OrthodoxNet.com Blog

American Thinker | Jude Acosta | May. 3, 2008

God bless America. I mean that with all sincerity. We are a nation of hopefuls and always have been. We march on Washington. We cure diseases that have wracked humanity for eons. We break records and run faster-than-four-minute miles. We split atoms and conquer space. We manifest our destinies and defy the presence of gorges, rivers, and mountains that threaten to block our collective will. Continue Reading »

OrthodoxyToday.org | Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev | Mar. 14, 2008

The recent debate on euthanasia is impossible to examine apart from the main problems in the dialogue between the religious world-view and Western secular humanism over the values which should lie at the foundation of the ‘new world order.’ In our opinion, these arguments demonstrate the anti-human essence of atheistic humanism, which lays claims to being a universal ideology and openly opposes itself to the traditional notions of life and death. Continue Reading »

Daily Mail | James Mills | October 23, 2007

As devoted foster parents, Vincent and Pauline Matherick have provided a stable family home for almost 30 vulnerable children.

But the couple’s latest foster son is being taken away from them by social workers because they have refused to promote homosexuality.

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Front Page Magazine | Myron Magnet in City Journal | July 30, 2007

Two April days threw a clarifying light on the state of race in America. On the 11th, North Carolina’s attorney general exonerated three white Duke students of the rape charges that a black stripper had lodged with much press fanfare a year earlier. The next day, CBS fired shock jock Don Imus for calling black Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” Between them, these events suggest an explanation for America’s most vexed social question: in a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

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Reuters Jon Boyle, Nov. 27, 2006

PARIS (Reuters) - Stoned, beaten and insulted, their vehicles torched by crowds of hostile youths, French police say they face an urban guerrilla war when they enter the run-down neighborhoods that ring the major cities.

“Our role is to guarantee the safety of people and property but the great difficulty today is that police are having problems ensuring their own safety,” said Jerome Hanarte of the Alliance-Police Nationale union.

Bedside television interviews with officers hospitalized after beatings in “les banlieues,” or suburbs, support statistics showing a 6.7 percent jump in violent crime in the 12 months to August.

Fourteen officers are hurt every day in the line of duty, unions estimate, and law and order is sure to feature prominently in next year’s presidential election.

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New Advent Bishop Thomas Doran August 17, 2006

I want to touch on this matter before we get too close to the November madness. As human beings, as citizens of a “first world country,” as Americans, and as Catholics, most importantly, we have to take count of the circumstances in which we live. We know that the only creatures of God that outlast time are those created having intellect and will. All other things, with the passage of time, break up or break down.

Many of the issues that confront us are serious, and we know by now that the political parties in our country are at loggerheads as to how to solve them. We know, for instance, that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people.

The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation. These things they unabashedly espouse, profess and promote. Their continuance in public office is a clear and present danger to our survival as a nation.
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Human Events Patrick McNamara July 13, 2006

Anti-war House members teamed up with activist group Code Pink today to denounce the Bush Administration and call for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

“We are proud to join them in expressing our shame and disgust at the Bush Administration’s dishonest, immoral policy,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D.-Calif.).

The congresswoman also said that it is the presence of U.S. forces that is causing the violence and insurrection in Iraq.

Woolsey was joined by other outspoken lawmakers such as Representatives Barbara Lee (D.-Calif.), Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.), Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) and Cynthia McKinney (D.-Ga.) who said, “Those of us who opposed this war from the beginning were right.”

Acting as an emcee of sorts for the press conference was long-time left-wing activist Medea Benjamin, representing Code Pink. The group, whose news release describes it as a “women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement,” was there to plug its ongoing hunger strike. Benjamin said nearly 4,000 people have joined the fast in some form.

Woolsey said she joined the hunger strike (for the day) yesterday, because she “wanted to highlight this grave injustice of the Iraq occupation.” She and other speakers likened their own fasts to those of Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Police say gays accused of slurs

Boston Globe
Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff July 14, 2006

PROVINCETOWN — Town leaders here are holding a public meeting today to air concerns about slurs and bigoted behavior. And this time, they say, it’s gay people who are displaying intolerance.

Police say they logged numerous complaints of straight people being called “breeders” by gays over the July Fourth holiday weekend. Jamaican workers reported being the target of racial slurs. And a woman was verbally accosted after signing a petition that opposed same-sex marriage, they said.

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CNSNews.com - More than 200 liberal organizations launched a nationwide campaign Tuesday to halt federal funding for abstinence-until-marriage programs. Conservatives responded that lawmakers should “stay the course” on abstinence education and reject the “old snake oil” of comprehensive sex education…

Townhall.com Burt Prelutsky May 23, 2006

I am not a religious man. I’m neither proud of that nor ashamed. I merely state that fact to establish where I’m coming from. I have friends who are believers and friends who are not. Where religion is concerned, I believe in live and let live. I only wish that the ACLU shared that attitude. I don’t like to describe myself as an agnostic or an atheist because I don’t care to align myself with the people whose own religion consists of a profound antipathy to everybody else’s.

