11/19/2010 – David Mills –
He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways cheerful young women the age of his granddaughter deal with the body’s failure as cancer begins shutting down the organs. Dying in a hospice, you lose all rights to modesty as you lose control of your body.
Few men could have found the indignities of those last few weeks more excruciating than did my father. But this was what dying of cancer is like, and my father, being the man he was, took it like a man. It was the hand he’d been dealt, and he was going to play it, as bad as it was. [Read more…]
11/18/2010 – Jeffrey Folks –
There are several factors that contribute to a nation’s future prosperity. One of the most important is an efficient and dependable supply of energy. A modern economy cannot function without adequate energy sources to power its electrical grid, supply its industries, heat its offices and homes, and fuel its transportation needs.
These facts are self-apparent, even to the left, so why is the left attempting to hamstring every promising new source of energy available to America? I can think of only one reason: because the left, as its main objective, wishes to bring America to its knees. From the left’s point of view, America is an imperialist nation that for too long has had its way in the world. Thus, for the left, the only moral position is to undermine American power and wealth. In the environmental movement as it exists today, the left has found the perfect vehicle for its assault on American power. [Read more…]
11/15/2010 – Deacon Douglas McManaman – The word ‘human’ comes from the Latin ‘humus’, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’. Man is from the earth.
I often tell my students that what they learn in the course of a semester, in their math class, for example, or in their chemistry classes, or physics, etc., took centuries for the most brilliant human beings to uncover. Once it has been uncovered, however, it appears to be so simple. Why did it take so long? This is true especially for philosophy. It takes years and years to dispose the intellect to learn such abstract truths, and from these truths it is possible to go on to demonstrate, through reason alone, the existence of God, and it is also possible, through reason alone, to show that God is one, eternal, the source of all that is good and beautiful, that He is Beauty Itself, Goodness Itself, and Truth Itself. And when we finally come to see it, we inevitably think: “This is so clear and simple; why did it take years to get this?”
The reason is that human beings, by nature, are slow. We are the highest beings on the hierarchy of material beings, but we are the lowest beings on the hierarchy of God’s intellectual creatures. [Read more…]
Each of us believes that certain things are wrong, not because we believe they are wrong, but because they really are wrong. And that applies to the moral relativist as well.
If you want to see a relativist sink into a sophistic seizure, ask him about the “virtues” of cruelty, rape, cheating, bigotry, or exploitation. Even the most liberally minded among us believe such things are wrong, even if they don’t know why.
Take the University of Maryland professor who recently engaged a member of the Genocide Awareness Project. In a ten-minute exchange on moral ethics, the professor exhibited great difficulty with the concept of morality, including the terms of the debate: human essence, value, and rights. Nevertheless, she had no difficulty calling her interlocutor’s reference to “mankind” offensive and “wrong.” [Read more…]
11/12/2010 – John Kelly –
Simply put, progressives feel that life isn’t fair. True enough, but there are endless other things that life isn’t as well. Life isn’t carefree, simple, eternal, digitally organized, or purple-green plaid. Yet we live. Most people can accept life’s troubles and have come to love life, as it is, including its frightful beauty. Yet for others, life’s summary judgment comes up negative, so they seek to force a remedy.
Life’s seeming unfairness is felt by young children who are only just sensing its deep, oceanic nature: If only mommy and daddy could always be here to hold me up. If only things weren’t so hard… [Read more…]
Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad.
As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared, they executed him and began their mission of mass murder.
When security forces broke in, the killers threw grenades to finish off the surviving Christians and detonated explosive-laden vests to kill the police. The toll was 46 parishioners and two priests killed, 78 others wounded, many in critical condition after losing limbs.
Within 48 hours, al-Qaida in Mesopotamia issued a bulletin: “All Christian centers, organizations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the (holy warriors).” [Read more…]
“Multiculturalism,” wrote the British scholar Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute, “rests on the supposition—or better, the dishonest pretense—that all cultures are equal.”
So, the argument for multiculturalism goes, no culture is superior to another, and no culture should compete with any other. And if we understand that, we can all get along just fine.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel went along with that idea for years but has recently changed her mind. Earlier this month she dared to tell a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party that multiculturalism is a failed experiment that needs to be rejected. [Read more…]
Nov. 2010 – Stanley Hauerwas – An open letter to young Christians on their way to college
“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”
Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be faithful in worship. In America, going to college is one of those heavily mythologized events that everybody tells you will “change your life,” which is probably at least half true. So don’t be foolish and imagine that you can take a vacation from church. [Read more…]
11/5/2010 – S. Fred Singer –
There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the “smoking gun” that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist. [Read more…]
Fr. John Peckby Fr. John Peck –
First of all, let me begin by saying that it is my duty, as a priest and pastor, to impose moral standards on you. Part of my job and function is to teach Christian morality and to get us, as a body, to adhere to Christian moral standards, so before you come to me with complaints about the separation of Church and state, be aware that I am doing my duty in telling you what the Church, as the Body of Christ, teaches about life and responsibility.
Moral theology in the Orthodox Church in America is pretty loosey-goosey, as is clearly evidenced by the Reflections on Voting for Orthodox Christians article that was posted, at first anonymously, on the OCA website. I have said, and will say here, that a more poorly reasoned collection of moral mish-mush does not yet exist. If you have read it, you can see that what is being said behind the lines is, ‘Things like abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell experimentation are wrong, but we don’t like the candidate who stands against these things, and anyway, capital punishment is wrong, and harming the environment is wrong.’ The statement that we are forced to become ‘reluctant republicans’ or ‘reluctant democrats’ betrays the writer’s real concern, which is to look impartial politically. He would have been very welcome by the Soviets in Russia, as a Christian who does nothing about his Christianity… [Read more…]
