Orthodox Editors
Condoms don’t protect souls
AmericanThinker | Ben-Peter Terpstra | March 22, 2009
Is abstinence, in particular, more realistic than promiscuity or less so? Is Christianity more realistic than Oprah or less so? Is the Pope wiser than Madonna’s “Sticky and Sweet” tour dancers?
In the Christian tradition, real believers have the audacity to believe that condoms don’t protect souls. The adulterer doesn’t need rubber, he needs a heart check. [Read more…]
Kroft to Obama: Are you punch-drunk?
Politico.com | Craig Gordon & Jonathan Martin | March 22, 2009
President Barack Obama said he believes the global financial system remains at risk of implosion with the failure of Citigroup or AIG, which could touch off “an even more destructive recession and potentially depression.”
His remarks came in a“60 Minutes” interview in which he was pressed by Steve Kroft for laughing and chuckling several times while discussing the perilous state of the world’s economy. [Read more…]
Creating Equal
Touchstone Mag | Louis Markos | April 2009
We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the United States’ Declaration of Independence boldly asserts, “that all men are created equal.” This noble sentiment declares unapologetically that all human beings—no matter their age or sex, culture or religion, race or ethnicity, social class or educational achievement—possess intrinsic dignity and worth. Unfortunately, over the last century, America—and even more Western Europe—has increasingly shifted its focus from political liberty to social engineering, from equal protection before the law to sameness mandated by law, from equality to egalitarianism. The focus today is not on equal creation but on creating equality.
This almost obsessive urge to create equality has spread even to the Church herself. The last several decades in America have witnessed many Christians’ slow surrender to egalitarian values and the projection of those values back onto Jesus, the Bible, and church doctrine and discipline. [Read more…]
Is Socialism Overtaking Capitalism In The Way Schumpeter Foresaw?
Investor’s Business Daily | John Tamny | March 19, 2009
In his 1942 book, “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,” Joseph Schumpeter asked the essential question: “Can capitalism survive?” His unsettling answer was, “No. I do not think it can.”
Schumpeter’s words were in no way meant to denigrate capitalism. Instead, he felt “its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it.” History in many ways proved his views prophetic.
The success of capitalism means that many are allowed to do things that have nothing to do with productivity. And from government and academic elites that frequently seek to undermine the very system that enabled their cushy jobs, to foundations created by capitalist profits that often dismiss same, the commercial success wrought by the pursuit of profit has created an unproductive elite that lives off the very business profits that it regularly casts a skeptical eye on. [Read more…]
Pushing the Gay Agenda in the Greek Archdiocese
by Glen Chancy — March 2, 2009
Globally, Orthodox Christianity is known to be highly conservative concerning what is frequently referred to as “traditional Christian morality.” In Europe, for example, more progressive and liberal elements of society spare no effort in attacking the Church as a bastion of traditionalist repression, especially concerning homosexuality.
Ironically, however, in the United States an image seems to be growing of the Orthodox Church as more liberal towards sexual sins than, for example, the Evangelical denominations. Quite a few people, judging by chatter on the Internet, are getting the impression that Orthodoxy is similar to the Episcopal Church in respect to moral issues.
Part of this confusion stems from the book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell. This book, published in 1994, asserted that certain Greek Orthodox medieval rituals were really ecclesiastical blessings of homosexual unions. Boswell especially singled out the Greek Orthodox Rite known as adelphopoiesis or “brother-making,” as one such example.
Since the book’s publication, Orthodox sources have roundly debunked Boswell. (One such effort can be found here.) Even so, a casual stroll through Google will find Boswell’s claims widely repeated on Websites associated with homosexual issues. (LGBT sites in the common parlance of today.) The fiction created by Boswell is useful for sexually active homosexuals, both within the Orthodox Church and without. [Read more…]
What is Marxism?
AmericanThinker | Steven Plaut | March 16, 2009
Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is a sort of pagan religious cult. It is a theology. It is a form of superstition.
Marxists claim that Karl Marx understood capitalism and economics. He did not. They also claim that the entire validity of Marx’s set of theories on all subjects rests ultimately on how valid Marxist economic thought is. Marxist economic thought was completely wrong. [Read more…]
An Academic Tragedy
FrontPage Magazine | David Horowitz | Mar. 13, 2009
To appreciate the radical changes that have taken place in America’s universities over the last few decades one could do worse than start with the University of California, Santa Cruz. Academic courses at Santa Cruz and other California campuses are ostensibly governed by the “Standing Orders” of the university Regents. These state that each school must “remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interests,” and that professors must never allow the classroom “to be used for political indoctrination.” In the words of the Regents, such indoctrination “constitutes misuse of the University as an institution.”
Unfortunately, this rule and rules like it at academic institutions across the country are increasingly ignored by university professors, and almost never enforced by university administrations. The UC Santa Cruz catalog is itself littered with course descriptions that promise an indoctrination, almost invariably in radical politics and causes. [Read more…]
My Socialist Past
AmericanThinker | Jeffrey Folks | March 15, 2009
“Socialism, a luxury of the wealthy. To the poor, a suicidal creed …” –David Hare
Anyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead. They lead to decades of frustrated poverty and lifetimes of untreated illness culminating in early death. I remember the columns of death notices for men and women in their forties and fifties that appeared in the local newspaper. Gradually I learned to associate those death notices with the lack of fresh foodstuffs, the travesty of state health care, and the pervasive demoralization of an enslaved population drowning itself in cheap alcohol and cigarettes. [Read more…]