Orthodox Network - Shining the Light of Wisdom and Truth
Asia Times Online Spengler March 13, 2007
Apropos of the debate over a European constitution, it should be remembered that Europe did not arise as an agglomeration of nations. On the contrary, Europe existed before any of its constituent nations, and the unified Europe of Church and Empire created the nations along with their languages and cultures. As individual nations, Europe’s constituent countries will die on the vine.
Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute Susan Yoshihara
(NEW YORK — C-FAM) A prominent journalist has argued recently that international political, economic and social breakdown were largely averted during the 1980′s due to the personal and political alignments between Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In his recently-released book, The Pope, The President, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, National Review Editor-at-Large and Hudson Institute Fellow John O’Sullivan offers new research illuminating the three “hopeful” and “confident” personalities, and the way they forged relationships of mutual trust through their alliances and disagreements in a period of international upheaval and personal trial.
Crediting Reagan and Thatcher for reversing the economic “malaise,” stagflation, and defeatism in the American and British collective psyche, O’Sullivan chronicles the political risks both Thatcher and Reagan took to transform the world economy into a post-industrial, information-age economy that today has achieved “eighteen years of high growth with stable prices, scarcely interrupted by two mild and shallow recessions.”
Wall Street Opinion Journal Peter Nadas October 23, 2006
So, on that Tuesday afternoon, a single flow of humanity was moving down the avenues; they were coming on Váci Avenue, on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Avenue, but on Marx Square many stopped in hesitation: Which way now? The piled-up streetcars stood motionless where they had gotten stuck in their tracks, with the lights burning in the empty compartments. There were about 80,000 people stranded around the edges of the square, on the banks of this vast intersection. They were singing, shouting demands, having visions, speechifying. A crowd, half a million strong, was already in front of the Parliament building. They demanded that the Russians go home, and clamored for Imre Nagy to make a speech.
Wall Street Opinion Journal Stefan Beck August 18, 2006
Experiencing firsthand the glamour–and backbreaking labor–of archaeology.
I’m no Marco Polo. My colleagues at work have visited Russia, Guatemala and New Zealand; I once spent a night in Paris, Ky. A trip to exotic Pittsburgh in my early college years was ruined when a hobo brandished a knife at me for telling a bad joke. Chastened by this brush with the Other, I spent my study-abroad semester writing a screenplay in New Britain, Conn. I didn’t have a passport anyway.
GREEK ORTHODOX ARCHDIOCESE OF AMERICA August 8, 2006
NEW YORK – On Wednesday, August 2, 2006, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine signed an Assembly and Senate Joint Resolution urging the Government of Turkey to stop racial and religious discrimination, and immediately recognize the religious authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Christian Church. The State of New Jersey is the first State in the Union to pass such a Resolution, thus setting the tone for other States to follow in the renouncing of Turkey’s deplorable treatment of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and other minority religions within their country. Legislators Steve Corodemus, Upendra Chmukula, Joseph Kyrillos and Bob Smith sponsored the resolution.
Ed. Since we have been discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, here is a piece with a different point of view by an Japanese Anglican Bishop who witnessed the bomb.
FrontPageMagazine.com Mark D. Tooley August 8, 2006
The outgoing chief bishop of The Episcopal Church, having presided over that 2 million member denomination’s spiraling schism over homosexuality, squeezed time into his schedule this week for an apologetic visit to Hiroshima.
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold expressed “repentance” over the U.S. atomic strike on the Japanese city 61 years ago. He is also very worried about current U.S. foreign and military policies, of course.
“I express my own profound sorrow, regret and repentance for the suffering the citizens of this city bore on August 6, 1945, and those in Nagasaki on August 9,” the presiding bishop told worshippers at Hiroshima’s Church of the Resurrection. “I further issue a call to continuing mutual repentance and reconciliation.”
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Townhall.com George Will July 9, 2006
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, July 11, the United States will become more geographically stable than it has ever been. It will have been 17,126 days since the admission of Hawaii to statehood on Aug. 21, 1959. The longest previous span between expansions of the nation was the 17,125 days between the admission of Arizona on Feb. 14, 1912, and the admission of Alaska on Jan. 3, 1959. Since then the nation has become, in a sense, smaller through the annihilation of distance and, to some extent, of difference.
Townhall.com George Will July 4, 2006
WASHINGTON — For your Fourth of July reading, open a mind-opening book about an immensely important American war concerning which you may know next to nothing. King Philip’s War, the central event in a best-seller that is one of this summer’s publishing surprises, left a lasting imprint on America.
Wall Street Opinion Journal Brian M. Carney Tuesday, June 27, 2006
A dissonant note of moral equivalence at an exhibit on communist horrors.
ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y.–Tucked out of the way on the top floor of the main building here is a curious little traveling exhibit about the Soviet Gulag. On the day that I visited, no signs in the lobby of the Ellis Island Museum announced the presence of the exhibit; one happened upon it through determination or by chance, stepping with little warning from display cases devoted to the hopes of immigrants seeking freedom or opportunity in America into the hopeless deprivation and cruelty of Siberian death camps.
Führerbunker floor planFor the first time ever, Adolf Hitler’s underground hideaway, the infamous Führerbunker, is to be marked with a historical sign.
Construction of the Führerbunker, which was located beneath the garden of the Reichskanzlei (Reichschancellery) in Berlin, was completed in 1939, and the structure remained intact throughout the war.
Wall Street Opinion Journal Matthew Kaminksi June 10, 2006
Is Poland’s last communist leader an opportunist, cynic, or “evolutionary revolutionary”?
WARSAW–Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader, is still fighting hard to shape history. Press any hot button and the general holds forth in long, clear, numbing sentences, as if back at a Party Plenum. Martial law imposed by him in the early hours of Dec. 13, 1981, to break Solidarity and Lech Walesa? That, he claims–as he has always done–”saved Poland” from the Soviets. His unswerving loyalty to Moscow and a decade of strongman rule? That paved the way for democracy. Gen. Jaruzelski’s self-obsession has filled several memoirs, including his Polish best-seller, “Martial Law: Why?” A man so closely associated with the darkest episodes in his nation’s recent past wants the future not so much to forgive him as to understand him–and even give him a little credit for a free, undivided Europe.
Townhall.com Buchanan May 23, 2006
Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.
The article is interesting in showing how St. George has been brought into English history and culture. Having said that, I don’t think the Orthodox will flinch under Muslim disapproval. I don’t know about the English, however.
Interfax News April 12, 2006
The history of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian cosmonauts began at the moment when a human being was first launched into space. These relations developed even when the Soviet state waged an intensive struggle with religion. In recent years these relations have been given a special positive impulse. Some episodes in the cooperation between the Orthodox Church and Russian cosmonauts have been related to Interfax-Religion by one of its principal eyewitnesses, Colonel Valentin Petrov, associate professor at the Gagarin Air Force Academy.
JBL: It’s always interesting that controversial Christian historical topics are released at Easter (or Christmas).
San Francisco Chronicle John Noble Wilford, Laurie Goodstein April 7, 2006
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.
In this text, scholars reported Thursday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four Gospels in the New Testament.
Here Jesus was said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, “you will exceed” the other disciples.
