselves and our better instincts...When so fierce an alienation has me its grip, I need something more powerful than affirmation and self-esteeem. I need that outcast word, sin.
"Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life" (Kathleen Norris)
Scientists are beginning to show that faith and belief in God can relieve pain.
Researchers at the Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind, in Oxford University, in a study published in the journal Pain, conducted an experiment with electric shocks on 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.
The Catholics in the experiment seemed to be able to block out much of the pain as they were able to activate part of the brain associated with conditioning the experience of pain, reported the Mail on Sunday. The study also found that participants who had strong religious belief could moderate their pain by thinking about it more positively.
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The researchers found that the Catholics felt "safe," "taken care of" and "calmed down and peaceful," said that looking at the painting of the Virgin Mary.
Matthew Archbold adds his own personal testimony about one of the longest nights in his life in Prayer Might Work Better than Aspirin
Michael Gerson on the biological basis for spirituality, Faith Beyond the Frontal Lobes says
..the brain is more like a muscle than a computer. The spiritual facility can be developed -- and it changes over our lifetimes, as our brains age. In this narrow sense, prayer and meditation work in the same way that aerobic training works on the heart muscle.
I'm familiar with the conversos, Jews in 14th and 15th century Spain who were compelled to convert to Christianity, many of whom, unwilling to abandon completely the tradition of their forefathers, continued to practice Judaism secretly, but this is the first I've heard of Catholics in hiding.
"We have been living a dual life. In our homes we were Catholics but in public we were good Muslims," said Ismet Sopi. "We don't call this converting. It is the continuity of the family's belief."
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The majority of ethnic Albanians were forcibly converted to Islam, mostly through the imposition of high taxes on Catholics, when the Ottoman Empire ruled the Balkans.
For centuries, many remembered their Christian roots and lived as what they call "Catholics in hiding". Some, nearly a century after the Ottomans left the Balkans, now see the chance to reveal their true beliefs.
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In staunchly Catholic families, often in villages with a strong social network, men converted publicly but continued to practice Christianity at home. Women and daughters often kept the faith, meaning it was transmitted to children.
Catholic priests administered the sacraments to these "crypto-Catholics" during house visits to the women.
The Catholic Church officially opposed this ministry to the converts, but local clergy often ignored that and maintained ties to the families.
The fact that there were "Catholics in hiding" was known during the Ottoman Empire: Albanians even had a word for them, "laraman", meaning piebald, or two-colored.
The most religious appear to be the least superstitious according to a recent study from Baylor University conducted by the Gallup organization.
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
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This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
G. K. Chesterton says it best, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - -they believe in anything,"
When the news is just too much, I can trust that Pope Benedict will inspire me. When I immerse myself in his words, I am curiously refreshed. I must have been a monk in another life.
A few days ago Pope Benedict was in Paris at the recently restored 13th century College des Bernardins, on the origins of western theology and roots of European culture. The college had been a residence of young monks until the French revolution. The Pope's visit was the official inauguration of what is now a meeting place for the dialogue between faith and culture.
The Vatican publishes the text.
The monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old"
That was not their intent. The monks sought the truth. They wanted to find God.
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.
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it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path toward language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up
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Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.
Robert Novak on his Brain Tumor
The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.
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I promptly suffered another seizure in the ambulance, the second of three seizures that day. I gained admittance to the high-quality Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which has an excellent oncology staff. A biopsy was performed, which showed a large, grade IV tumor. In answer to my question, the oncologist estimated that I had six months to a year to live.
Being read your death sentence is like being a character in one of the old Bette Davis movies.
I believe I was able to withstand this shock because of my Catholic faith, to which I converted in 1998.
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My dear friend, the Democratic political operative Bob Shrum, asked Sen. Kennedy's wife, Vicki, to call me about Dr. Friedman. I barely know Mrs. Kennedy, but I have found her to be a warm and gracious person. I have had few good things to say about Teddy Kennedy since I first met him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, but he and his wife have treated me like a close friend. She was enthusiastic about Dr. Friedman and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke, which I did.
The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington. My long conversation with Vicki Kennedy filled me with hope.
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There are mad bloggers who profess to take delight in my distress, but there's no need to pay them attention in the face of such an outpouring of good will for me. I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case.
The most amazing personal stories are always about transformation. That's why conversion stories are so compelling. Today for example we have the story of Joe Eszterhas and he's written a book about it.
"Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith" (Joe Eszterhas)
He wrote dark thrillers like Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge and lived a wild life. After moving to Cleveland with his second wife, he was diagnosed with throat cancer.
Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately...
"I was going crazy. I was jittery. I twitched. I trembled. I had no patience for anything. … Every single nerve ending was demanding a drink and a cigarette," he wrote.
He plopped down on a curb and cried. Sobbed, even. And for the first time since he was a child, he prayed: "Please God, help me."
Mr. Eszterhas was shocked by his own prayer.
"I couldn't believe I'd said it. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd never said it before," he wrote.
But he felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a "shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands."
Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Mr. Eszterhas had been blinded by God. He stood up, wiped his eyes, and walked back home a new man.
In a phone interview this week, Mr. Eszterhas said it was "an absolutely overwhelming experience."
'Basic Instinct' author writes book about faith.
But after his spiritual transformation, he said, he had had enough of death, murder, blood, and chaos.
"Frankly my life changed from the moment God entered my heart. I'm not interested in the darkness anymore," he said. "I've got four gorgeous boys, a wife I adore, I love being alive, and I love and enjoy every moment of my life. My view has brightened and I don't want to go back into that dark place."
Mr. Eszterhas' love and appreciation for life was magnified even more last year when his surgeon told him he didn't need to schedule another visit.
Just what happened in those caves?
Alasdair Coles on The Sudden Emergence of Consciousness
The Upper Paleolithic Revolution consisted of more than just cave paintings. Visual creativity emerged in many other ways. Burial rites become more complex. And, it is speculated, the first music was made and the first words spoken. van Huyssteen argues that the key distinction between Upper Paleolithic man and homo sapiens elsewhere and earlier hominids, was the power to construct and understand symbol, of which language of course is a part. This ability to ‘code the invisible’ allowed for storage of information outside of the gene and the start of the cultural non-genetic inheritance. The ‘mental toolkit’ required to manage symbolic representation is the ‘ability to be conscious of being conscious’ and to search for meaning. The new humans wake up, discover they are naked and meet God.
Gerald Vanderleun gives us The Frame-Up. The mystery of the world revealed in a backyard using an empty picture frame.
The world is made of a perceptible mystery beyond our means of measuring, but not beyond all sight unless we will ourselves blind.
A quite extraordinary letter written by Sister Lucy Vertrusc, a young nun, to her mother superior, after being raped by Serbian soldiers.
Unspeakable evil overcome by heroic goodness.
A vocation in response to evil
A must-read.
I remember the time when I used to attend the university at Rome in order to get my masters in Literature, an ancient Slavic woman, the professor of Literature, used to recite to me these verses from the poet Alexej Mislovic: You must not die/because you have been chosen/ to be a part of the day.
That night, in which I was terrorized by the Serbs for hours and hours, I repeated to myself these verses, which I felt as balm for my soul, nearly mad with despair.
And now, with everything having passed and looking back, I get the impression of having been made to swallow a terrible pill.
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I will go with my child. I do not know where, but God, who broke all of a sudden my greatest joy, will indicate the path I must tread in order to do His will.
I will be poor again, I will return to the old aprons and the wooden shoes that the women in the country use for working, and I will accompany my mother into the forest to collect the resin from the slits in the trees.
Someone has to begin to break the chain of hatred that has always destroyed our countries. And so, I will teach my child only one thing: love. This child, born of violence, will be a witness along with me that the only greatness that gives honor to a human being is forgiveness.
Through the Kingdom of Christ for the Glory of God."
Born after World War II, but old enough to remember the stories told after, I was deeply impressed in the sense of being marked indelibly with stories of the horrors in the concentration camps in Germany and in the former USSR. Both were vivid examples of what could happen in countries that suppressed religion and religious worship.
The Diary of Anne Frank made vivid what it was like to live in hiding and fear of being discovered and what girl could not deeply identify with the young Anne and wonder how she would have acted in the same situation. Perhaps that why in college, I was most interested in studying Germany, Russia and China, totalitarian governments all. I wanted to understand how that was felt in the daily lives of people. You've heard that they governed through fear. Fear, yes, but more than that. A fear strengthened and potentiated by the breakdown in the web of trust that undergirds a truly civilized country. People are atomized, stripped of what is most personal and human about them. From their personal bonds of blood and affection for family and friends to their relationship with the Divine.
Too often in news stories about post-Soviet Russia, Germany and China, the focus is on political or economic recovery. There's more going on than that, witness Requiem for the Romanovs. From what I read, it was a watershed cultural event that brought to the fore the question that until now have been evaded.
In her weeping, the soloist was not alone. Many of the more than 2,000 people who filled into the concert hall of the largest basilica in Russia, the Church of Christ the Savior, bombed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, wept openly as they listened and watched the tragedy of the last Romanovs unfold.
The story of the last days of the Romanovs is well known. Czar Nicholas II, embroiled in a terrible war with Germany and Austro-Hungary, decided to abdicate his throne on March 15, 1917. Without a single strong leader, Russia was soon in political turmoil. Out of the turmoil, the tiny but compact and single-minded Bolsheviks emerged as Russia's new rulers toward the end of 1917.
Nicholas and his family were soon placed under house arrest. They gardened, read books, prayed. Then, in the summer of 1918, on the evening of July 17, they were taken to the basement room of their prison, and shot to death. Their bodies were then burned.
Russia had made a clean break with its monarchical, and Christian, past.
The age of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and of anti-Christian state atheism had begun.
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the Requiem is far from a "nostalgic recollection" of the "good old days of the czars."
Instead, it is a searing socio-political critique of the atheism and persecution of religious belief central to Russia's communist regime.
While In the largest basilica in Russia, it was a cultural event not a religious service
"This is why we chose to organize this Requiem Concert. This is not a liturgy, not a Church celebration, but a cultural event. We want to participate in the cultural debate in Russia today, and make our case.
The Russian Orthodox Church was the principal sponsor, supported by two American groups; the orchestra directed by a Russian general and the musicians former members of the armed forces.
Bishop Hilarion concluded tonight's Requiem for the Romanovs with these words: "The horror of a national tragedy could not destroy the hope for a breakthrough to light and the inspired certainty that the triumph of evil would be fleeting, and would be followed by a bright future, by growth in spiritual perfection, by restoration and revival. The heroism of the martyrs of the 20th century contains a reflection of the future Kingdom which is transfiguring everyone and everything to live in peace through Christ."
Pope Benedict addressing the youth at World Youth Day in Sydney Australia.
"Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises. Our hearts and minds are yearning for a vision of life where love endures, where gifts are shared, where unity is built, where freedom finds meaning in truth, and where identity is found in respectful communion. This is the work of the Holy Spirit!"
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Dear friends, life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose. Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this – in truth, in goodness, and in beauty – that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.
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Dear friends, in your homes, schools and universities, in your places of work and recreation, remember that you are a new creation! Not only do you stand before the Creator in awe, rejoicing at his works, you also realize that the sure foundation of humanity’s solidarity lies in the common origin of every person, the high-point of God’s creative design for the world. As Christians you stand in this world knowing that God has a human face – Jesus Christ – the "way" who satisfies all human yearning, and the "life" to which we are called to bear witness, walking always in his light
Said the police
"I've never seen a crowd like this, it's even better than an Olympic crowd," New South Wales police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said today.
"Hundreds of thousands of young people moving through the city not affected by drugs and alcohol has been such a wonderful experience.
