Fr. Hans

‘Gay horse’ case dropped

ANGUS HOWARTH

AN OXFORD University student who called a policeman’s horse “gay” will not be prosecuted.

But police stood by their decision to take him to court for “homophobic comments” after the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday dropped the case.

Sam Brown, 21, from Belfast, approached the mounted officer during a night out in Oxford after his final exams last May, and said: “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?” Moments later, two police cars appeared and he was arrested under the Public Order Act.more

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The Lion in Winter: Why ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ is Winning Over America

How did a movie about crusaders, a sacrificial lion and talking beavers gross $67 million in its opening weekend? The not-so-unlikely marriage of Hollywood and C.S. Lewis.

By John Zmirak

What did you do this past weekend? I spent part of mine in a Times Square theater full of adult Manhattanites at a movie with talking beavers. And a perky 8-year-old English girl with crooked teeth. And a cute widdle goat boy named Tumnus. No hunks on screen, no babes, and nary a kiss. The only “hot” woman in the movie was a six-foot-plus satanic witch with blonde dredlocks, and a kinky habit of torturing centaurs. The film’s stars were teens and children, but there wasn’t one kid in the audience. Nor were these moviegoers bused in from some Evangelical church—there were too many women wearing black, holding hands with Nader voters. I wondered aloud if this was a bunch of stoners—but sniffed around in vain for a whiff of the banished herb. Nobody snorted at the moments of outright Christian allegory, or scoffed at the galloping satyrs. Only one person even got up to go to the bathroom. These urbanites sat, spellbound, for more than two hours, some with tears on their cheeks, and at the end they burst into applause. At last I had to face the fact: New Yorkers are into Narnia.

So are Americans: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe made $67 million in its opening weekend, covering almost half its costs, and received glowing reviews from most major papers, including the Logos-phobic New York Times. (Only the lowbrow New York Post and drab suburban Newsday disagreed.) Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a hit—and the prospect of six more Narnia movies, to compete with the Harry Potter franchise and drive C.S. Lewis all the way up the bestseller lists. Look for Lewis sections to spring up in the bookstores, crowding up against the Tolkien shelves, in a veritable onslaught of Oxford Christian whimsy. It helps that so many of the writers who review the movies grew up on the Narnia books, and still remember fondly the moments of imaginative epiphany they provoked.

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Past, future of Roe vs. Wade: Should, would a Justice Alito upend the landmark decision?

Washington Post Steve Chapman January 12, 2006

Samuel Alito Jr. wrote a memo in 1985 arguing there is no constitutional right to abortion, and pro-choice groups are alarmed by that document. They say it proves he’s a right-wing extremist with a “long history of hostility to reproductive freedom,” in the words of the National Abortion Federation.

Maybe Alito is secretly plotting to make pregnancy mandatory for all fertile females, as the NAF suggests. But for those of us who are inclined to be charitable, there’s another possible explanation for why he said the Constitution doesn’t protect abortion rights: because it doesn’t.

It’s true the Supreme Court has ruled it does, but that only proves the Supreme Court has the final say on the matter. The right to abortion is a wholesale invention of the court. There is no reference to it anywhere in the Constitution, and it can’t be reasonably extrapolated from the principles enshrined in our national charter.

In the history of American jurisprudence, the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision stands out for its utter detachment from the actual language of the Constitution. That helps to explain why, 33 years later, it has yet to gain broad acceptance from the public at large.

. . . more

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Senate Civility: Why Mrs. Alito left the room

Wall Street Opinion Journal

It’s a sign of how little Democrats have on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito that on Day Three of his confirmation hearings they were still pounding away on his membership in an obscure Princeton alumni group that flowered briefly at the judge’s alma mater. They can’t touch him on credentials or his mastery of jurisprudence, so they’re trying to get him on guilt by ancient association.

. . . more

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Pope attacks “culture of death” at first baptisms

Reuters Crispian Balmer Sun Jan 8, 2006 9:40 AM ET172

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict performed the first baptisms of his pontificate on Sunday, using the occasion to launch an impassioned denunciation of irresponsible sex and a “culture of death” that he said pervaded the modern world.

Pope Benedict, abandoning his prepared sermon, compared the wild excesses of the ancient Roman empire to 21st century society and urged people to rediscover their faith.

“In our times we need to say ‘no’ to the largely dominant culture of death,” Benedict said during his improvised homily in the frescoed Sistine Chapel where he was elected Pope last April.

