Christianity

What We Can’t Not Know – Universal Moral Truths

What We Can't Not Know by Chuck Colson –
Want to clear the room at a party? Just say something like, “There is such a thing as right and wrong, and everybody knows it.”

The great commandment in this postmodern, relativistic world of ours is this: “Don’t impose your morality on me.”

Obviously, it didn’t used to be this way. Once, if you mentioned basic moral rules like the Ten Commandments, everyone would agree that they were right. Not only were they right for all, but they were also known to all. Everyone knew that honoring parents and telling the truth is right for everyone. And everyone knew that deliberately taking innocent human life, sleeping with your neighbor’s spouse, and mocking God is wrong for everyone. Today all of that has changed.

Or has it? According to University of Texas Professor J. Budziszewski, it really hasn’t — at least not in the way you might think. [Read more…]

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Shhhh: Judeo-Christian Culture Is Actually…Superior

Judeo Christian Morality Bible by Stuart Schwartz –
Shhh. I am about to say is something so radical that it will jangle every politically correct nerve in your body. And yet…it is true. The founding and traditional culture of the United States, its Judeo-Christian heritage and boots-on-the-ground decency is superior to all other cultures this world has produced. And it certainly beats the radical worldview (part Marxist, part Islamic, and all thug) that our political and media elites — led by the president of the United States — are imposing upon us.

Scream if you must — but then think. Think about what former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain — Christian and African-American — and so many others recognize as “the greatest country in the world.” Outside of the cocoons of condescension wrapping the university and urban strongholds of our trendy elites, this is recognized not as jingoism but truth. [Read more…]

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Metropolitan Hilarion: Life is given for us to exercise in virtue

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev by Metropolitan Hilarion –
But there in one thing that we all should know: life is given for us to exercise in virtue and to get rid of vices, sinful habits and inclinations. If the Lord lost hope for our reformation He would put an end to our earthly life to make us move into a different existence. If the Lord has patience for us here, on earth, it means that there is a hope for our reformation. […]

On April 3, the Fourth Sunday of Lent when the memory of St. John Climacus is celebrated, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relations, celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the church of Our Lady the Joy to All the Afflicted in Moscow.

After the service, the DECR chairman greeted the archpastors present in the church and delivered a sermon reminding the faithful that the Church commemorated on that day St. John Climacus known to most believers as the author of the book The Ladder of Divine Ascent. He said:

“This book was written in the 7th century for the monks on Mount Sinai, but it is still relevant today. It presents the entire spiritual life of a Christian as a ladder of ascent to God. [Read more…]

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To Seek God and to Let Oneself Be Found by Him

Faith and Reason Define Christianity by Deacon Keith Fournier –
Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed, in order to accept it: man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility

Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda, but as an inner necessity, consequent upon the nature of their faith: the God in whom they believed was the God of all people, the one, true God, who had revealed himself in the history of Israel and ultimately in his Son, thereby supplying the answer for which all people, in their innermost hearts, are waiting. […]

Yesterday, I covered the launch of Pope benedict XVI’s outreach called “The Court of the Gentiles” intended to encourage a dialogue with non-believers. The effort debuted in Paris over the weekend. It already has appointments in Tirana, Albania, Stockholm, Sweden, numerous locations in the United Sates, Canada and Asia. This effort is the inspiration of Pope Benedict XVI, the Missionary Pope, and is being led by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi who heads the Vatican’s culture office. [Read more…]

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Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie: Transgender Activists, Cultural Revolution

Christian Marriage Sacrament by Deacon Keith Fournier –
The Gender Identity Movement demands the recognition of a ‘right’ to choose one’s gender and laws which accommodate, fund, and enforce such a ‘right’

The “Gender Identity Movement” is dangerous. It is a part of a broader Cultural Revolution which substitutes an entirely different view of the dignity of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing, human sexuality, marriage and the family and the moral basis of a free society than that which formed Western Civilization. […]

In the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Christians of Rome he writes of a progressive moral corruption which can occur to people who “while claiming to be wise become fools.” St. Paul pulls no punches saying of such people that they “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” He also addresses the consequences of their immoral choices and actions.( Romans 1) In this strongly worded admonition, the Apostle is quite clear in affirming the early Church’s rejection of homosexual practices in a list of debased behaviors which grow out of moral corruption.