If home sapiens has been on earth for 100,000 years, why did God sit idly by for 95,000 years before getting involved asks Christopher Hitchens. Was he napping for 98% of human history?
Dinesh D'Souza answers
The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.
"So in a sense," Kreps notes, "God's timing couldn't have been more perfect. If He'd come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world's population, so even though 98 percent of humanity's timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption."
With an argument that boomerangs, D'Souza continues
Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. Besides some cave paintings, no real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization. Both the wheel and Egyptian hieroglyphics are only 5000 years old.
How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn't figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?
So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this, but no one has offered a persuasive account.
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Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.
He really captured my attention.
They call him 'Doc' at the prison for his four doctoral degrees.
For decades he was dean of two law schools including Notre Dame.
Now at 71, a widower and father of five, David Link will be ordained a Catholic priest this Sunday.
When his wife died in 2003 from ovarian cancer, Link said
"I certainly got a call from the Holy Spirit. It wasn't on a cell phone, but it was a pretty clear call. When the Holy Spirit calls, he doesn't ask how old you are. He just has another job for you."
Urged by his wife, he became a volunteer at the Indiana State Prison where he will continue as full time chaplain after his ordination.
When he began sending the men birthday cards, one inmate, "this big, tough-looking dude," came to his office crying with thanks. No one had ever sent him a birthday card before.
"If you had said to me 10 years ago when I was dean of the law school that I'd first of all go to the seminary, and second that I'd be here working with maximum security prisoners, I would have said you had a bad mental problem," he said.
A surprising document from the Church of England, what Ruth Gledhill in the London Times calls the Church's strongest attack on the Government in decades.
The policies of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have helped to generate a spiritual, civic and economic crisis in Britain, according to an important Church of England report.
Labour is failing society and lacks the vision to restore a sense of British identity, the report says.... It accuses the Government of “deep religious illiteracy” and of having “no convincing moral direction”.
The report, commissioned for the Church of England and to be published on Monday, accuses the Government of discriminating against the Christian Churches in favour of other faiths, including Islam.
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The authors find evidence of deep-seated hostility to the Church in particular, excluding it from important areas of policy and research – despite Mr Blair being one of the most devout prime ministers of the past century. They portray a Government committed to research into Muslim communities but barely interested in Christian involvement in Britain’s civic and charitable life.
This is in spite of what the authors describe as centuries of pioneering work by the Church in areas of welfare and social provision. “We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding or interest in the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere,” the report says.
They are right.
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation had its American kickoff last week and Michael Gerson was there to note The Faith That Moves Tony Blair.
Religion, Blair argues, is not going away, as secularists have expected and predicated for centuries. For millions, he noted in his Westminster speech, it is "the motive for their behavior, the thing which gives sense to their lives and purpose to their journeys -- which makes life more than just a sparrow's flight through a lighted hall from one darkness to another, in that memorable image of the Venerable Bede." While religion may sometimes be a source of conflict, it has often been a source of reform and idealism -- as in the fight against slavery, apartheid and genocide. The goal of his faith foundation, he explained to me, is for the major faiths "to work together against injustice rather than prey -- that's p-r-e-y -- on injustice."
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"Faith," Blair argues, "is not an historical relic but a guide for humanity on its path to the future. A faithless world is not one in which we want ourselves and our children to live."
The death of hell is indeed the death of life itself, for it ensures a world without justice, without consequence, and without restraint. Like the Phoenix, Hell will always arise from its own ashes, bringing new horrors far beyond what our vaunted knowledge can comprehend or conquer. To deny the reality of hell after death is to guarantee its incarnation in life. Hell will not be denied; its horrors will be visited liberally upon those who acknowledge it least.
From The Doctor is In, The Death of Hell.
If hell does not exist, men would be wise to invent it. If it does exist, we are fools to deny it.
Today, the accepted definition of Hell is the absence of God. I can only surmise that with God's absence is the absence everything that reflects His glory, all of nature and all that is human that mirrors truth, goodness and beauty.
Ted Chiang's Hell is the Absence of God won both Hugo and Nebula awards as Best Novelle in 2002. You can read it at the link.
Jennifer F has written a remarkable post that may cause you to reconsider your world view
All of my scattered thoughts on the subject were brought into relief the other day when I had a conversation with an immediate family member (whom I don't want to identify directly). He seemed depressed and uneasy about something, and when I asked him why he said it was about his retirement account. He's deeply distressed that he won't have enough money to afford anything other than a government-run nursing home in his old age. I reminded him that my husband and I would love for him to move in with us when it gets to the point that he doesn't feel comfortable living on his own. We weren't even talking about a situation where he might need intensive medical care, yet he flatly refused to even consider the notion.
"I would never do that to you," he said. "I would never have you put your life on hold like that."
We've had this conversation many times before, yet this time, the first since my conversion to Christianity, I was hit by just what a profoundly sad worldview this reflects. I've always wanted this family member to live with us when he can no longer live on his own, and he's always refused on the same grounds. That part is nothing new. Yet this time I saw clearly that the situation goes beyond an unfortunate refusal of help: it reflects a worldview in which well-meaning people like my relative believe that the best thing they can do for their loved-ones is to not burden them with their presence, where the very meaning of life has been twisted to suck love out of the world.
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It leads us to believe that if we were ever to lose our self-sufficiency, our presence would not just be an annoyance but would in fact prevent our loved-ones from fulfilling their very purpose in life.
When I compare my life with the self-focused worldview to my life with the other-focused worldview, the difference is striking. Not that I am anywhere near some saint-like level of always seeking to serve others before myself, but simply understanding that that is the goal, that my own life isn't about me, has changed everything. It's counter-intuitive, it requires sacrifice, and it isn't always the most comfortable path. But it is clear that, truly, this is how we were designed to live. After all these years of trying it my way, it's like I'm finally operating my life according to the instruction manual. And it is ultimately a manual for how to live a life of love, written by he who is Love itself.
By preaching up, not down, by paying us the compliment of making serious, sustained arguments, the Pope brought America not just new perceptions but challenging ideas as well writes George Weigel
It seems as if I've not been blogging much about the Pope's visit to America, but that 's not really true. I've just been reading blog posts not writing them.
I was riveted to the television for the entire visit not wanting to miss a moment or a word of what he said. I downloaded all his speeches so I could read them and ponder them. Every excited expectation was met and then some as the Pope showed in every action, word and gesture, his purpose to spread Christ's hope and his personal humility. Maybe the most important event was one we never saw, The Healing in the Chapel when Pope Benedict became the healing pastor to five victims of the clerical abuse scandal. The sight of the Pope walking down the deep pit of Ground Zero to fall to his knees and pray for minutes in silence was the most moving.
I spent two days on and off writing a wrap-up post with lots of links and thanks to the people, reporters and bloggers who wrote so much better than I could and with great feeling about each of the Papal events.
Then I lost the entire post. So here's a much shorter recreated post to give special thanks to
The Anchoress
Whispers in the Loggia
Sissy Willis
Miss Kelly
The Deacon's Bench
Pope 2008
and all the members of Papal Discussion blog at the New York Times.
What struck me and what I haven't seen discussed anywhere is what a profoundly counter-cultural moment in time it was. We are so used to a steady media diet of war, murder, terrorist attacks, fears, hatred, sex, politics and celebrity stories, that the six days when the media allowed us to see the Pope at the White House and the UN along with the splendor and beauty of the Catholic Mass were astonishing.
The contrast between the bleakness of most of what we see and the power of peace and love the Pope brought to our shores could not be greater. The contrast between the happiness of the huge crowds waiting for hours to see the Pope and the crowds at anti-war rallies or San Francisco rallies could not be greater. The clarity, intelligence and moral seriousness of the Pope's addresses contrasted sharply with the political speeches we are used to. We are not used to dignity, reverence and joy as part of our media diet.
Some seeds sown by Pope Benedict will flourish immediately, others may not be evident for months, even years. But grow they will. In a future full of hope, many will point to this visit as changing their lives.
If this is true, it's astonishing.
Menstrual Blood: A Valuable Source of Multipotential Stem Cells
Researchers seeking new and more abundant sources of stem cells for use in regenerative medicine have identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source -- menstrual blood.
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Stromal stem cells derived from menstrual blood exhibit stem cell properties, such as the capacity for self-renewal and multipotency," said Amit N. Patel, MD, MS, Director of Cardiac Cell Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine. "Uterine stromal cells have similar multipotent markers found in bone marrow stem cells and originate in part from bone marrow."
A day later, a Japanese study shows that cells from menstrual blood may be useful in repairing heart damage.
The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, researcher Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University's school of medicine, told French news agency AFP.
There's even a company that's begun menstrual blood banking!
It wasn't so long ago that the public and scientific consensus was that stem cells could only be harvested from human embryos.
I'm not the only one who remembers the hysteria that surrounded President Bush's decision not to allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Charles Krauthammer does in Technology Vindicates Morality. So does the Anchoress who reminds us that embryonic stem cells have produced nightmarish results in the lab and never had a successful application.
So far there have been 73 successful treatments using adult stem cells and none for embryonic stem cells.
Doing good by doing no harm works.
If you suddenly hear church bells ringing out next Tuesday around 4 pm, they ring to mark the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI to the United States for a six day visit, the schedule for which tire out anyone much less an 81-year-old man.
Catholics around the country are eagerly awaiting the touchdown at Andrews Air Force Base where he will be welcomed by the President and First Lady, the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn, his meeting with the bishops, vespers at the National Shrine, the Mass in Nationals Park, his meeting with leaders from other faiths, his visit to the Park East Synagogue, his speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, his meeting with young people with special needs and seminarians at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, his trip to Ground Zero and his celebration of the Mass at Yankee Stadium.
Of course, the Catholic media is pulling out all the stops with EWTN carrying live full coverage of every moment. Peter Steinfels wrote in the New York Times to expect a cliched coverage by the mainstream media as they discover once again that the Pope is indeed Catholic.
Yes, he disagrees with Richard Dawkins that atheism is necessary for salvation. Yes, he believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God and the center of human history. Yes, he thinks that Catholic Christianity is truer than Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or even Protestant Christianity. Astounding. What next?
To its credit the New York Times has set up a blog magisterially entitled A Papal Discussion with noteworthy and informed contributors to assess the Pope's visit. Still I expect a lot of silly discussion about how the Pope has 'changed', has 'grown', is 'cracking down' all while wearing red Prada shoes. But since nothing can approach the splendor of the 2000 year old Catholic Church, there will be much fascination with Catholic liturgy and vestments. What I'm most interested is how they experience and report on a man of such virtue, intellect and moral authority. How will they report on Pope who writes such extraordinary letters such as Deus caritas est God Is Love and Spe Salvi Saved by Hope.
In Something Beautiful Has Begun, Peggy Noonan remembers asking people who had met John Paul II what they thought or said,
they'd be startled and say, "I don't know, I was crying."
John Paul made you burst into tears. Benedict makes you think. It is more pleasurable to weep, but at the moment, perhaps it is more important to think.
I always liked Pope John Paul II, but it was Cardinal Ratizger who riveted me with his homily to the College of Cardinals as they gathered to elect a new Pope when he spoke of the
dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
The antidote he said was the development of
a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth. We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love.
His call to develop a mature adult faith and his powerful intellect and ability to make the vast deposit of the magisterium clear and fresh has made me a fan and deepened my faith.
A lot of other people are getting Pope Fever like Miss Kelly who has snagged a ticket to the Mass in Yankee Stadium. The Anchoress, who to no one's surprise, loves Benedict and other Catholic things finds Benedict
warm, pastoral, approachable, quite paternal, and as easy to glean as a dear old uncle sharing fellowship over a cup of tea.
