Orthodox Editors

Vatican II and the Orthodox Bishops

Fr. Thomas Hopko
Fr. Thomas Hopko

10/14/2010 – Fr. Thomas Hopko –
Orthodox Christians devoted to accountability are surely aware that accountability in behavior cannot be separated from accountability in understanding since practice (praxis) is necessarily connected to vision (theoreia).

This conviction inspires me, given the present state of things, to raise the following question:

Is it possible that the teaching of the Second Vatican Council about the ministry of bishops in the Roman Catholic Church is now being taught and practiced in an adapted and altered form in our Orthodox churches today?

Let me explain why I raise such a question.

According to the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, following Vatican I and the Council of Trent, bishops are not organically connected to the specific dioceses in which they serve. They rather have their episcopal position and power by virtue of their personal sacramental consecration as bishops. [Read more…]

Hayek, Libertarians, and Conservatives

The Road to Serfdom10/17/2010 – Ron Lipsman –
Sixty-six years after its original publication, Friedrich Hayek’s masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, continues to inspire legions of both mature and aspiring devotees of individual liberty, free markets and limited government. Hayek’s explanations of why collectivist planning must inevitably lead to tyranny are simple and logical, yet also profound and thoroughly convincing.

Hayek’s grand tome, The Constitution of Liberty, published sixteen years later, contains more brilliant reasoning and forehead-slapping insights — this time more from a “political/sociological” point of view than via the economic slant in The Road to Serfdom. But The Constitution of Liberty ends with a special postscript entitled “Why I am Not a Conservative.” This short but devastating critique of American conservatism — as Hayek saw it in 1960 — has had a demoralizing effect on the conservative movement. [Read more…]

Social Darwinism and the Left

10/15/2010 – Jay Richards –
The charge that if you defend free markets and limited government, then you’re a Social Darwinist is a hackneyed and dishonest claim of the Left. I’m not sure who first tried to identify conservative economic policies with Social Darwinism, though Walter Mondale famously attacked (and misrepresented) Ronald Reagan in the 1980s for defending “Social Darwinism” rather than “social decency.”

In a recent column, Robert Reich indulges this nonsense once again (“Republican Economics as Social Darwinism”). The charge, of course, is that conservatives or Republicans oppose say, nationalized medicine, or a massive welfare state, or unsustainable entitlement spending, because they think society should allow the weak to be weeded out and the strong to survive. [Read more…]

The Cross in Torment

Christian Church Persecuted 10/15/2010 – Stephen Brown –

While Tariq Ramadan is hectoring Americans about “Islamophobia,” calling Muslims the new “blacks” in America, a synod is currently underway in the Vatican to save Christian communities in the Middle East’s Islamic countries from extinction. The flight of the region’s Christians to the West from the area where Christianity was born has reached such alarming proportions, Pope Benedict XVI gathered 285 delegates in Rome last Monday to investigate the phenomenon.

In his homily in St. Peter’s Cathedral to open the two-week synod, the Catholic pontiff called upon the delegates to scrutinize the situation with a “view to God” to ensure the region’s Christians can escape “discouragement” and “the temptation to flee.” The pope also indicated that the heart of problem lies in the threat Middle Eastern Christians face from Islamic radicalism, calling it, along with the international drug trade, “terroristic ideologies.

“Violent acts are apparently made in the name of God; but this is not God: they are false divinities that must be unmasked,” he said. [Read more…]

The Death of Government

10/14/2010 – Bruce Walker –
There is far too much government in our lives. Government regulates the light bulbs we can use, the process of hiring employees, the licenses which businesses need to operate, and, of course, the mammoth monster of public debt and taxes which have reached such surreal levels. Every American — man, woman, senior citizen, and infant — owes a mind-numbing $44,000 of federal debt. Each day, we are bombarded with the results of photo-ops for our president or his family, or with the president’s speeches against certain offending classes of Americans, such as the Chamber of Commerce or Fox News. [Read more…]

Eastern Christian New Media Awards: 2010 Awards Nominations Open

Eastern Christian New Media Awards 2010 10/11/2010

Nominations are now open for the best Orthodox blogs in 2010! To nominate an entrant click on the link listed below and select that Category that you would like.

