Orthodox Editors

On Independence Day: The Gift of Life

Life is a Gift from Godby Fr. James Farfaglia –
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776). We have heard and read these famous words many times. Yet, it should be interesting for us to note that of the three fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the founding fathers of our nation recognize life as the first of these three unalienable rights.

Why is the right to life the first of these God given rights?

Life is a gift from God. The first pages of the Holy Bible direct our gaze to the awesome gift of life. [Read more…]

American Leftism: An Infantile Disorder

American Leftists Cry Baby Democrats by Victor Volsky –
In his fascinating essay “The Metaphysics of Contemporary Theft” describing the rising tide of parasitism engulfing the U.S., Victor Davis Hanson suggests that the Obama Administration only pretends to want to destroy the American way of life so as not to deprive itself of its source of sustenance:

Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host. That does not mean it has not done a lot of damage and will not do even more in the next two years; only that it never quite wanted to see cap and trade legislation enacted, blanket amnesty, Guantanamo shut down, or Predators ended; these were simply crude slurs by which to demonize Bush, ways of acquiring power and influence, but not a workable plan of living. Note that Obama is now zealous on just those issues which he could have easily rammed through his Democratically controlled congress in 2009-10 when he had large majorities, such as amnesty and cap and trade

[Read more…]

In a New York Minute: Coming Persecution of Christians over True Marriage?

New York marriage - persecution by Deacon Keith Fournier –
The truth about marriage is not only a ‘religious’ construct, it is objectively true

The leaders of the homosexual equivalency movement are dedicated to building a society where the positive law of the Nation forces us all to call to be a marriage what can never be a marriage – or face the police power of the State. They scored what they believe was a decisive “victory” for their brave new world in New York last week. History will prove them wrong. However, with the tragic act of the legislature in New York, hostility toward Christians will continue to grow.

Sadly, even those who knew they were doing something which violated the Natural Law and threatens the common good – voting to call something a marriage which can never be a marriage – succumbed to the pressure of the mob last week. And the mob celebrated in the streets of New York on Sunday. The mob also placed on display some of the behaviors which will soon be protected by the positive or “civil” law of the State. To borrow from the refrain of the old Eagles song, “In a New York Minute, everything can change. In a New York Minute, things can get pretty strange.” [Read more…]

President Quixote’s Legacy: Confused, Ill-Educated and Not Too Bright

Incompetent in Chief Obama by Monty Pelerin –
The number of Obama supporters seems inversely related to his time in office. Many wonder what happened to “The One We Are Waiting For.”

Obama assumed office in difficult economic times. After a couple of years of excuses — which included “the problems were worse than we knew” and the generic, all-purpose “it’s Bush’s fault” — Obama now owns the original problems and new ones of his own doing. An incomplete report card on his “accomplishments” would include the following:

  • the economy worsened
  • discretionary military efforts (“kinetic” if you prefer) increased
  • an unpopular, flawed health care plan was forced on the public
  • inflation increased, especially in critical goods like food and gasoline
  • job prospects decreased
  • the stimulus failed miserably
  • “transparency in government” became a laugh-line for late night TV
  • corruption in government accelerated to Chicago-style warp speed [Read more…]

Stefan Kanfer: Curb Your Dogma

Catholic Schools Matter by Stefan Kanfer

Apostate David Mamet confronts the secular religion of liberalism.
“I had my first conversation with a conservative at the age of 60.” On the face of it, that claim seems absurd: David Mamet must have dwelt in a hermetically sealed environment for six decades. But the playwright/director is telling the truth; he’s spent his career in show business, an ecosystem as airtight as academia.

Unlike so many of his colleagues, however, Mamet began to question the shibboleths and doctrines he had long taken for granted. In four years, the 64-year-old moved inexorably from left to right, like the hour hand on a clock. In The Secret Knowledge, his latest collection of essays, he confesses that “I examined my Liberalism, and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and time again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws.” But there was a profound difference; the gambler hurts primarily himself. “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.” [Read more…]

Economic Slavery: Modern-Day Indentured Servitude

Economic Slavery Indentured Servitude by Frank Ryan –
The “tax the rich” hysteria gripping this nation is absolute insanity. Cries to raise taxes on those with incomes over $250,000 or some other magical number are unbelievable.

As a CPA, I find the “tax the rich” schemes to be pure junk science. To that end, the illogical precepts underpinning these arguments must be exposed. (Incidentally, by way of full disclosure, I would not be personally affected by these tax increases. I merely want to expose the scheme for the fraud that it is.)

Many in Congress have attempted to make earning an income distasteful, so those pitiable enough to earn an income are subjected to public scorn. Politicians and many in the media are collectively pushing policies to “punish those people” by taxing them into economic slavery and involuntary servitude. [Read more…]

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…]

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…]

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…]

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…]