Sissy, a self-confessed agnostic, is getting A glimpse of the clearing and will be ringing her bells that that for many long years, they have never been heard.
With the theme of the Pope's visit "Christ Our Hope", I expect he will bring us good news and remind us that Christian hope is transformative because it offers assurance that "life will not end in emptiness".
Raymond Ibrahim writes Islam's 'Public Enemy #1' is a Coptic priest Zakaria Botros who appears
frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.
Botros has famously made 10 demands of Islam that serve to highlight the radical demands Islam makes of non-Muslims. The result: mass conversions to Christianity, albeit many clandestine ones. One Islamic cleric on Al Jazeera estimated that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity annually. This is an extraordinary number considering that each convert faces ostracism, persecution and even death for apostasy.
The ultimate reason for Botros’s success is that — unlike his Western counterparts who criticize Islam from a political standpoint — his primary interest is the salvation of souls. He often begins and concludes his programs by stating that he loves all Muslims as fellow humans and wants to steer them away from falsehood to Truth. To that end, he doesn’t just expose troubling aspects of Islam. Before concluding every program, he quotes pertinent biblical verses and invites all his viewers to come to Christ.
Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.
Another writer on the big untold story in the Middle East, looks at country by country to say Muslims converting to Christianity in record numbers .
The Egyptian Bible Society told me they used to sell about 3,000 copies of the Jesus film a year in the early 1990s. But in 2005 they sold 600,000 copies, plus 750,000 copies of the Bible on tape (in Arabic) and about a half million copies of the Arabic New Testament.
Spengler, brilliant as always writes on The mustard seed in global strategy
A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam
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Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".
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Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance.
Allam hails Benedict XVI as the leader of the West.
The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.
The way out Spengler wrote after the Pope's Regensberg address, the way out is conversion.
"Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity." Today's Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name
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The global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict's Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.
UPDATE: Intentional Disciples questions the 6 million figure cited above and calls it an urban legend, but she does point to the work of Independent Christianity which I had never heard of, yet composes 20% of all Christians in the world. She calls it an explosive global movement that most Catholics don't know exists.
It is these evangelizers - almost all of whom are lay - living in Muslim communities, loving their neighbors, teaching school, healing the sick, founding and running businesses, planting thousands of evangelizing small Christian communities in hundreds of different language groups and situations, writing books, making radio broadcasts, building relationships, trust, and credibility with Muslims they actually know personally - who have been used by God to turn the tide. Fr. Zacahrias is one rather loud horn in a vast symphony orchestra - and he isn't even first chair.
Remember that study that Dudley Woodbury did about why Muslims become Christian? Of the 5 primary reasons that 750 MBBs gave - the central theme was love. God's love reflected consistently in the lives of Christians they knew. Being exposed to the love of Christ through the gospels.
Not media, Not TV. Not apologetics. Love. From tens of thousands of expat missionaries and hundreds of thousands of national Christians who are "Great commission" Christians.
Since I'm still gobsmacked with the idea that 6 million Muslims in the Middle East convert to Christianity each year, I decided to do a little research to find out why.
Intentional Disciplines has done a splendid post on why Muslims convert based on a study that used an extensive questionnaire with respondents from 30 countries and 50 ethnic groups that gives us a more informed picture then mere anecdotes as to what's going on.
There's a lot more discussion for each of the following five most frequently mentioned reasons and, if you are as interested as I am, you'll want to read the whole thing.
1) The lifestyle of Christians. Former Muslims cited the love that Christians exhibited in their relationships with non-Christians and their treatment of women as equals.
2) The power of God in answered prayers and healing. Experiences of God's supernatural work—especially important to folk Muslims who have a characteristic concern for power and blessings—increased after their conversions, according to the survey. Often dreams about Jesus were reported.
3) Dissatisfaction with the type of Islam they had experienced. Many expressed dissatisfaction with the Qur'an, emphasizing God's punishment over his love. Others cited Islamic militancy and the failure of Islamic law to transform society.
4) The spiritual truth in the Bible. Muslims are generally taught that the Torah, Psalms, and the Gospels are from God, but that they became corrupted. These Christian converts said, however, that the truth of God found in Scripture became compelling for them and key to their understanding of God's character.
5) Biblical teachings about the love of God. In the Qur'an, God's love is conditional, but God's love for all people was especially eye-opening for Muslims. These converts were moved by the love expressed through the life and teachings of Jesus. The next step for many Muslims was to become part of a fellowship of loving Christians.
"Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life" wrote Magdi Allam, a Muslim and deputy director of Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, when he wrote about threats to his life after he condemned Palestinian suicide bombers in 2003.
On the vigil of Easter, Magdi Allam was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI himself and took a new baptismal name Christian on what he later called, "the most beautiful day of my life."
He wrote in an article appeared in the Corriere della Sera that
the witness of Catholics, who “gradually became a point of reference in regard to the certainty of truth and the solidity of values,” played an important role in his conversion.
His most decisive influence he said was Benedict XVI
“who I admired and, as a Muslim, defended for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.”
I had always admired Pope John Paul II as a great and holy man, I marveled at his courage and later at his visit to prison to forgive his assassin, but from a certain distance. When Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the Sacred College of Cardinals assembled in Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, I was electrified.
Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards “the maturity of Christ” as it is said in the Italian text, simplifying it a bit. More precisely, according to the Greek text, we should speak of the “measure of the fullness of Christ”, to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!
How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. .... Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
I was that small boat of thought, tossed around 'by every wind of teaching' , motivated mainly by my ego and desires until inspired by Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI , I began my journey towards an 'adult and mature faith'. The whole journey is too long to be recounted here and now, except its conclusion; I have come home to the Catholic faith and the Mother Church: I have I felt so whole.
No where near as brave as Christian Allam, I am humbled by his journey to conversion that he recounts here.
my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.
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My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.
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It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values.
I too want to fight against the dictatorship of relativism and its softer cousin, the culture of whatever - wherever and whenever I can. I too want to stand behind the Pope who offers the only strong and muscular defense of faith and reason as the basis for authentic religion and the culture of life as the basis of civilization. I too want to uphold reason and the sacredness of life against the tide of nihilism and extremism that threatens to engulf us. So, in my small way, I will do so.
These past three days of the Triduum, I have been drenched in music and beauty with friends and fellow worshipers and filled with gratitude and immense joy. I feel reborn, even Exultent and can only point to the beautiful Easter chant I found via the Anchoress.
Doctor Bob elucidates
liberation theology, in which Christianity is defined (redefined, actually) primarily as a means of identifying with and liberating the oppressed. It has deep roots in atheistic Marxism, especially in the concept of class struggle and the centrality of violence in overcoming oppression. Liberation theology sprouted from Catholic and Marxist syncretism in Latin America, and has subsequently spread to many liberal Protestant denominations as well. Its core premise — the centrality of class warfare in human relationships — is inherently incompatible with the unity of Christians in Christ, and this distortion of Christian doctrine was gently but devastatingly rebutted by former Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) in his doctrinal instruction on the topic.
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That social justice, concern for the poor and the underprivileged, and the mitigation of hatred and racism are — and have always been — emphatic teachings and priorities for Christianity is indisputable. But Christian opposition to injustice and oppression is not its sole and central doctrine, but rather a manifestation of the personal deliverance of the individual from the slavery and oppression of sin which Christianity offers.
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Churches which abandon historical Christian orthodoxy in favor of Christianized political and socialistic substitutes may indeed accomplish some good (even Hamas feeds the poor) and often seem to operate from the very best of motives. But they exsanguinate the faith of its life-blood — its historical orthodoxy, hammered out through centuries in creeds and scripture, through persecution endured and heresy rebutted — leaving but a mummified corpse of ritual and religious talk and self-righteousness. Like some ancient Aztec sacrifice, they carve out the heart of a historic faith, and thrust it triumphantly upward to heaven. But the gods they propitiate are those of politics and power, division and deviancy — not the God of the cross and the empty tomb, nor the Lord of the martyrs and the life-blood of saints.
St. Patrick in his own words. From his confessions.
St. Patrick, born in Britain, captured and made a slave for 6 years until he had a vision and found the courage to escape and eventually return to his family. A few years later, another vision appeared to him
I saw a man coming, as it were from Ireland. His name was Victoricus, and he carried many letters, and he gave me one of them. I read the heading: "The Voice of the Irish". As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood of Foclut, which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: "We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.[12]
"Science gives us Knowledge, and religion gives us Meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence"
wrote Professor Michael Heller in his statement when he won the 2008 Templeton Prize valued at more than $1.6 million. Heller is a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest who
developed sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe, often under intense governmental repression,...
Heller, 72, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, toiled for years beneath the stifling strictures of the Soviet era. He has become a compelling figure in the realms of physics and cosmology, theology, and philosophy with his cogent and provocative concepts on issues that all of these disciplines pursue, albeit from often vastly different perspectives. With an academic and religious background that enables him to comfortably and credibly move within each of these domains, Heller’s extensive writings have evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind's most profound concepts.
Here is more Heller from his statement
Einstein was not far from Leibniz's idea when he was saying that the only goal of science is to decode the Mind of God present in the structure of the universe.
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Within the all-comprising Mind of God what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation.
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Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question on ultimate causality is translated into another of Leibniz’s questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
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Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality – the motto of all John Templeton Foundation activities. The true humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all – of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.
In the New Oxford Review, a board-certified psychiatrist and professor, Richard Gallagher documents a real Case of Demonic Possession.
Even those who doubt such a phenomenon exists may find the following example rather persuasive. For clergy, or indeed anyone involved in the spiritual or psychological care of others, it is equally critical, however, to recognize the many and infinitely more common "counterfeits" (i.e., false assignations) of demonic influence or attack as well.
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We made a number of phone calls to arrange gathering together to help Julia. Julia herself was not in on these phone discussions; she was far from the area at the time. Astonishingly, Julia's "other" voice -- again sometimes deep, sometimes high pitched -- would actually interrupt the telephone conversations and somehow come in over the phone line! The voice(s) would espouse the same messages: "Leave her alone," "Leave, you idiots," "Get away from her," "She's ours." Julia, again, said later that she was unaware of any such conversation. And yet this speech was heard distinctly by several of the team on a number of occasions.
After a set at a hotel in Washington State, I was dragged into a long, drawn-out discussion with a graying, balding New Ager who just couldn't get over my evangelical background. "You seem so smart," he kept saying. "How could you buy into that stuff?"
Here's a guy wearing a crystal around his neck to open up his chakra, who thinks that the spirit of a warrior from the lost city of Atlantis is channeled through the body of a hairdresser from Palm Springs, and who stuffs magnets in his pants to enhance his aura, and he finds evangelicalism an insult to his intelligence. I ask you: Who's the redneck?
From a review by Ed Driscoll quoting Redneck Nation by Michael Graham.
"Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War" (Michael Graham)
The wonderful phrase, "Teach us to care and not to care" comes from T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday that he wrote shortly after he converted to Anglicanism. It's the struggle of a man who had no faith acknowledging his need for faith and hope in a prayer for God.
Ash Wednesday
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.
At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.
IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs
Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing
White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.
O my people.
VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
So you're the Anglican Archbishop of York and you're about to take your first trip to Rome where you will meet with the Pope, what do you bring as a gift?
Well, like any good Bavarian, he does like his beer
I told the brewery I was meeting the Pope and they made a special brew for him. I heard he'd been given some Black Sheep ale and liked it. So I brought that and the Holy Grail."
Sentamu stands the Pope a beer
Sissy who tipped me to this has written about the Pope and John Sentamu - the "Archbishop-of-Canterbury-in-waiting" before as he took on British Airways and the BBC.