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Townhall.com Mary Katharine Ham May 24, 2006

“I was aiming to follow in the footsteps of one of my role-models, Muhammad Atta.”

–Mohammad Taheri-azar

Do you remember Taheri-azar? The 25-year-old Iranian graduate of the University of North Carolina rented an SUV in March and drove it into The Pit, a campus gathering place for UNC students. He accelerated into the standard college crowd of preachers, smokers, gawkers, and cause-hawkers. He hit nine people and injured six. None died, much to Taheri-azar’s chagrin.

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Interfax

MOSCOW. April 4 (Interfax) - The Russian Orthodox Church should develop a universal approach to human rights based on moral norms andcombining various traditions, said Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kirill.

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Lifesite John-Henry Westen

Network cites Canadian hate crimes law as reason for not releasing program in Canada

Two days ago, LifeSiteNews was forwarded a firestorm of emails from faithful Catholics in Canada regarding the world’s largest Catholic media network - Eternal Word Television Network - not airing programs on homosexuality in Canada and Europe.  The emails referred to an exchange between a Canadian viewer of the network and a producer at the network.

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The New Criterion

In their continuing effort to raise consciousness, spread enlightenment, and deprecate the traditions that made Britain Britain, the BBC has posted extensive information on major world religions on their internet site (www.bbc.co.uk/religion). A friend directed us to the section on Islam. It makes instructive reading for anyone wishing to chart the progress of the virus of multiculturalism—that odd compact of self-righteousness, nihilism, and pusillanimity—in elite British society.

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Meet Rod Dreher, a conservative who is critical of capitalism.

Wall Street Opinion Journal GEORGE H. NASH Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Rod Dreher, a columnist and editor at the Dallas Morning News, is a self-confessed member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. As a lapsed Protestant who converted to Roman Catholicism several years ago, he is an unabashed religious and social conservative. He has little use for the morally relativist and libertine tendencies of modern liberalism. Too often, he says, “the Democrats act like the Party of Lust.”

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Porto Alegre, 17:04

Liberal reforms in Protestant churches, allowing female clergy and same-sex marriage may prompt Orthodox churches to consider a tactical alliance with Roman Catholicism to defend traditional Christian values, Russian Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev told journalists in the Brazilian town of Porto Alegre.

“The gap between the traditional wing, represented mainly by Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church, and the liberal wing, represented by many Protestant churches, is only growing day by day,” he said

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WASHINGTON BUREAU: Terry Mattingly’s religion column for 2/15/06.

One of the demonstrators was a small child with a placard that said, “Whoever insults the prophet kill him.” Another marcher wore a suicide bomber costume.

Other signs in London said: “Behead those who insult Islam,” “Europeans take a lesson from 9/11″ and “Prepare for the REAL Holocaust.” The organizer of the Feb. 3 event told the BBC that he looked forward to the day when “the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street.”

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New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, is undergoing treatment for his “increasing dependence on alcohol,” Robinson said in a letter to the 49 churches in his diocese.

Robinson, 58, voluntarily checked himself into an undisclosed facility on Feb. 1 for a four-week stay. Robinson said in the letter, dated Monday (Feb. 13), that he had the support of his partner, Mark Andrew, and his two daughters.

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Robert Woodson applies tested, anti-liberal principles to combating inner-city violence.

ROBERT WOODSON is the founder and head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE). A former civil rights activist and community organizer, he is one of the many 1960s-era liberals who was mugged by reality. In Woodson’s case, it was the reality that the civil rights movement had become a middle-class cause with little relevance to impoverished neighborhoods.

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If everything is marriage, then nothing is.

Canada, you don’t know the half of it. In mid-January, Canada was rocked by news that a Justice Department study had called for the decriminalization and regulation of polygamy. Actually, two government studies recommended decriminalizing polygamy. (Only one has been reported on.) And even that is only part of the story. Canadians, let me be brutally frank. You are being played for a bunch of fools by your legal-political elite. Your elites mumble a confusing jargon to your face to keep you from understanding what they really have in mind.

Language Exam

Let’s try a little test. Translate the following phrases into English:

1. Canada needs to move “beyond conjugality.”
2. Canada needs to “reconsider the continuing legal privileging of marriage and other conjugal relationships.”
3. Once gay marriage is legalized, Canada will be able to “consider whether the legal privileges and burdens now assigned to marriage and other conjugal relationships can be justified.”
4. Canada needs to question “whether conjugality is an appropriate marker for determining legal rights and obligations.”

[Answers: The English translation of #1,# 2, and #4 is: “Canada should abolish marriage.” The translation of #3 is: “Once we legalize gay marriage, we can move on to the task of abolishing marriage itself.”]

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