The Search For Meaning

The Search For Meaning in Lifeby Dan Doyle –
Suffering comes into every life. Often it is so terrible we wonder how we can ever survive it. We can’t imagine the there could be any meaning in it. One of the most important books I’ve ever read is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it he tells of his experiences as an inmate in several of the Nazi death camps during WWII. Frankl was one of the lucky ones, he survived. He was liberated at the end of the war from Auchwitz as the only survivor of his family. Out of his pain and loss, out of the hell of it all, he came away with a deeper faith in God and, ironically, in humanity. We are the lucky ones, then, who can read this small book and be edified by the powerful meaning he discovered in and through his own suffering.

When we suffer, nothing makes sense to us. We are overwhelmed with a feeling that the world is cold, indifferent to our suffering, that we are utterly alone in it and imprisoned by it. How could there be any meaning in it at all? This is the central question of Viktor Frankl’s book. The core responsibility of our individual human lives is to find meaning and purpose, not just in fame, or wealth, but in transcendent ways, through faith, hope and, most importantly through love. [Read more…]

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The Price of Gay Marriage: The Galvanic Corrosion of Language

Defend Marriage Religionby Geoffrey P. Hunt –
When was that watershed moment where advocacy of gay marriage crossed into the mainstream from the radical chic of the intellectual elite ? Gay marriage, quite apart from homosexuality per se, has only in recent years been embraced by more than just a few libertarian sophisticates. Ironically it wasn’t too long ago when the progressive darlings and the beautiful people believed, to the contrary, that marriage of any kind was oppressive, a form of institutional bondage.

One of the more incomprehensible aspects of the gay marriage movement has been the spectacle of well-educated academics, plaintiff’s lawyers, politicians, judges and Protestant clergymen designing tortured arguments for deconstructing natural law, human biology, the history of civilization, language and logic. On the other hand, creating a new class of civil rights amidst claims of discrimination is easy when your world view equates justice with moral equivalence, accompanied by enabling the slow corruption of language. [Read more…]

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Green Tyranny Destroying America

Green Tyranny Destroying Americaby John Stossel –
Environmental activists and politicians would like you to think that we must love their regulations — or hate trees and animals.

I love trees and animals. But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring.

The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices (“only” a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.

In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, “I think it’s something we can do without.”

Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.

Originally, environmental rules were a good thing. I love the free market, but it doesn’t offer a practical remedy to pollution. I could sue polluters for violating my property rights, but under our legal system, that’s not even close to practical. [Read more…]

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Orthodox Christian Services Restore the Soul

Orthodox Christian Services Restore the Soulby St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894) –
Church services, that is, all the daily services, together with the entire arrangement of the church’s icons, candles, censing, singing, chanting, movements of the clergy, as well as the services for various needs; then services in the home, also using ecclesiastical objects such as sanctified icons, holy oil, candles, holy water, the Cross, and incense — all of these holy things together acting upon all the senses — sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste — are the cloths that wipe clean the senses of the deadened soul. They are strongest and only reliable way to do it.

The soul becomes deadened by the spirit of the world, and possessed by sin that lives in the world. The entire structure of our Church services, with their tone, meaning, power of faith, and especially the grace concealed with them, have an invincible power to drive away the spirit of the world. In freeing the soul from the world’s onerous influence, it allows the soul to breathe freely and to taste the sweetness of spiritual freedom. [Read more…]

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The Abolition of Sex

Gender Spectrum Destroying Children Soulsby Fay Voshell –
The Massachusetts public school system has taken the tired mantra “You can be whatever you want to be” to new heights of absurdity.  It is now possible for any student to declare what his sex is regardless of whether it is the biological opposite of what she was born as.   The new transgender manifesto, which includes punishments and counseling for students who object to the idea of changing one’s sex by fiat, can be found here.

The basic premise is that a student has the right to decide what sex he or she is, and the school is required to support the child’s self-proclaimed identity in every respect.  According to the aforementioned document, if a boy decides he is a girl, he is to be addressed as “she,” and school records are to reflect his new preference by recording his feminine name of choice.  Thus, “John” is to be known hereafter as “Jane” if s/he so desires, and parental assignation of nomenclature be damned.  Schools are to promote gender neutral clothing.  It appears that standard graduation garb such as blue gowns for boys and white for girls is to be scrapped along with any requirement that girls wear dresses to the prom. [Read more…]

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Conference on Poverty, St. Vlad’s Seminary, May 31-June 1, 2013

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life!”

Jay Richards
Jay Richards
Susan R. Holman
Susan R. Holman
Conference presenters will be Jay Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute; and Susan R. Holman, senior writer at Harvard Global Health Institute, and author of The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia and God Knows There’s Need: Christian Responses to Poverty, both from Oxford University Press.

View Acton Institute’s engaging videos from “PovertyCure,” an international coalition of organizations and individuals committed to entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person. [Read more…]

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Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
Last week, Bjorn Lomborg, the widely published Danish professor and director of one of the world’s leading environmental think tanks, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, published an article about the Philippines’ decision, after 12 years, to allow genetically modified (GM) rice — “golden rice” — to be grown and consumed in that country.

The reason for the delay was environmentalist opposition to GM rice; and the reason for the change in Philippine policy was that 4.4 million Filipino children suffer from vitamin A deficiency. That deficiency, Lomborg writes, “according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year.”

During the 12-year delay, Lomborg continues, “About eight million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency.” [Read more…]

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Please Do Not Adjust Your Child

Indoctrination of Childrenby Daren Jonescu –
Of all the arguments public-school advocates have used to hoodwink generations of parents into condemning their own children to years of state-controlled subservience training, one of the most successful is that without public schools, children cannot be properly “socialized,” and will therefore be ill-prepared for life in the “real world.” Not only is this argument absurd on its face, but that face also reveals the ugliest intention of compulsory schools: the deliberate retarding of human moral and intellectual development.

The basic premise of the argument for public schools as necessary tools of socialization is that learning to get along, or fit in, with children one’s own age is a vital life skill. Is it?

Childhood, contrary to the worst tendencies of democratic thought, is not [Read more…]

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The Lord of Quantum Mechanics and Orthodox Teleportation

The Lord of Quantum Mechanics and Orthodox Teleportationby Dcn. Joseph Gleason –
Jesus is the Lord of quantum mechanics, and He created the space-time continuum. Physical barriers and geographical distances are not obstacles for Him. He can instantly transport people (and their prayers) to any location in the universe, without even breaking a sweat.

With all of our concordances, commentaries, and deep-dives into koine Greek grammar, we sometimes forget to sit back, relax, and revel in how incredibly awesome and cool some of the things in Scripture really are.

Teleportation is “the transfer of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them.” What could be cooler than that? [Read more…]

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Truth is Hate (To Those That Hate Truth)

Truth is Hate To Those That Hate Truthby Bill Muehlenberg –
On the outside wall of the Ministry of Truth building are the three slogans of ‘The Party’: “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Those who have read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell will be quite familiar with all this.

In his chilling 1949 novel Orwell warned of where society was heading, and in it offered us a horrific police state where Big Brother controlled everything through extensive use of propaganda, government censorship and surveillance, and nonstop indoctrination and mind control.

The book prophetically spoke of “thoughtcrimes,” “Newspeak,” and “doublethink”. Who would have thought that just sixty years on these very things would increasingly be part of life in Western societies? Today we have “hate crimes” and “hate speech” which refers to anything the secular social militants regard as non-PC. [Read more…]

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