With his trademark gap-toothed grin and staccato enunciation of quaint English, the Ugandan-born archbishop is credited with having an electrifying effect on faithless, post-Christian Britain.
While in Rome, Sentamu might have learned the Beer Blessing.
Bene+dic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisae, quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es: ut sit remedium salutare humano generi: et praesta per invocationem nominis tui sancti, ut, quicumque ex ea biberint, sanitatem corporis, et animae tutelam percipiant. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen
Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, that Thou hast been pleased to bring forth from the sweetness of the grain: that it might be a salutary remedy for the human race: and grant by the invocation of Thy holy name, that, whosoever drinks of it may obtain health of body and a sure safeguard for the soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
It was just luck that six months ago I had scheduled a retreat at St.Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.
After two weeks of the flu, I needed some time to re-energize and get back on track before I took up again all the things I had to do.
So I looked forward to some time with the Trappist monks, to put my ordinary concerns aside, to get away from it all including the Internet and reconnect with my inner self. I wasn't disappointed.
"What was it like?" a friend asked when I got back yesterday.
"Like honey," I said.
It was slow. Time expanded in a miraculous way. I had plenty of time to read "St. Augustine Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)" , a book I always meant to read but never got around to. Time too to take long walks and long naps.
It was sweet, the atmosphere one of concentrated holiness and peace. The meals delicious and taken in silence while we listened to tapes of John Shea, a gifted spiritual writer on the Gospel of St.Luke.
It was beautiful. The monks, no matter the age, all work to make the community self-supporting. At St. Joseph's they are most famous for their Trappist Preserves.
No matter what they wear as they work and some wear blue jeans,
when they gather for song and prayers, seven times a day, they put on their monk's robes.
And when they sing ancient psalms and antiphons, they are as one, joining with monks around the world and in ages past in a timeless singing of praise and thanksgiving. To hear them them is to be lifted up in a sublime experience of beauty.
It's said that monasteries are powerhouses of prayer and spiritual energy. All I know is there is no better place to recharge.
Too busy with cooking, baking and family gatherings to post before Christmas, I hope you all had a wonderful and joyful Christmas.
I've also very much enjoyed the many best wishes and special Christmas links that so many bloggers have posted.
Since I believe in celebrating all twelve days of Christmas, at least through the New Year, I have for you a few little gifts that you may have overlooked in the rush to get ready for the first day of Christmas.
First, An Arabic Christmas Carol (Byzantine Hymn of the Nativity) with gorgeous images from Syria, Egypt and Bethlehem you've never seen before.
Today, is born of a virgin, He who holds the whole creation in his hand
He whose essence none can touch is bound in swaddling clothes as a Child
God, who in the beginning established the heavens, lies in a manger.
An Arabic Christmas Carol was written in response to the The Hymn by Chaldean Catholic Priest-Martyr which you'll find on YouTube.
I'm pleased that so many Iraqi Christians packed the churches for Christmas Mass, which would have been unthinkable just a year ago.
"Last year was the year of misery, desperation and sadness, But this year is better. So many people attend the Mass and you can see that their praying was joyful."
Many Muslims joined Christians in celebrating this most joyful day with the newly installed Roman Catholic Cardinal Delly, patriarch of Iraq's ancient Chaldean Church who said during the service
"Iraq is like a garden and its beauty is the variety of its flowers and scent,"
Among those attending were several Shiite Muslim sheiks, including Raad Tamimi, who said they had come "in solidarity with our Christian brothers . . . to plant the seed of love again in the new Iraq." Tamimi, a tribal leader, was excited to shake the cardinal's hand and asked that a photo be taken with his cellphone.
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Jameel Hamouda, 55, who attended the Christmas services, said four of his family members had left Iraq, but that he was hopeful they would return.
"This is the first time the Muslim figures like sheiks and Shiite clerics attended the Mass," Hamouda said. "I feel happy and my soul filled with peace. God willing, there will be a union."
In this video, the beautiful Majida Al Roumi sings Silent Night in English, Arabic & French, but you have to turn the volume way up.
Surprisingly, the day after Christmas is celebrated in the Catholic Church as the Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr of the young Church.
Gil Bailie says that more Christians have been killed in the past 100 years than the sum total killed in all the years since Jesus Christ was born some 2000 years ago.
Sadly, many of the Catholics in the Mid East face persecution. The war in Iraq and follow-on extremist violence of some Muslim extremists made many more Christians martyrs and caused tens, if not hundreds of thousands to flee the country for Syria and Jordan and only now, after the surge, are some beginning to return;
And in the Holy Land, most of the Christians have fled Bethlehem and Gaza's Christians, Living in Fear
So this Christmas, it's good news that writing from prison, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif, one of Al Qaeda's senior theologians, is calling on his followers to end their military jihad.
Just where do the laws of gravity and physics come from?
Paul Davies on Taking Science on Faith
science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
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until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
The nature and power of music is grand, awesome and ultimately a mystery.
Dr. Oliver Sacks writes about people with "musical misalignments" that affect their professional and daily lives, like the composer of atonal music who has with "corny" and "tonal" musical hallucinations playing over and over in his brain, what the Germans call earworm.
"Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" (Oliver Sacks)
New York Times reviewer,Michiko Kakutani writes that Dr Sacks is able
to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.
Could it be that Life itself is a musical adventure as Gagdad Bob writes in Songs in the Key of Jesus
each of us represents an unrepeatable melodic line that wends itself through the four great chords constituting the song of existence.
Believing that everything that exists can be explained in material terms is materialism and
Materialism is a philosophy by the tone-deaf and for the tin-eared.
He quotes his own book, "One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit" to say
if you really want to know reality in its fullness, "it is no longer adequate to be just a materialistic banjo-picker sitting barefoot on a little bridge of dogma; rather, one must have at least a nodding acquaintance with a few other instruments in order to play the cosmic suite. The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional musical score that must be read, understood, and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it can support diverse interpretations, but surely one of them cannot be 'music does not exist.'"
No one understands the power of music better than Pope Benedict.
The Pope is considering a dramatic overhaul in order to force a return to sacred music.
The Second Vatican Council declared
The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even that that of any other art.The main reason for this pre-eminence is that, as sacred song united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy ... the Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy; therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services."
Young people who have never heard Gregorian chant are amazed to learn that it is the official music of the Catholic Church. Australian Tony Vaughn says
The interest in Chant over the last four or five years has been amazing. Young people want to know more about this incredibly beautiful and spiritual music, and where they can experience and learn it.
At Mont Saint Michel, the beauty of the traditional liturgy is Making Pilgrims out of Tourists
for the tourists who visit, Father De Froberville explained that "the age of anti-clericalism seems to be over. .... those younger than 60 are open to Christianity in a way not seen for a long time. They think it's cool.
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It is the richness of our liturgy that keeps them interested.
Wasn't it Albert Einstein who said
Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust - we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
“At some point in the nineteen-sixties, Hell disappeared. No one could say for certain when this happened. First it was there, then it wasn’t.”
The Catholic Novel is Alive and Well in England by Marian Crowe explores Catholic novels in First Things.
Why Catholic Novels?
They provide an experience somewhat akin to reading those weighty Victorian novels, imbued with moral seriousness and ethical concern, in which human acts had momentous import in a meaningful universe. Christian readers have a special interest in these novels, however, for they bring to life doctrines rendered insipid and prosaic due to long familiarity and frequent repetition in creeds and liturgy.
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At this point I need to define what I mean by the term Catholic novel. I do not mean simply a novel by a Catholic or one with some Catholic material, but a work of substantial literary merit in which Catholic theology and thought have a significant presence within the narrative, with genuine attention to the inner spiritual life, often drawing on Catholicism’s rich liturgical and sacramental symbolism and enriched by the analogical Catholic imagination.
The Catholic imagination, says Andrew Greeley, is one that is sacramental, that “sees created reality as a ‘sacrament,’ that is, a revelation of the presence of God.” Some novels are deeply engaged with Catholic material, but almost exclusively in a negative or hostile sense. Such novels are sometimes considered Catholic novels, and some Catholics find it bracing and expansive to enter a fictional space that confronts them with the shadow side of the Church. Yet the Catholic novels that most engage my interest are those that include some kind of sense that Catholicism, no matter how flawed the institutional Church and no matter how weak and sinful individual Catholics, is a locus of truth.
If you know about the English Catholic novelists like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and probably about the American Catholic novelists like Flannery O’Connor, J.F. Powers, and Walker Percy, Crowe's piece will give you many new authors to explore.
Last week, I read and quite enjoyed the character of
"Cardinal Galsworthy" (Edward R. F. Sheehan), a book by a former reporter for The New York Times that's become a minor cult classic. That I had the chance to have dinner with the author last week has nothing to do with my hearty recommendation.
The most watched movie in history is the Jesus film, having been seen by more than 2 billion people and translated into more than 760 languages and dialects. By July 1, 2007, it's been seen by 5 billion people.
With that success, it's not a surprise that talking bibles and cellphone bibles are being used by Christian missionaries to expand the audience and influence of the world's largest religion. The Washington Post tells the story of Plugging the Planet into the Word.
In Cambodia, flooded with missionaries since the early 1990s after a decade of war and the Khmer Rouge left the country devastated with almost 2 million killed or dead of starvation, the director of the National Buddhist Institute said
We are getting used to globalization, but it is important to maintain our identity. For centuries and centuries we have been Buddhists.
But, he added, people have a right to choose their religion, and the government is grateful for the medicine, food and manpower that Christian groups are bringing. As for the Christian literacy program, he said, "If Buddhists worry about it, they should teach children to read, too."
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Im's father, Sum Tel Thoen, 37, a fisherman, said he didn't care that Christians were teaching his daughter. "It doesn't matter if my daughter is Christian. My focus is education," he said. "I can't read or write. I want my daughter to."
What is the appeal of Christianity to Muslims? It is impossible to understand global politics in the developing world these days without understanding the role and force of religion.
Why Muslims Follow Jesus. The results of a recent survey of converts from Islam.
In fact, and perhaps counterintuitively, the number of new Christians each year outstrips the number of new Muslims, even though the annual growth rate is higher for Muslims (1.81 percent) than for Christians (1.23 percent). Over the last century, Christians have grown at a slower rate than have Muslims, with Muslims increasing from 12 percent to 21 percent of the global population during that time. But this is hardly surprising. Christianity has more total followers than Islam.
The top reasons why.
1. Seeing a lived faith. The lifestyle of Christians was the most important factor.
2. The power of God in answered prayers and healing. Dissatisfaction at the type of Islam they had experienced.
3. The gospel message, especially its assurance of salvation and forgiveness. Particularly attractive was the love expressed through the life and teachings of Jesus.
4. Subconscious influences
it's hard not to notice that Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Bangladeshis, and Algerians became more responsive after enduring Muslim political turmoil or attempts to impose Islamic law.
Even now, Chinese Christians who now number 80 million are rapidly growing and expected to quintuple over the next three decades to embrace one-third of the population.
Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers, whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class in China's cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated.
Chinese missionaries believe they are called are now being trained to evangelize the Muslims back to Jerusalem.
The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as "Back to Jerusalem". As [Time correspondent David] Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it's their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.
Thousands are already in the Mideast as technicians and ordinary workers and many practice evangelism on the side.
A stirring depiction of Christianity by Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Denver who delivered a talk on Renewing the Church, Converting the World.
To be a Christian is to believe in history.
