Orthodox Editors

Bishop Michael: Affirming the Sanctity of Marriage

Bishop Michael OCA OrthodoxARCHPASTORAL LETTER RE-AFFIRMING THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE

June 24, 2011 Feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

Beloved Fathers and Mothers, Brothers and Sisters in the Lord:

Christ is in our midst! – He is and ever shall be!

On this very day, we have witnessed the successful efforts of public officials in the State of New York to legally re-define the meaning of marriage to include unions between two persons of the same gender. It is important for us, as Christians of the Orthodox Church, preserving the Tradition of teaching the truth handed down by the Lord Himself, “the faith which was once for all delivered to the Saints” (Jude 3), to re-affirm the meaning of marriage given to us in His Sacred Scripture.

In the document, Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctify of Life, written and adopted by the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America in 1992, we read (in part) the following summary of the teaching of our Faith on this matter:

(1) God wills that men and women marry, becoming husbands and wives. He commands them to increase and multiply in the procreation of children, being joined into “one flesh” by His divine grace and love. He wills that human beings live within families (Genesis 1:27; 2:21-24; Orthodox Marriage Service). [Read more…]

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Yes, We Still Have a Prayer

Pray for America prayer important by Quin Hillyer –
Pray. Really. Pray. Praying might just be what we need if we want this blessed country to thrive as a beacon of freedom.

It’s always a bit of a risk, and can be borderline off-putting, to intertwine prayer and politics in an overt way, or even to seem to do so. Readers or listeners rightly recoil when somebody suggests that God takes sides in politics, or that his (the person’s) own politics are more godly than that of his opponents, or (worse) that he undertook his own candidacy or cause because God “told” him to do so. That’s not what this is about. This also isn’t one of those “the-sky-is-falling” sorts of rants in which the point is that the nation is somehow on the verge of utter disaster and can be saved only by openly miraculous, divine intervention. Things aren’t great in the good’ol USA right now, but we’re not (quite) at that extremity yet.

Instead, at issue here is something more subtle. At issue is a country that has lost its way, in part because far too many millions of its individual citizens have lost their own way in their daily lives. [Read more…]

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Immune to Reform

Teacher Unions Undermine Education Communist Teachers’ unions will never willingly give up their power, says Terry Moe.
by Marcus A. Winters –
Last fall, I took my wife—a well-informed, intelligent professional who unintentionally married into the contentious world of education reform—to see Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the plight of America’s public schools, Waiting for Superman. She left the theater convinced that our schools face clear problems that have some clear solutions. But she was puzzled about why reforming the system was so difficult. She knew that the teachers’ unions had something to do with what was wrong with the schools, but just how they wielded so much power baffled her. How is it that the unions manage to protect preposterous arrangements like lifetime job security and seniority-based layoffs while forcing students to attend schools that everyone knows are failing? I’d guess that many people emerge from Guggenheim’s film asking similar questions.

In his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe provides the answers. Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook. [Read more…]

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American Denial

American Flag Distress Denial by Steve McCann –
Many of us who immigrated to the United States from either war-ravaged or totalitarian countries, where freedom was either unknown or the quintessence of daydreams, find ourselves baffled by a trait common to the majority of Americans: the belief, consciously or subconsciously, that the worst cannot happen here. That somehow the demoralizing images and disturbing experiences of those elsewhere are confined to those poor souls and will never find their way to American shores.

While this characteristic is found across all political and economic strata, it is particularly rampant among the current ruling class in the United States, who by their control of the culture and education, have ingrained that sort of thinking into the psyche of the vast majority of Americans. [Read more…]

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Where We Dare Not Go

past present future orthodox by Fr. Stephen Freeman –
My previous article spoke about the “moment” and the unique place it holds within our lives. It is strange, therefore, that the present moment is a place we seem to avoid – a place we dare not go. There are many ways to speculate about such an avoidance. In the experience of many, it is a place that seems almost impossible to read – which is strange indeed when we consider the fact that it is actually the only thing truly present to us.