“(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness … displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility,” he added.

…more

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Saddam’s Terror Training Camps

What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal–and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
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Materialistic Moral Compasses

American Vision Eric Rauch

Liberal politics is at a crossroads. Humanism is being attacked by way of the Intelligent Design movement. If biological Darwinism can be shown to be nothing more than a philosophy that gives meaning to the facts, then, by implication, humanists are left in the lake without a paddle. The Darwinists hold fast to their “first principles” as tenaciously as most Christians, and yet we are the ones who get ridiculed for having a “silly, wishful-thinking faith.” Two recent articles by British authors exemplify this point forcefully.

[Read more…]

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Soul Man: Leon Kass sounds a warning about the perils of biotechnology

Wall Street Opinion Journal BRET STEPHENS Saturday, January 7, 2006

WASHINGTON–Leon Kass is willing–reluctantly willing–to indulge a request. I have asked him to refresh our interview of several weeks ago by reflecting on the case of Hwang Woo Suk, the internationally celebrated South Korean researcher who recently admitted to fabricating cloned stem cells. Dr. Kass thinks that a decennial White House conference on aging might make for an equally timely news peg. Health and longevity; dementia and death; euthanasia and living wills; performance enhancement and life-prolonging genetic manipulations–these are the subjects that really engage the mind of this 66-year-old physician and ethicist (and former philosophy professor of mine). As for embryos, stem cells, cloning and the uses and abuses thereof, they are “not the most profound of subjects,” he told me over a pot of tea in the kitchen of his Washington apartment. “The embryo question is really about the means. The real question has to do with the ends to which we put this.”

[Read more…]

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Patriach Bartholomew in Tarpon Springs

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is in Tarpon Springs, Florida for the feast day of Epiphany this week. I was up there yesterday for a welcoming Doxology at St. Nicholas Cathedral, the church in Tarpon. He will lead liturgy tomorrow, throw the cross into Spring Bayou during the blessing of the waters, and make the usuals rounds of meetings, banquets, etc. that accompany these visits.

Some of the events will be televised: Patriachal visit.

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Islam Remains Number One Danger To The Christian Church

The Rev. Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo is the international director of the Barnabas Fund based in England. The Fund is a ministry which assists Christian minorities in the Islamic world and in other areas where Christians undergo persecution. Dr. Sookhdeo was recently in the United States where he spoke with David W. Virtue of VirtueOnline. Dr. Sookhdeo is a leading world authority on Islam, author of several books on Islam including “Understanding Islamic Terrorism” and “A Christian’s Pocket Guide to Islam”. Born in Pakistan of Islamic parentage he converted to Christianity while a student in London in the early 60s.

VirtueOnline: What does the Barnabas Fund (BF) do?

Sookhdeo: It calls attention to the plight of Christian minorities particularly within the Islamic world. It looks at the persecution they are experiencing and seeks to make this known to the wider world. It calls upon the church to pray for, to identify with, and to be advocate for and support practically their suffering brothers and sisters.

VirtueOnline: I gather you are the leading organization in the world involved in this kind of work, and that you inform a number of worldwide government institutions of the difficulties and challenges which Islam poses.

…
VirtueOnline: The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to hold the view that Islam can coexist peacefully with Christianity.

Sookhdeo: I would suggest that he listen to the voices of Christians within the Muslim world and in particular the voices coming from southern Sudan, Northern Nigeria, Pakistan and other countries. In these situations Christians experience discrimination, outright persecution and increasingly violence, being directed against them. If Islam is going to be a religion of peace and to coexist alongside Christianity then it must relinquish its theology of violence based on the revelations in the Koran. It must change its Shari’a Law and allow for full equality of Christians. It must allow Muslims the freedom to choose that is, to reject Islam if they so choose or embrace another religion if they so desire. It must give full freedom to women. Unless it can do these things how can there be co-existence? While the intention of the archbishop in seeking co-existence is good, whether Islam the religion will ever embrace his vision of society is another matter.

VirtueOnline: Are there any other difficulties?

Sookhdeo: There is a further difficulty. Many Christians in the Islamic world believe that some Christians in the West have betrayed them, that they have been sacrificed on the altar of interfaith, race and community relations. In their desire to make peace with Islam at any cost, they have sacrificed their brothers and sisters in this process. They also feel that it is patronizing and racist for white people to dialogue with Muslims on their behalf, as if non-Westerners were not capable of doing dialogue should they so desire.
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