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Christianity, thus, means believing definite things about history and about our own respective places in history. We don’t just profess belief in the Incarnation. We say we believe that God took flesh at a precise moment in time and in a definite place. Pontius Pilate and Mary are mentioned by name in the creed—and the reference to Mary, his mother, guarantees Christ’s humanity, while the reference to Pilate, who condemned him to death, guarantees his historicity.
All this ensures that we can never reduce the Incarnation to an abstract concept, a metaphor, or a pretty idea. It ensures that we can never regard Jesus Christ as some kind of ideal archetype or mythical figure. He was truly a man and truly God. And once he had a place he called home on this earth. There’s something else, too. We believe that this historical event, which happened more than 2,000 years ago, represents a personal intervention by God “for us men and for our salvation.” God entered history for you and me, for all humanity.
These are extraordinary claims. To be a Christian means believing that you are part of a vast historical project. And it’s not our project. It’s God’s. We believe that since the beginning of time God has been working out his own hidden purposes in the history of nations and in the biography of every person. He’s still unfolding his purposes today, and each of us here has a necessary part to play in his divine plan. Again, no other religion makes anywhere near these kinds of claims about the meaning of human life—and not just “human life” in general, but each and every individual human life.
I've read somewhere that spirituality is most like music.
Some are immediately swept away by the music of Bach and Beethoven. Many must cultivate an ear for classical music. Others, tone deaf will never get it.
Now via Maggie's Farm comes a sermon from a pastor who says that people believe more than they know they believe, that faith is a way of seeing.
If you say that seeing is believing, you will never be a great scientist; you will not be a creative artist; you will have nothing but superficial relationships, and here is the last thing: If you say that seeing is believing, you will never be a leader.
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Leadership doesn't say, "Prove it to me and then I'll give you my support." Leadership comes in and says, "With faith and trust and openness, we can really make this thing work."
Four things. What is it really that I have said to you? Let me in good homiletical style tell you what I have just told you. It is this: faith is a way of seeing. St. Augustine put it perfectly. He said, "To have faith is to believe what you can't see and the reward of faith is to see what you believe."
When anthropologists look at religion, in particular Rene Girard, they see the sacred as a human universal.
Girard has reminded us of truths that we would rather forget—in particular the truth that religion is not primarily about God but about the sacred, and that the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre.
The Sacred and the Human by Roger Scruton
From Camille Paglia's lecture on Religion and the Arts in America
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat.
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When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.
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For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts.1 The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
Her advice for art lovers - Always speak with respect of religion;
conservatives - need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture;
progressives - must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms
Tony Snow found unexpected blessings in cancer.
Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered
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The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense.
This tiny fragment is a receipt acknowledging the payment of .75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylonia.
So why is it being hailed as the most important find in Biblical archaeology in 100 years?
Tiny tablet provides proof for Old Testament
The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum's great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.
But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.
Who watches over Western Civilization?
Back in the 20s, Charles Coulombe writes, the German General, the British House of Lords, the Academie Francaise and the Holy See were thought enough to prevent the takeover of Europe by Communism. Today, only the Holy See remains an influential institution at a time when threats to Western Civilization come from Islam and the forces of secularism that threaten the expression of national identities.
He asks Could the Latin Mass Save Western Civilization?, an outstanding essay.
The truth is that the Catholic Church is a bellwether for the health of Western Civilization in general—a sort of canary chanting in the coal mine of culture.
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When, in 1971, news came out that the traditional Latin Mass was to be scrapped, a primarily non-Catholic group of English artists and writers protested to Paul VI.
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Fifty-six of the most prominent and celebrated English writers, artists, and musicians of the time signed it --- among them Vladimir Ashkenazy and Yehudi Menuhin (pace Mr. Foxman), Graham Greene, Robert Graves and Cecil Day-Lewis (onetime poet laureate and father of Daniel), Iris Murdoch, and, in the end most importantly, Agatha Christie. The importance of the last signatory lay in the fact that the then-Pontiff was a devotee of her mysteries, and so granted her request. The resulting permission for the Old Mass to be continued in England to some degree has therefore been dubbed the “Agatha Christie Indult.”
What these illustrious folk understood, better than many theologians, was that the health of the Catholic Church was and is integral to the health of the West. If our civilization is to withstand its current slate of internal and external foes—throughout Europe and the Diaspora—it must regain its hold on the things that first enkindled its spirit. Restoration of liturgical sanity and unity within the Catholic Church will inevitably have a beneficial “trickle-down” effect far beyond the Church’s borders. Those who prize the health of the West must welcome Benedict XVI’s action, regardless of their own creed.
Keep your eyes on Rome.
On July 7, Pope Benedict XVI issued a Moto Propio saying in essence that both the Latin form of the Mass, the one blessed by Pope John XXIII using the 1962 Roman Missal and the New Mass of the Roman Missal of Pope Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council (novus ordo) are equally valid, the former "extraordinary" and the latter "ordinary" and can be used at just about any time. The Latin Mass was never forbidden or even changed, but following the Second Vatican Council, it could only be offered under special dispensation of the bishop, a requirement no longer.
Harvey Mansfield talks about the soul and the importance of naming people and things in their individuality in the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.
First he introduces us to the notion of thumos that Plato and Aristotle talked about - that part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.
The biology of Plato and Aristotle, unlike modern biology, takes account of the soul, the sense of human importance. Modern biology saves lives, but the old biology understands them better. The notion of thumos reminds us of our animality because it is visible to the naked eye when we observe animals. Modern biology uses the microscope and uncovers chemical and neurological counterparts to thumos, which actually distract us from analysis of the behavior they are meant to explain. We rest satisfied when we have pronounced the word testosterone and fail to observe as carefully as old-fashioned naked-eye science. Sociobiology has come up with the concept of turf, an unnoticed reference to thumos that we all use today to designate the marking out of one’s own. But in human beings, one’s turf is one’s family, one’s party, one’s country, one’s principle.
..... Having eliminated the soul, modern science cannot understand the body in its most important aspect, which is its capacity for self-importance. Modern biology, particularly the theory of evolution, is based on the overriding concern for survival in all life. This is surely wrong in regard to human life. If you cannot look around you and must insist on indulging a taste for the primitive, you have only to visit the ruins of an ancient people and ponder how much of its GNP was devoted to religion, to its sense of the meaning of human life rather than mere survival.
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Coming to religion, we arrive in the realm of what is particular and individual. Science and religion are nowhere more opposed than in regard to human importance. Religion declares for the importance of humans and seeks to specify what it is.
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True religion shows its concern for the human species by addressing individual human beings. Science for its part speaks against the special importance of any object of science, including human beings, and in the theory of evolution it seeks to erode the difference between human beings and other animals.
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Literature takes on the big questions of human life that science ignores—what to do about a boring husband, for example.
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Altogether thumos is one basis for a human science aware of the body but not bound to it, a science with soul and taught by poetry well interpreted.
"What? You couldn't stretch to matching pants?"
That's what Phil McCord thought the Pope would say to him when he met the Pope with the wrong pair of pants the dry cleaner gave him.
McCord was in Rome for the canonisation ceremony for Mother Theodore Guerin, the former hospital administrator who was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.
Just over six years ago his eye was healed from a serious illness after he prayed to Mother Theodore Guerin, the founder of the convent where he works.
At least 12 doctors were consulted about his remarkable recovery, and none could find a medical explanation for his cure.
The Catholic Church subsequently ruled it was a miracle.
As this was the second miracle attributed to Mother Theodore Guerin - and the Church says that it takes two miracles for a holy person to qualify for sainthood - the former hospital administrator's miracle meant Mother Guerin would be made into a saint.
As a good follow-up to my earlier post on Youths Fear Winding Up Alone, take a look at this New York Times piece of Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus.
Peter Gomes who's spent 37 years at Harvard where being seen as religious often meant being dismissed as not very bright
There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years.
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A survey on the spiritual lives of college students, the first of its kind, showed in 2004 that more than two-thirds of 112,000 freshmen surveyed said they prayed, and that almost 80 percent believed in God. Nearly half of the freshmen said they were seeking opportunities to grow spiritually, according to the survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Compared with 10 or 15 years ago, “there is a greater interest in religion on campus, both intellectually and spiritually,” said Charles L. Cohen, a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
While students may be learning more, Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University says the deep ignorance of Americans about the world's religions is dangerous.
"If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they're both Muslim, and you've been told Islam is about peace, you won't understand what's happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it's so?
Americans get an 'F' in religion.
Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
Knowledge about the basics of the Bible and the core beliefs and stories of other religions are necessary, he says if you are to be an 'empowered citizen' and understand what's going on in the world.
Prothero's solution is to require middle-schoolers to take a course in world religions and high schoolers to take one on the Bible. Biblical knowledge also should be melded into history and literature courses where relevant. He wants all college undergrads to take at least one course in religious studies.
Or if you are pressed for time, you could read his book
"Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't" (Stephen Prothero)
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.
Albert Einstein
From Einstein & Faith by Walter isaacson, an excerpt from his newly published book Einstein: His Life and Universe.
Below is the Albert Einstein Memorial in front of the National Academy of Science in Washington, sculpted by my friend, Bob Berks. Einstein is contemplating the universe spread out before his feet.
Andrew Bolt's Easter Message A surprising message from an agnostic.
..when I see a Western artist mock Christ, I see an artist advertising not his courage but his cowardice – by not daring to mock what would threaten him more.
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It's no accident that we feel safer insulting Christians than trashing almost anyone else. This is a religion that's always preached tolerance, reason and non-violence.
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This is one reason why I, an agnostic, will today do what I do every Easter, and play Bach's divine St Matthew Passion while I sit for a while and give thanks.
I will be thanking again not only a preacher of astonishing moral clarity and courage, but one who inspired a faith that has brought us unparalleled gifts...
Sister Marie Simon Pierre is a simple nun with an incredible story she's prepared to tell the world, a story that well lead to the beatification of Pope John Paul II.
Under the Vatican's saint-making process, the first step towards beatification requires that a candidate must either be a martyr or perform one verfiable posthumous miracle.
Sister Marie Simon Pierre was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2001, a condition that worsened over the years and felt a strong affinity to Pope John Paul II who suffered from the same disease. Both she and her community of the Little Sisters of Catholic Maternities prayed for her healing and for the intercession of John Paul.
Weeks after his death, she awoke one night completely cured.
International Herald Tribune
Simple nun, 'no star', at center of Pope John Paul Beatification
London Times Online
The discreet little nun who could speed John Paul to Sainthood
by the time the Pope died in April 2005, she was unable to stand or walk. She had stopped working as a nurse in a Paris maternity hospital and was confined to office activities.
Two months later she tried to write down John Paul II’s name as she prayed to him for help “but all that came out was a scribble,” she said in an account sent to the Vatican.
However, that evening, the “miracle” occurred.
“I fell asleep and, waking up several hours later, felt that the illness had disappeared,” said Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre.
She leapt out of bed and went to the chapel to pray.
“I felt a profound sense of peace and wellbeing. My hand did not tremble anymore.” Four days later the doctor who had been treating her for four years declared that the symptoms had vanished completely, with no medical explanation.
Father Slawomir Oder, the Polish prelate in charge of John Paul II’s beatification claim, said handwriting experts had compared the nun’s “illegible scribble” on the day of her prayer with her “perfectly legible and comprehensible” writing the next morning. He said doctors in France had become convinced of the miraculous nature of her cure. Psychologists had also conducted tests to prove she had no psychiatric problems.
You have to see this picture of The Ghostly Angel of the Vatican.
Last night I watched the Sopranos, the episode when Christopher, in hospital after being shot and considered clinically dead for about a minute, reports that he had a visited his father in hell where he was told he was going.
Many people were discomfited by the Pope's speech the other day in which he said God's love is great, but hell 'exists and is eternal.'