Anyone who maintains that there is no reference to the rejection of homosexual practices in the Bible has to remove this entire chapter and many other biblical references. They must also get rid of early Church documents which uniformly condemn homosexual practices. [Read more…]

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The Reasonableness of Christianity

Jesus Christ - Lord God and Saviorby Jack Kerwick –
Contrary to atheistic boilerplate, Christianity is anything but a crutch for the weak minded and timid hearted. Christians have gone to great lengths over the centuries to show that, while reason is no substitute for faith, and while it can never occupy anything other than a subordinate position with respect to the latter, reason can indeed establish at least the probability of God’s existence. Some Christians have gone further than this to argue that God’s existence is rationally demonstrable — that is, that it can be established with certainty by reason alone.

St. Anselm, the eleventh century bishop of Canterbury, is famous for his “ontological proof” for God. Anselm tried to show that there was no way that God can’t exist. The idea of God, Anselm reasoned, is the idea of a being “than which none greater can be conceived.” When the atheist and the theist deny and affirm God’s existence respectively, it is this idea that they have in mind. But since it is better for a being to have existence than for it to lack it, and since God is, by definition, the best, the conclusion is inescapable: God necessarily exists. It is no more possible, logically, to affirm the idea of God while simultaneously denying His real existence than it is possible to affirm the definition of a “bachelor” while denying that a bachelor is an unmarried man. [Read more…]

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Vigorous Defense, Getting Serious About DOMA

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –

As I have told you, the President and the attorney general will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts. It’s outrageous, it’s disingenuous, but it’s not the end of the story. As a co-equal branch of government, Congress has a stake in seeing that the laws it enacted are enforced and defended in the courts. The question is “Are they serious about doing so?”

Federal law requires the attorney general to notify the House if he decides not to defend the constitutionality of a federal statute. Federal law also authorizes the Senate and the House of Representatives to intervene in litigation over the constitutionality of a federal statute. What’s more, the House can hire outside counsel to represent its interests in the litigation if that’s the best way to defend the law. [Read more…]

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What’s so appealing about Orthodoxy?

St Sophia Orthodox Churchby Rod Dreher –

I came to Orthodoxy in 2006, a broken man. I had been a devoutly observant and convinced Roman Catholic for years, but had my faith shattered in large part by what I had learned as a reporter covering the sex abuse scandal. It had been my assumption that my theological convictions would protect the core of my faith through any trial, but the knowledge I struggled with wore down my ability to believe in the ecclesial truth claims of the Roman church (I wrote in detail about that drama here). For my wife and me, Protestantism was not an option, given what we knew about church history, and given our convictions about sacramental theology. That left Orthodoxy as the only safe harbor from the tempest that threatened to capsize our Christianity.

In truth, I had longed for Orthodoxy for some time, for the same reasons I, as a young man, found my way into the Catholic Church. It seemed to me a rock of stability in a turbulent sea of relativism and modernism overtaking Western Christianity. [Read more…]

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Distant Recall

by Ken Myers –
In his 1983 Templeton address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began by recounting a memory from his childhood. “I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why this has happened.’”

As a telegraphic summary of the source of Russian ills under communism, it would be hard to improve on those four initial words. Since Solzhenitsyn spoke them, they have served many Christian pundits in the West as a description of the disorders within liberal democratic regimes. But while this slogan boasts a certain scrappy punchiness, it doesn’t offer us much help in figuring out how the memory lapse in question was provoked. [Read more…]

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Social Leveling: Socialism and Secularism

Acton Instituteby Hunter Baker –

Social leveling is something that we typically associate with the destruction of material differences between human beings. It is the socialist dream of a classless society in which distinctions, usually the result of economic variation, are made irrelevant. The state, empowered by the political action of the masses (or at least a group claiming to speak for the masses), works to gain control of the wealth and property of a society and then to redistribute it in such a way as to make people equal. It should be obvious that this type of action vastly increases the power of the state because it becomes the effective owner of all property.

Although socialism aims to wipe out material inequality, it may merely present a new opportunity for sin. James Madison noted that taking control of the property in a state will not make people equal for more than a very short time. They have different talents, abilities, and levels of energy. A new elite will assert itself, just as it has in every nation with a communist revolution.[Read more…]

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