The present moment, however, has some unique properties in human experience that make it a place we prefer to avoid. It is not past or future – and is thus much less subject to imagination. The imagination is a place where we find ourselves empowered, though the power we have is delusional and only destructive of the self. We may play mental games with the past, imagining that the truth is whatever we think it is, and imagine our own reactions as well. Never mind the fact that our imagination is most often quite wrong and our reactions utterly beside the point. The imaginary past becomes a “new history” which takes its place in the narrative of our lives. As such, our lives become a lie. [Read more…]

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The Post-Economic Age

socialism communism a failure by Bruce Walker –
The Left, grounded in the childish superstitions of Marx, views life as economics. One awful flowering of this dangerous silliness is the proliferation of victims. The resource-rich nations of long decolonized Africa and Asia, for example, remain poor because of imperialist exploitation by America and Europe. Women and racial minorities are still, officially, “exploited,” although how that can be taken seriously forty years after the Women’s Liberation Movement and fifty years after centerpiece Civil Rights legislation is never really considered. The Left needs victims and victimizers and the easiest way to invent these clumps of humanity is dreary socialism and its dull-normal offspring, like feminism.

Most of all, the Left needs all things to be, at their core, economic. Although many Americans and many Europeans face daunting problems finding work and paying bills, this is less the result of true economic problems and more the consequence of the awareness by Leftists that the full flowering of prosperity would end the need for their noxious hatreds and coveting. [Read more…]

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The Cost of Adaptations Limits Evolution

Bacteria Limited in Evolutionby Brian Thomas, M.S. –
Living forms supposedly evolved by adapting to environmental challenges. It is generally assumed that they did this by gradually acquiring the needed genetic mutations until brand new features arose and whole creatures eventually morphed into totally different ones. But does real science support this story?

Experiments with bacteria continue to show that although adaptations do occur, they are bound by hard limits to how much change can take place.1 And these limits also circumscribe evolution’s potential.

Two separate studies in the June 3, 2011, issue of Science arrived at the same conclusion. One tested the effects of multiple mutations on the “fitness” of mutant versions of a methanol-eating bacteria called Methylobacterium.2 Researchers measured the relative fitness of a mutant by directly comparing its growth rate with non-mutants in the limited resource environment to which the mutants had adapted. [Read more…]

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Shovel-Ready Punch Line

Obama Shovel Readyby Jonah Goldberg –
“Shovel-ready was not as … uh … shovel-ready as we expected,” Barack Obama joked the other day at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Republicans jumped on Obama’s comment as insensitive. “He joked about the wildly mistaken predictions he and others at the White House made a couple of years back about the job-creating potential of the stimulus,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Well, I don’t think the 14 million Americans who are looking for jobs right now find any of this very funny.”

I’m sure they don’t, but the fact that the president laid an egg when he tried to be self-deprecating isn’t the scandal here.

After all, Obama has pretty much said the same thing several times. In a New York Times magazine profile last October, the president admitted he had to learn the hard way that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” [Read more…]

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How Russians survived militant atheism to embrace God

St. Basil Cathedral Moscowby Walter Rodgers –
Today, less than 20 years after the collapse of the officially atheistic Soviet Union, Russia has emerged as the most God-believing nation in Europe. That’s a testament to the devotion of babushkas who kept the flames of faith alive in the face of state-sponsored repression.

Sometimes really huge news stories occur that receive almost no notice, but they are seismic just the same. Today, less than 20 years after the collapse of the officially atheistic Soviet Union, Russia has emerged as the most God-believing nation in Europe, more so than Roman Catholic Italy or Protestant Britain. The independent Public Opinion Fund poll discovered this spring that 82 percent of Russians now say they are religious believers.

Given the brutal and ruthless repression by Joseph Stalin of the Russian Orthodox Church and all religion, this is truly a remarkable statistic. It is a testament to the babushkas who would not capitulate to Soviet bullying. Hoorah for the hero grandmothers of the motherland! Against all odds they have won. [Read more…]

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The ‘Achievement Gap’ Fraud

by John T. Bennett –
Our educational system is self-destructing because of a fraud known as the “achievement gap.” One result of that fraud is that public school bureaucrats are taking away opportunities from good students in a misguided effort to help underperforming students.

When the mainstream media reports on progressive social policies, the results can be astonishing. A recent Washington Post “Metro” section featured a stunning educational policy: a school policy that ruins opportunities for bright students in order to help the less bright students (“Dumping honors classes for AP,” May 22). The Post reports that honors classes are being abolished from the curriculum in Fairfax, VA, and many schools across the country. The purpose of abolishing the honors courses: to help “underrepresented minority students.” With that article, the Post unwittingly exhibited the core of the problem with education in this country: The flawed system and students’ low culture. Each factor combines in a downward spiral to give us the bad educational results we have today. [Read more…]

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