Have there been near-death experiences of hell? Time to check out near-death.com which I found less reliable than the Wikipedia entry on near-death experiences.
Not all near-death experiences are those of a brilliant white light and indescribable love; some experience what they could only call hell.
Two of the most famous are Dr. George Rodonaia and Howard Storm.
If you think that hell has gotten a bad name, you might want to read Fr. James Schall on The Brighter Side of Hell who concludes that Hell exists so that we might be free.
"The road to Hell," it is said, "is paved with good intentions." It is also paved with many insights into the very nature of our being that guide us to the truth of things and the importance of our existence.
Blackfive has a patent-pending on the Irish palm pilot shown above.
It's worth pointing out that are two patron saints of Ireland, St Patrick and St. Brigid and the latter particularly loved beer which is featured prominently in some of the miracles attributed to her.
Her generosity in adult life was legendary: It was recorded that if she gave a drink of water to a thirsty stranger, the liquid turned into milk; when she sent a barrel of beer to one Christian community, it proved to satisfy 17 more. Many of the stories about her relate to the multiplication of food, including one that she changed her bath-water into beer to satisfy the thirst of an unexpected clergyman.
St. Brigid's prayer begins
I'd like to give a lake of beer to God.
I'd love the Heavenly
Host to be tippling there
For all eternity.
and ends
I'd sit with the men, the women of God
There by the lake of beer
We'd be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.
Who else but an Irish saint imagines God as forever drinking beer, a beatific vision unique to the Irish?
Go here to hear Noirin Ni Riann recite the prayer in her wonderful Irish voice.
And finally, an Irish joke from To the Point.
An Irishman was walking along a beach in County Cork one day and noticed an encrusted bottle washed up on the sand. Wondering what might be inside he broke it off at the neck and out popped an Irish Genie.
"Oh, me man, I hah been in tha bottle for a hundred years, and you be settin' me free!" he exclaimed. "For that, I'll be givin' you two wishes!"
"Two wishes? Anything I want?" the man asked incredulously.
"Anythin' - just name it," the genie replied.
"Well, what I'll be wantin'," said the man, "is a glass of good Irish ale - but a very special glass, so that no matter how much I drink it will always be full of good Irish ale."
Poof! There it was in his hand. The Irishman drank and drank and drank, and twenty minutes later, he hadn't made a dent. The glass was still overflowing with wonderful Irish ale.
But by now the genie was getting impatient.
"Listen me man" he announced. "I'm grateful for you settin' me free, but I was in that bottle for a long time and I've things to do. So you'll be makin' your second wish now."
The Irishman thought for a moment, looked at the glass in his hand, and declared, "You know, I think I'll have another one of these!"
So drink and pray beer for St. Patrick and St. Brigid, but never green beer, an abomination.
There's a party over at Guinness. You have to register, but then you can download some Irish music by Quagmire
His experience as a slave made him a holy man, a mystic and the first person in the history of the world to denounce slavery unequivocally. For that alone, he would be revered. But his influence in Ireland may well have saved Western Civilization at an earlier time when it was in mortal peril.
And so it was that a young Briton named Patricius died an Irishman named Patrick, and neither Ireland nor Christianity was ever quite the same. By the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, the Irish stopped slave trading and never took it up again. Human sacrifice had become unthinkable. His countrymen never stopped making war on one another, but war became much more confined and limited by what we now call the rules of warfare. In the modern classic How the Irish Saved Civilization, it is said that Patrick's conversion of Ireland made possible the preservation of Western thought through the early Dark Ages by means of the monasteries founded by Patrick's successors. When the lights went out all over Europe, a candle still burned in Ireland. That candle was lit by Patrick.
The light of a candle can be blown out, die out or used to light another candle.
After the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians, back in the fifth century, Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization
... to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius, retire to one's villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it, by men so strange they lived in little huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills and nettle baths. As Kenneth Clark said, "Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time--almost a hundred years--western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea."
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as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature--everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one--a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.
It's fitting that St. Patrick's Day is the First Green of the Spring. Drink up.
Abraham Lincoln is one of my great heroes. Today on his birthday, I pleased to share new things I learned about him this year.
When Albert Kaplan bought this daguerreotype, Portrait of a Young Man in 1977, it reminded him of Lincoln somehow. Years later, he appears to have proved that it is a portrait of a young Lincoln with authentication both scholarly and authoritative available at Lincolnportrait.com
As a young man, Lincoln was not particularly religious. He never joined a church, was never baptized and never made any profession of belief. Yet, something happened to change his mind. In President Lincoln's Secret, Professor Allen Guelzo writes
Lincoln’s election to the presidency, just in time to see the country fall into civil war, presented him with a different set of challenges to his meager stock of religious belief. Lincoln expected a quick and direct restoration of the Union. But in battle after battle, the Union armies were handed humiliating defeats. The president could make no logical sense of this apparent contradiction of progress. After a year-and-a-half of seemingly fruitless bloodshed, he concluded that God had taken a direct hand in events to stymie the war’s progress so long as it was waged for purely political purposes, and to force Lincoln to recognize that the war must be turned in a moral direction that spoke directly to the crime of slavery.
This insight is what eventually drove Lincoln to depart from the policy direction with which he had begun the war, and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the astonishment of his Cabinet, Lincoln explained that his decision to issue the Proclamation was a “vow” he had made “to myself, and...to my Maker.”
Have you ever thought of mysteries as Christian fairy tales?
Neither did I. But Lauren Winner in Divine Mysteries gives me pause.
.....the moral, even theological, shape of mystery novels. Christian apologist J.I. Packer once observed that mysteries "would never have existed without the Christian gospel. Culturally, they are Christian fairy tales, with savior heroes and plots that end in what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe -- whereby things come right after seeming to go irrevocably wrong....The gospel of Christ is the archetype of all such stories."
Indeed, there is something both comforting and hopeful about the morality that governs the mystery genre. Good and evil are clearly delineated. Evil is laid bare -- it is undeniably real and active. And yet mystery novels don't often leave crimes unpunished, let alone unsolved. Evil is always found out, and overcome, by goodness. In a world often beset by violence, such stories are enough to restore one's faith.
A stolen statue of Jesus returned with a note of apology to the Little Brothers of St. Francis, also known as the Sons of Levi for their denim robes.
"I'm very sorry about stealing your statue. I meant nothing personal by it. I had been drinking and made an extremely poor and out of character decision. I wanted to return it yesterday, but I woke up feeling overwhelmed by embarrassment and shame," he read.
The thief ended the letter by saying, "I am sorry for the trouble you don't deserve."
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The brothers said they do not hold a grudge and invited the thief to come over for a cup of coffee.
I loved this psalm to the common man from the Anchoress
We take each day as it comes
Sometimes I hate my life
But mostly things are good.
How do you live after an inexplicable accident becomes an unimaginable tragedy?
The psychiatrist who blogs as Shrinkwrapped encouraged a commenter known as "Jimmy J" to write about his journey. Jimmy J was deadened by grief, a human "doing" not a human "being," when he was struck by grace.
One Man's Journey
There is so much to like about this piece by Jeff Randall, Christmas: crucified by do-gooders in the London Telegraph
I haven't become a weirdo fundamentalist. This is not a matter of religiosity (I flicker somewhere between an agnostic and a mild believer). My protest is about resisting those who seem hell bent on turning Christianity into a crime.
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The paradox of the dreadful campaign to create a culture of resentment against conventional Christmases is that it's being led neither by ethnic minorities nor leaders from other religions. Quite the reverse. Many non-Christians seem genuinely baffled by our desire for self-abasement
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No, it's not the Muslims, Jews or Hindus who are behind the drive to secularise Christmas. They are not the culprits....The demons in this horror story of crucifying Christmas are white, middle-class do-gooders whose assumption of a superior morality is as disgraceful as it is disgusting. They are busybodies, obsessed with forcing on us their vacuous "ethical" code. In the view of Dr John Sentamu, the splendid Archbishop of York, they are "the chattering classes", who see themselves as holding a flag for an atheist Britain. Actually, they are more pernicious than that. The teachings and guidance of old-fashioned Christianity offend them, so they seek to remove all traces of it from public life.
Christian voluntary groups are harassed on the grounds that being a Christian excludes "diversity". Christian Unions at universities are suspended because they insist that their members have Christian beliefs, which is interpreted as opposition to gay sex.
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t is not yet illegal to be a Christian, but woe betide those who hold fast to a standard of behaviour that was once the moral norm.
Some things for reflection in my continuing search for what is true, what is right and what is best for a good life
With all the attention paid to keeping our bodies free from pesticides, toxins, free radicals, slim, trim and looking good so we can feel good, why is so little attention paid to the harmful effects of pornography?
The Bishop of the Catholic Archdioceses of Arlington, Paul Loverde, has and writes Bought With a Price, a pastoral letter giving guidance to Christians on the grave offense that is pornography.
Via the Anchoress who cuts to the chase with A great definition of sin.
comes this excerpt from Happy Catholic.
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
The quoted excerpt is from a book, Carpe Jugulum, the 23rd in a series, by Terri Pratchett, a writer I never heard of, but who has quite a following, a "juggernaut procession" according to Amazon's review.
There may be something to this psychic stuff, or that's what British officials thought when Helen Duncan revealed the sinking of HMS Barham, a 29,000 ton battleship early in WWII with a loss of 861 lives.
Already reeling from the Blitz, the British government decided to keep the news quiet, even forging Christmas cards from the dead to their families.
So, when D-Day approached, officials ordered her arrest because they were afraid she might reveal top-secret plans.
They charged her under the 1735 Witchcraft Act!
It was alleged she had pretended "to exercise or use human conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan spirits of deceased dead persons should appear to be present".
She was convicted and sentenced to nine months in London's Holloway Prison. As she was led away,
the housewife cried out in her broad Scottish accent: "I never heard so many lies in all my life!
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News of the case infuriated PM Winston Churchill. In a note to his Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, he wrote: "Give me a report. What was the cost of a trial in which the Recorder was kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of the necessary work in the courts?"
Today, there are efforts underway to clear her name.
From the Doctor Is In, Warren Peace, another stellar essay.
The sceptic will be quick to point out the violent pages in Christianity’s history, dragging out the Crusades and the Inquisition to prove that all religious zealotry is violent by nature. Such pale parallels do not survive scrutiny, ignoring the far less useful reality that the Crusades were very much defensive wars against four centuries of brutal and aggressive conquest against Christians and Christian lands. Even the Inquisition–hardly Christendom’s finest hour–occurred in the milieu of la re-conquista– a nearly seven-century re-conquest of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim aggression. Christianity’s most punitive stances were themselves reactions to Islamic aggression and conquest.
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Our struggle now is a struggle of ideas; more than that, a struggle of absolutes. Our enemies hold to them–though their absolutes beget murder, hatred, destruction and anarchy.
It is a struggle which the West is now woefully ill-equipped to fight, having squandered, like some prodigal son, the cultural and spiritual riches it inherited on self-indulgence and dissipation. We are a culture of material comfort and moral relativism, living off the spoils of an earlier age when truth mattered and character counted.
I think it's a good sign that Harvard plans to revise its curriculum to require a course in religion. From the WSJ report
The proposed requirement in religion, dubbed "Reason and Faith," has little parallel in higher education, authors of the report said. It would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which calls traditional academics "profoundly secular," seeks to place Harvard's students and faculty in the center of contemporary religious debates.
"I think 30 years ago," when the school's curriculum was last overhauled, "people would have said that religion is not something that everyone needs to know," said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and co-chairman of the committee that drafted the report. "But today, few would disagree that religion is supremely important to modern life."
