The Next Sexual Revolution

From Christianity Today website. Noted by Jennifer Roback Morse on her website The Marriage Revolution.

By practicing what it preaches on marriage, the church could transform society.
A Christianity Today editorial | posted 08/27/2003

Same-sex marriage makes perfect sense–if you buy North American culture’s take on sex and marriage. More than four decades after the introduction of the Pill, hardly anyone now getting married remembers the time when pleasure, procreation, passion, companionship, and parenthood were all intimately knotted into a bundle called marriage. Without those connections, marriage has become an arena for mere self-fulfillment and sexual expression. Even the Ontario Court, in its June 10 affirmation of same-sex marriage, could describe marriage as only an expression of love and commitment. If that is all there is to marriage, why not grant the same legal benefits to committed same-sex couples as to married heterosexuals?
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Europe to the barricades

Tony Blankley, November 24, 2004

This Christmastime could be the moment when Western Europe finally joins our war on terrorism. Anti-Islamist fear and anger from the mouths of the European volk are breaking through the surface calm perpetuated by the elite European appeasers. The assassination and mutilation of Dutch filmmaker van Gogh by an Islamic fanatic — and the retaliatory fire-bombings of mosques by ethnic Dutchmen — has forced high European leaders and news outlets to begin to publicly face up to the implications of Sept. 11, 2001 and the migration of Muslims in large and hostile numbers into the heart of Europe.

From Holland’s leading newspaper, the Telegraaf, to Germany’s liberal Berliner Zeitung and Der Spiegel (roughly, the European equivalents of the The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine) has come the same heated prose that could be found in the United States in the aftermath of September 11. And here in the United States, even the liberal National Public Radio Network’s (NPR) “All Things Considered” is beginning to seriously report European volkish fury the way they usually report breathlessly on the latest developments in Brazilian rainforest depletion.

Read the entire article on the Town Hall website.

Silenced priest warns of gay crisis

If this is true the Catholic Chuch is in grave trouble.
By Julia Duin THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Starting today, 290 of the nation’s Catholic bishops will meet at the Capitol Hyatt for their yearly business meeting and to tie up loose ends on the massive sexual-abuse crisis that has shaken the U.S. Catholic Church to its core in the past two years.

Although it’s been less than a year since the church revealed that there were 10,667 cases of abuse committed by 4,392 priests in a 50-year period, the message at the meeting will be that the crisis is under control.

Read the entire article on the Washinton Times website.

Fr. Patrick Reardon: Faith alone or love and faith?

November 28, 2004 Second Sunday of Advent, Father Pat’s Pastoral Ponderings

When the Apostle Paul lists faith, hope, and love as the triad of things that “abide,” he takes care to assert, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). This superiority of love within the standard Pauline triad seems noteworthy in two ways.

First, there is the stark fact that Paul accords the supremacy to love, not faith. Let me suggest that if Paul had not made this point explicitly, there is reason to suspect that certain later readers of his epistles might have concluded, “and the greatest of these is faith.” My speculation here is justified by the plain fact that some of Paul’s later readers really did attempt to condense his teaching on justification by coining the expression “faith alone.” Pressed on the point, of course, those same students of Paul explained that real faith, living Christian faith, necessarily includes love. Love, thus, is subsumed into their full definition of faith.
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Religious Left Denounces “Moral Values” Voters

Mark Tooley, November 10, 2004
http://www.ird-renew.org/News/News.cfm?ID=991&c=4

At a press conference organized by the pro-abortion Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), representatives of the Religious Left expressed deep angst about the recent U.S. election results. And they warned the Bush Administration not to heed the agenda of socially conservative voters.

The RCRC officials were clearly disturbed by exit polls showing “moral values” being the number one concern of a plurality of voters, ahead of the economy, terrorism and the war in Iraq. These moral values voters, motivated by issues such as abortion and same-sex “marriage,” strongly favored President Bush’s reelection.

“The leaders of the Religious Coalition are outraged at the underlying message of the election story—that religion and morals are the exclusive property of social conservatives,” exclaimed RCRC president Carlton Veazey. RCRC, founded 30 years ago, is a coalition of mostly mainline church agencies that lobby against all potential restrictions on abortion.
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Rules for writers

I shamelessly lifted this from This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis.

Important Rules for Writing Good

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Be more or less specific.
15. Understatement is always best.
16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19. The passive voice is to be avoided.
20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Bishop Tikhon of the OCA quotes Noam Chomsky

A readers sends a quote by Bishop Tikhon of the OCA:

One might very well agree with Noam Chomsky that terrorism is nothing new, and that what made 9/11 particularly painful was the realization that for the first time we were the victims, rather than the perpetrators of it. Having terrorized Kossovo and Serbia, before that Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, the Phillipines, etc., etc., one would think that “with-it” Americans would have admitted, “What goes around comes around,” no?
I wonder what the citizens of Falloujah think when it is explained to them that they are now being subjected to an attack against terrorism?
Love,
+B.T.

Let me direct the good Bishop to some articles examining Chomsky’s ideas in a brighter light: What Noam Chomski Really Wants, or the antichomsky website.

Peggy Noonan. So Much to Savor: A big win for America, and a loss for the mainstream media

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

Answer to James’ question on the sacrifice of Isaac

Upstream James asked about the scriptural passage concerning the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham:

I’ve always wondered this about Abraham: if he would obey the command to slit the throat of his innocent son, how exactly are we to suppose he was able to discern the voice of God from the voice of Satan?

This also raises the question as to whether he obeyed God not because He was good but because He was powerful and if he would have obeyed the dictates of an equally omnipotent Fiend.

If the story is simply a parable and a myth, could not the moral have been better served through a less literal take on “sacrifice”?
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Faith and Patriotism

By CHARLES J. CHAPUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22chaput.html?ex=1099442009&ei=1&en=0626a7e7415fe210

Denver — The theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

That saying comes to mind as the election approaches and I hear more lectures about how Roman Catholics must not “impose their beliefs on society” or warnings about the need for “the separation of church and state.” These are two of the emptiest slogans in current American politics, intended to discourage serious debate. No one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy. Nor does anyone doubt the importance of morality in public life. Therefore, we should recognize these slogans for what they are: frequently dishonest and ultimately dangerous sound bites.

Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That’s the nature of the democratic process. If we say that we “ought” to do something, we are making a moral judgment. When our legislators turn that judgment into law, somebody’s ought becomes a “must” for the whole of society. This is not inherently dangerous; it’s how pluralism works.
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