Multiple nominations are welcomed and encouraged. Nominations aren’t votes, this is putting people on the ballot to be voted on later (during the voting phase). We will be accepting participants until October 31st. The categories this year have expanded by two since 2009.

Eastern Christian New Media Awards: 2010 Awards Nominations
http://ecawards.blogspot.com/2010/10/2010-awards-nominations-open.html

If you like the work that it’s being done on this blog, kindly consider nominating the OrthodoxNet.com Blog for the specific Category that best fits the articles, editorials, and other information regularly being posted here.

Is Obama’s Position on Religious Freedom ‘Mosque, Yes; Cross, No?’

Mojave_Cross_covered_02_md 10/10/2010 – Margaret Calhoun Hemenway –

It would be unimaginable for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to pursue the removal of thousands of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery, situated so near the seat of the federal government in the nation’s capital and where so many of America’s veterans and honored heroes are laid to rest. Likewise, it would be seemingly unthinkable for the ACLU to try to sue to eliminate the Senate and House chaplains (both of whom are of the Christian faith), who, in accordance with longstanding tradition, open with a prayer the upper and lower chambers each day that Congress is in session.

But like the predatory wolf that searches for the lamb at the outskirts of the flock, the ACLU targeted a lone cross — a war memorial — in California’s Mojave Desert, off a desolate highway, perhaps believing it to be an easy target for removal. The ACLU was mistaken. For ten years, a battle has been waged to preserve this solitary Latin cross, first erected in 1934 to honor World War I veterans. In fact, the Mojave Desert War Memorial is our nation’s sole congressionally designated World War I memorial.

A former National Park Service (NPS) official (who now lives in the State of Oregon) objected to the cross memorial and enlisted the ACLU to sue to remove it. [Read more…]

Two Steps Forward

Democrats communists10/10/2010 – Jeffrey Folks –
Lenin famously described his strategy for communist domination as “one step forward, two steps back.” Of course, by that he did not mean to suggest steps of equal length. The step forward was a lot more like two large steps, and the two steps back were more or less symbolic, designed to diffuse opposition.

Clearly, in the past two years the United States has moved two giant steps in the direction of socialism. We have seen the redistribution of hundreds of billions of dollars, the seizure of major industries by the state, the re-emergence of a hard-core welfare state, the virtual nationalization of healthcare, takeover by regulation of the energy and financial sectors, and much more. This resurgence of state control has been accompanied by the new power of labor unions, environmental lobbyists, tort lawyers, and state bureaucracies. But now, having reached the limit of what the public will stomach, the Leninists who run the Democratic Party see that it is time for two baby-steps back. [Read more…]

The Green War on Children

10/8/2010 – Michelle Malkin –
Halloween isn’t for another three weeks, but environmental ghouls are on the haunt. A sadistic video released by global warming fear-mongers reveals an inconvenient truth about eco-radicals: They despise the very children for whom they claim to be saving the planet.

In the opening scene of “No Pressure,” a four-minute short clip produced by carbon reduction activist group “10:10,” a teacher urges her elementary school charges to fight climate change by cutting their carbon emissions by 10 percent by Oct. 10. When a few uncooperative students object, the teacher (played by actress Gillian Anderson) presses a red button at her desk — which immediately detonates the nay-saying children. Their heads explode in graphic, bloody detail. Skin and body parts splatter all over their horrified classmates. [Read more…]

Pushing Junk Science on Children

10/6/2010 – Chuck Rogér –
Humans have angered Mother Nature. Our species must stop multiplying, give up our addiction to huge-screen HDTVs, stop eating so many steer, and travel on twenty-pound electric tricycles forty miles at a time between charging stations. Otherwise, we are doomed.

This is a story about the ruling class promoting ruling class interests. Every year, scientists for sale compete for government grants to perform “research” that advances the human-caused global warming hoax. In order to keep the hoax alive, politicians must generate a steady supply of believers to conduct “research” as well as vote for said politicians, who keep the grants flowing. [Read more…]