To understand the nature of faith and religion, even if one is an atheist or agnostic, is necessary these days if one is comprehend why so many young men find the meaning in jihad they couldn't find in modern society. Multiculturalism just isn't doing it. Nor does the platitude we all worship the same God. The Christian God is different from the Muslim God. Just ask the Pope.
Awesome, beautiful and strange, The Inner Life of a Cell, from Biovisions at Harvard is my pick for the best video I've seen in some time.
When I think there's all that going on inside of each of us, in each of the 10 -100 trillion cells in our bodies, my mind reels, and I stagger, dumbstruck, in my wonder for a minute or two, then my mind wanders off, looking for easier stuff to think about, maybe something to eat.
Another Muslim day of rage is scheduled for Friday to protest the Pope Bendict's speech at Regensburg.
Apparently, firebombing churches, kidnapping priests, murdering a nun, calling for the Pope's assassination, and announcing, as did Al Qaeda in Iraq, "We shall break the cross and spill the wine...God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome...(May) God enable us to slit their throats," just didn't go far enough.
"Stop calling us violent or we'll kill you" seems to be the message being sent to us infidels by these jihadists of the Wahabbi strain.
Too many seem to be just fine with this message. Like the New York Times which editorialized,
A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue....It is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He (the Pope) needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology.
The New York Times would rather not talk about the demonstrable fact that forced conversions and the use of violence in God's name hinders real dialogue between Christians and Muslims. The Times doesn't want to talk about Islamic violence and aggression because it might provoke more violence and aggression, maybe against them. They censor themselves and would censor the Pope from saying what is true. They behave, and too many Western leaders behave as if sharia law were already in effect as they submit to Muslim authority and intimidation. That's called dhimmitude.
What are people so afraid of that they can't stand up for free speech and home truths? Why are we not more outraged? Like Pope John Paul, Donald Sensing says Be Not Afraid.
We hold the high ground - we believe in individual liberty, we believe in religious tolerance, we believe in women’s rights, we believe in a narrow window for the just use of war - and we should not be afraid to stand tall and to express our outrage at the insane reactions we are seeing across the Muslim world. In fact their actions prove the point made previously in Danish cartoons and the quote from Pope Benedict.
Enough Apologies writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post.
None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting....
Where's the reciprocity?
nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?
These jihadists are bullies, gangster religionists and it's time to stand up and say so. We don't have to abide by Islamist rules and they can't make us. I pity those who are so mealy-mouthed that they can not say Enough already. They live with shriveled soul in an internal and self-imposed state of dhimmitude, swearing allegiance to multiculturalism and political correctness and scorning those who are so unsophisticated as to be religious.
The Belmont Club writes that the
aching void left by Western cultural and political leaders ... has emboldened militant Islamic preachers to cross boundaries they would have respected until recently. This erasure of cultural borders caused by the near total desertion of the frontier by the so-called opinion-leaders has invited the most reckless elements of Islam across and raised the risk of real clash of civilizations. As Lord Carey put it: "We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times". It is a time made perilous not only by the absence of moderate voices within Islam but by the even more conspicuous absence of any leadership among Western politicians.
The Pope was the first to say, using a 600 year old quotation, that violent jihad and forced conversions are inherently evil and he said it in the context of a dense and scholarly speech calling for a real, sincere dialogue between faiths using reason and abjuring violence. He later apologized for the reactions to his speech but not for what he said.
The Anchoress wrote
Any intelligent human being understands that one does not - in the 21st century - publicly touch on the subject of Islamic jihad and religious compulsion, no matter how delicately or distinctively, unless one wants to deal with a reaction that is both primitive and intimidating, by a group demonstrably closed to dialogue.
And yet Benedict, clearly an intelligent man, has done so. He has, in essence, dared to say to Islam, “Is this really what you want to be doing, in this century? The rest of the world’s religions have put away the swords…how about we talk?”
Up to now, no one has come out and said that to Islam. The Pope is the first.
She says the quintessential question of our time that the Pope put on the table is
“Okay, short of our surrender and our conversions, what is it going to take to get you folks to settle down?”
It may seem curious that the most forceful defenders of the Pope have been religious figures.
Cardinal Pell in Australia said
The violent reaction in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict's main fears...They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.
In England, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton defended the Pope's "extraordinarily effective and lucid" speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.
“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.”
A close reading of the Pope's speech reveals why religious people are particularly well-qualified to speak first. They understand both Reason and Faith. Reason tempers what could be the savagery of religion. But Reason alone is not enough because it restricts the human domain to what can be proven empirically. By so doing, it narrows the scope of what it is to be human by resisting insight, understanding and the wisdom of the past. The utter cluelessness of the New York Times and much of the mainstream media when it comes to religion and faith proves my point.
George Weigel in the LA times, The Pope Was Right says
The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.
Oriana Fallaci, one of my heroes, said
The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
When asked what contemporary leader she admired, Fallaci replied.
I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger. … I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.
I too feel less alone with Pope Benedict as the Defender of Faith and Reason and Western civilization. "How many battalions has the Pope?" Joseph Stalin once famously asked. None of course, except for the stalwart Swiss Guards. Would that all those who believe in simple human truths stand behind him and condemn and shame all those who believe, support or excuse violent jihaadism. Thus concludes my personal day of rage for the Pope.
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor describes the value of prayer in today's world.
I believe, naturally, that we must teach each other the art, the necessity, the obligation and the beauty of prayer.
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Prayer is man’s way of saying “yes.” Yes to the universe and to his creator. Yes to life and its meaning. Yes to faith, to hope, to joy, to beauty, to love. A beacon to the lost wanderer, Jacob’s letter to the dreamer in search of dreams. A window to the soul, prayer is what is most indispensable in our passage on Earth. Consolation or compensation to some, sublimation to others, prayer also means power and adventure.
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You say prayers hoping that whatever you ask has been received and understood. It also communicates its lasting faith in the power of prayer. Prayer was the shortest way to reach out for answers to misfortune. It was enough to pray, to pray well, for men or women to reconcile themselves with destiny and to receive some happiness, some peace, either as gift or as reward.
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To pray is to measure what one has and what one lacks, what one is and what one wishes to be, to accept what one is given and given back. Without this ability, we are deprived of an essential dimension. To be closed to prayer is more punishment than sin, for prayer may contain its own reward.
Prayer and study are both given to us to lift ourselves to higher spheres. They are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they complement one another.
For those of us who sometimes see signs and wonders, there is the medieval book of psalms unearthed in an Irish bog.
Said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland,
"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."
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"In my wildest hopes, I could only have dreamed of a discovery as fragile and rare as this. It testifies to the incredible richness of the Early Christian civilization of this island and to the greatness of ancient Ireland."
Even more astonishing at this very moment in time is that the book was found open to Psalm 83 which is a prayer for the overthrow of nations that would destroy Israel.
"They say, "Come, let us destroy them that they be no more a people,
And that the name Israel be remembered no more.
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"Let them be disgraced and terrified forever,
And may they be put to shame and perish."
Something I came across while looking for something else. There are 82 million Christians in China!
David Aikma, the author, in an interview.
I would like readers of Jesus in Beijing to grasp how Christianity, though assumed by many in the West to be outmoded and irrelevant to modern life, is regarded by many Chinese as the absolute key to a successful, peaceful, powerful modern China in the future.
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But another factor has been a very open-minded approach by many Chinese intellectuals into such phenomena as the remarkable historical primacy of Western civilization around the world. How could this happen? What were the core principles of Western civilization that enabled it, time and again, to correct itself rather than plunge into cyclical and eventually permanent decline? Many concluded that it was Christian ethics and the dynamism of a faith based on a profound hope in the future and a belief that history was not cyclical, as Buddhism and even Confucianism proclaimed, but linear, and with a specific end goal.
Finally, Christians in the fine and performing arts have shown that there is a way out from the often-nihilistic cycle of modernism and postmodernism. This can be very attractive to artists who would prefer a hope-filled universe in which to develop their creative skills.
Another quote from the book
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
When faced with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, ordinary moments become holy.
So Harry Lehotsky writes in the Winnepeg Sun
Being told you only have a short time to live has a way of sharpening your senses and adjusting your priorities and perspectives on life.
Many of the most ordinary events and encounters in life are infused with fresh meaning and significance.
A sunny day. The smell of lilacs. A good day at work. Greetings, hugs, goodbyes. We take too many people and things for granted.
Time simultaneously speeds up and slows down. It's hard to explain. It's like you're aware of how quickly hours and days speed by. But you're more determined than ever to juice the most out of every minute.
Some would say it's only coincidence, me, I think signs and wonders better explain the mysteries of things too awesome to understand or explain.
Like the Rainbow over Birkenau, one of the death camps Pope Benedict visited on his trip to Poland.
As the music of violins an a harp played, it rained and, some time later, a colorful rainbow appeared right over the chimney of a ruined crematorium. It was a beautiful and breath-stopping view, as if God himself made a sign of His Covenant with Israel. And in the slowly clearing up sky, an eagle flew over the former death camp, like a symbol of Poland. People gathered at this scene with bewilderment, and Benedict XVI, who apparently didn’t see it, turned back to the rainbow arch and began his address to a small crowd of people, gathered on the camp’s grounds.
David Daystch, the Polish journalist who wrote the piece, recalls an earlier visit he took to Auschwitz with a Japanese journalist.
On that particular day, in Auschwitz, in the dreadful underground of the Death Ward (Barrack 11), we stood together in front of Father Kolbe’s death cell. There was an inscription on the door, marking the date of his execution by a poison shot into his heart: August 14, 1941. I looked up at the date and froze: it was the date of my own birth! I told Yoshino. She put her hands around my neck and cried. Then she took a picture which is in her book, published in Japan. Many times I wondered what influence that scene had on my later life. A remembrance of Father Kolbe’s martyrdom made my imprisonment in a communist jail a lighter experience and my present life of an invalid with a broken spine more tolerable.
Father Kolbe is The Saint from Auschwitz.
When the Nazis selected 10 to die because one prisoner had escaped, one man cried "My wife! My children! I will never see them again! Kolbe, a Catholic priest, stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted. The man who was saved, Franciszek Gajowniczek, said later
'I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?
I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.
Another survivor Jerzy Bielecki declared that Father Kolbe's death was
'a shock filled with hope, bringing new life and strength ... It was like a powerful shaft of light in the darkness of the camp.
Kolbe was canonized as a martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.
He wakes at 3:30 am to pray, he flies business class, his only indulgence is watchstraps, he now lives in half a house because it was too expensive and exhausting to rebuild a whole house after a recent earthquake, and his attitude is to give everyone some of his time.
Even though he says things that take many people aback - he's against homosexuality, abortion and oral sex, thinks George Bush is very straightforward and was astonished by his grasp of Buddhism, everyone respects and listens to the Dalai Lama.
From the Telegraph, U.K. "Westerners are too self-absorbed."
"It is fascinating," he says, speaking in slightly stilted English. "In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences - yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours; you have more food than you could possibly eat, yet that makes women like Heidi miserable."
The West's big problem, he believes, is that people have become too self-absorbed. "I don't think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice - which brings no real freedom.
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He laughs when I change the subject and talk about the West's attempts to become more spiritual through yoga, massage and acupuncture. "These are just physical activities," he says. "To be happier, you must spend less time plotting your life and be more accepting."
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The West is now quite weak - it can't cope with adversity and it has little compassion for others. People are like plants - they can develop ways of countering negative forces. If people took more responsibility for their own problems, they would become more self-confident."
He does not believe that you have to be religious in order to have a meaningful life. "But you have to have morals, to strive for basic, good human qualities. I don't want to convert people to Buddhism - all major religions, when understood properly, have the same potential for good."
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"Buddhists are taught that if there is something you can do about a situation, you must do it immediately. But if there is nothing you can do, you can't worry - that is indulgent."
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"But the Tibetans always say: wherever you feel most comfortable, that is your home. Whoever shows you greatest kindness and comfort, they are your family. So I am happy to die in India."
Excerpts frpm the essay by John Barrow, winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize, entitled The Great Basilica of Nature . After a dazzling description of seeing the interior of St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, Barrow writes
But, on reflection, what was more striking to me was the realization that the hundreds of master craftsmen who had worked for centuries to create this fabulous sight had never seen it in its full glory. They worked in the gloomy interior, aided by candlelight and smoky oil lamps to illuminate the small area on which they worked, but not one of them had ever seen the full glory of the golden ceiling. For them, like us, 500 years afterward, appearances were deceptive.
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The nucleus of every carbon atom in our bodies has been through a star. We are closer to the stars than we could ever have imagined.
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It is to this simple and beautiful world behind the appearances — where the lawfulness of nature is most elegantly and completely revealed — that physicists look to find the hallmark of the universe. Everyone else looks at the outcomes of these laws. The outcomes are often complicated, hard to understand and of great significance – they even include ourselves – but the true simplicity and symmetry of the universe is to be found in the things that are not seen. Most remarkable of all, we find that there are mathematical equations, little squiggles on pieces of paper, that tell us how whole universes behave. There is a logic larger than universes that is more surprising because we can understand a meaningful part of it and, thereby, share in its appreciation.
The Business of Life for Christians in the Holy Land is increasingly troubled. The Agony in the Garden and the Way of the Cross have become a way of life. I looked about, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that there was no one to lend support;
From Reuters In Bethlehem,
A 76-year-old Greek Orthodox monk is beaten up by villagers, his carefully tended olive trees are uprooted and his isolated West Bank monastery is defaced with graffiti depicting nuns being raped.
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Corruption and lawlessness in the West Bank and Gaza in the past decade have hit Christians harder than others because, as a minority, they have not been able to defend themselves easily.
Exasperated at the failure of the Palestinian Authority to act and the reticence of churches to speak up, a group of Christians in Bethlehem drew up a list of grievances that included theft of their land by Muslims, attacks and desecration of Church property.
The Christians passed the list to Church leaders, saying local authorities had done little to help.
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"If the situation continues, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity will become cold, empty museums," said Samir Qumsieh, a Palestinian-Christian businessman, referring to two of the holiest Christian shrines.
I looked about, but there was no one to help,
I was appalled that there was no one to lend support
Isaiah 63
Results of the long-awaited study on prayer have been released.
Taking almost 10 years, following some 1800 patients and costing more than $2.4 million, the study show that prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery.
The study said nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members and friends.
Designed to cure problems with earlier studies that had conflicting results, the study may have created another.
Patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
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In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study's authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised questions about how and whether patients should be told that prayers were being offered for them.
The best control group to study Alzheimer's appears to be nuns. And let's not forget Sister Josita.
That is the extraordinary discovery made by Professor David Bennett, an American neuropathologist investigating Alzheimer's disease...
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Then, within hours of a nun dying in the concrete tower-block nunnery, her body is hurried the few miles to the Rush University Medical Centre, where her brain is removed and sliced into discs, and stored alongside the 1,000 other brains in Prof Bennett's research programme.
The brain slices are examined for evidence of neuritic plaques - abnormal whorls of brain tissue - and neurofibrillary tangles, which are mixed-up bundles of nerve fibres. These were the symptoms first spotted by Aloiz Alzheimer in 1906 in a woman who had died of an unusual mental illness.
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"I'm very happy to give away my brain," says Sister Michele Elfering, 76, who has been with the order since she was 18, and has taught maths and reading in Chicago schools, rising to become a headmistress, "I'd do anything I can do to help with Alzheimer's. I've seen so many sisters get it. It begins with them being forgetful; starting a conversation and not being able to finish it. Then they forget where things are in the kitchen. They'll go for a glass of water and start looking in the condiments drawer. You can see it happening. You're very aware of it, though it's very slow. Sometimes they'll have a strong memory of their childhood and no memory of what they did five minutes ago."
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"Often, the sisters who get Alzheimer's seem to be lost in another world and then they'll suddenly start saying the Our Father or singing hymns, or just talk about God. It seems that the last thing to go is praying."
There are traditional religions that genuinely point to matters of the spirit and how to live a better life. Others masquerade as religion and dupe gullible souls.
Read Inside Scientology in Rolling Stone and decide for yourself.
They assert that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic warlord named Xenu controlled seventy-six planets in this corner of the galaxy, each of which was severely overpopulated. To solve this problem, Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings and then flew them to Earth, where they were dumped into volcanoes around the globe and vaporized with bombs. This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, until they were caught in electronic traps set up around the atmosphere and "implanted" with a number of false ideas -- including the concepts of God, Christ and organized religion. Scientologists later learn that many of these entities attached themselves to human beings, where they remain to this day, creating not just the root of all of our emotional and physical problems but the root of all problems of the modern world.
Patrick was a hard-bitten man who did not find his life's purpose till his life was half over. He had a temper that could flare dangerously when he perceived an injustice -- not against himself but against another, particularly against someone defenseless. But he had the cheerfulness and good humor that humble people often have. He enjoyed this world and its variety of human beings -- and he didn't take himself too seriously. He was, in spirit, an Irishman.
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This former slave had the right instincts to impart to the Irish a New Story, one that made sense of all their old stories and brought them a peace they had never known.
Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity -- the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene ....transform[ing] Ireland into Something New, something never seen before---a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, though impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly.
From
"How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History)" (Thomas Cahill)
Roseanne Cash's new album Black Cadillac "mines the grief" Cash experienced after she lost three parents in two years - her mother, father and stepmother, Johnny and June Carter Cash. She says in a Beliefnet interview "Each song is about a different place on the map of loss."
Do you see this album as a love letter or a farewell to your parents?
No--it's not a tribute record, it's not a farewell, it's not a goodbye note. It's about what I discovered in the mourning process about my relationship to them, which I believe continues, about re-negotiating the terms of those relationships, because they're not over, although I'm the only one talking. And about the emptiness, the silence that comes when you're the only one talking. It's about an attempt to connect and find what survives death—the ancestral thread, and love.
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I am the wall protecting my children from their own mortality, so therefore my mortality is acutely present. I have a sense that I'll get past this phase I'm in right now where I feel like it's so present, that death is imminent, because I'm not old yet, and I know that it's all there because so many people died in such rapid succession. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate that sense of mortality into a graceful way to live in the present. It's hard.
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I have written above my desk—"When you sing, you pray twice." Somebody told me that they knew this psychic who when he saw musical notes around a person, he knew they prayed a lot. I thought that was so great, like prayers go out as musical notes, and maybe vice versa.
In talking about the movie that's packing in the audiences in Europe, David Warren writes an outstanding essay entitled A truth exposed.
I've always been intrigued about life in a monastery. Silence. Beauty. Loss of self. Greater individuality. Selflessness and deep kindness. Great joy in living.
Entitled Die Grosse Stille -- Into Great Silence -- it is about the life of the monks in Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian monastic order.
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What most interested me, and the person who brought the film to my attention, was a single remark of the filmmaker, about what he had learned from making his documentary. He told the BBC, “When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears.”
And again: “We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it’s not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It’s a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept.”
This is why the film plays to packed houses. It speaks to people about what they are.
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We cling to things that cannot last, out of our curious panic; to things like Porsches, and the nanny state. We ignore, in this panic, anything that isn’t hard to the touch -- the verities of God, nature, and our nature. Yet in so doing we select what is transient, over what is eternal.
Pain, loss, disappointment, and death, we cannot escape. Each is written unalterably into our fate, as living organisms. But our fear is not so written. It has instead been brought upon ourselves.
Somehow, the atmosphere in Europe harkens the 30s when people began closing their eyes, so horrific was the aftermath of the Great War.
In Paris, a young Jewish man was kidnapped and tortured, left to die on railroad tracks.
From the report in Le Figaro.
“The discovery Monday afternoon of the naked body of Ilan, 23 years-old, near the railroad tracks at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (Essonne) is the tragic epilogue of a long police stake out. The victim had been tortured, 80% of his body was covered with bruises, deep cuts, and burns from an inflammable fluid. The young man, handcuffed and gagged, left for dead by his torturers, died on his way to the hospital.
Was it a criminal attack or was he targeted by the gang because he was Jewish? That is the question the paper and the government should be asking. Fortunately, the journalist Nidra Poller does at Atlas Shrugs and she shows the difficulty of conducting criminal investigations when you must also be politically correct.
Since I've always found it difficult to comprehend anti-semitism, I was especially glad to find ShrinkWrapped's post Pity the Poor Anti-Semite
Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation while devoting themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:
The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew.
UPDATE. The French have arrested 12 people from the gang called "The Barbarians" suspected in the killing of Ilan Halimi.
"They acted with indescribable cruelty," the judiciary police chief leading the investigation said. "They kept him naked and tied up for weeks. They cut him and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him alight."
The French officials say anti-Semitism was not a factor, his family say otherwise.
"We are in total shock," a close friend of Ilan's said Saturday. "All of us, Ilan's mother especially, have not yet begun to comprehend what happened."
Technorati Tags: anti-Semitism, Ilan Halimi
Who would have thought that the ancient Jewish holiday of Purim would have so much relevance with the Iran of today? Sigmund, Carl and Alfred do , Iran, the Bomb and the Purim Holiday
Of course, in days of old, it was only Mordecai and Esther that saved the day. In those days, it was Mordecai and Esther alone, that were to stand up for freedom and tolerance. They stood against hate and evil and they prevailed. They saved not just the Jews, but rather, their stand was to save the Persians as well from the deceit and ruination an immoral Regent was to bring upon them.
Adolph Hitler once said that there would be 'no Mordecai and Esther to save the Jews.' His remarks were met with great laughter. He went on to say, in a speech delivered on January 30, 1944, that, if the Nazis went down in defeat, the Jews could celebrate 'a second Purim.'
His words turned out to be prophetic, because in the civilized world, every day is Purim, a holiday that celebrates the freedom of man and the renunciation of expressions of hate.
God willing, we celebrate a third.
As I was writing a post this morning on a Fallen Indian Warrior, I found this wonderful quote from Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee. Suffused with wisdom, it stands for the ages.
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and
Demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life,
Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and
Its purpose in the service of your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,
Even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and
Bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and
For the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks,
The fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing,
For abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts
Are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes
They weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again
In a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."
The three things I most admire and respect about American Indians are their spirituality, their fearlessness of death and the way they seek to fill their lives with beauty. They cultivate an appreciation of beauty above, below, before, behind, all around and within.
From the Navajo night chant
May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me.
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beautiful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.
Who knew that the Vulcan salute invented by Leonard Nimoy
which means 'live long and prosper' had its origins in the Jewish blessing gesture used by the kohanim during the worship service that's performed on certain holy days.
"The special moment when the Kohanim blessed the assembly moved me deeply, for it possessed a great sense of magic and theatricality... I had heard that this indwelling Spirit of God was too powerful, too beautiful, too awesome for any mortal to look upon and survive, and so I obediently covered my face with my hands. But of course, I had to peek." (From his autobiography, I am Spock.)
via Richard Cohen who found out by testing his DNA that he carries the marker of the Kohanim, like 3% of all Jews, and can trace his DNA back to the priests of ancient Israel.
I can make the salute easily, can you?
