Fr. Hans

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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The War Democrats Believe In

By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 20, 2004

The Democrats have been characterized as a party of peace marchers and flag-burners — a Neville Chamberlain cadre chattering away on cable TV, knee-jerk internationalists who’ve mistaken the United Nations for the United States Marines.

I must protest this calumny.

Under the right circumstances, the Democrats can be Sgt. York and Audie Murphy times Rambo. There was a little war of which Democrats are exceedingly fond — so much so that they’re still bragging about it five years later.

It’s a conflict that didn’t involve allegations of weapons of mass destruction. The nation we subjugated wasn’t a sponsor of international terrorism. (This time, we fought for the terrorists.)

It wasn’t remotely related to national security. And the justification for our intervention turned out to be a complete fabrication.

For 78 days in 1999, we bombed Christian Yugoslavia (our ally in two World Wars) to aid Moslem separatists who were tight with Osama bin Laden. Ever since, NATO has occupied its sovereign territory — with disastrous results.

Read the entire article on FrontPageMagazine.com.

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Anglicans to ban gay bishops?

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_world_story_skin/453646%3fformat=html

The Anglican Church will order its world leaders to sign an unbreakable covenant forbidding the ordination of openly gay bishops, according to British reports.

The covenant will be unveiled in a long-awaited report, in an effort to heal a deep rift in the church over the issue of homosexuality.

The Church’s 38 provinces would be made to sign a “unity agreement”, preventing the ordination of openly gay bishops such as Gene Robinson, who was consecrated in the United States last year.
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Fr. Patrick Reardon: “Love your enemies” in scripture

It may be the case that we have heard the plainest words of Holy Scripture so often that we no longer really hear them. A long but shallow acquaintance with the Bible’s most obvious teachings may serve sometimes to deflect, if not actually to dull, even the keen double-edged sword of God’s Word. We assume that the point of the divine will has already pierced its way into our hearts, whereas in truth we may have spent much of our lives dodging and deftly parrying the thrust of the blade.

Take, for example, the simple mandate to love our enemies. The thing could hardly be plainer: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you . . . But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? . . . And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:27,32,33).
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Quote: John Adams on morality, religion, and the US

On October 11, 1798, President John Adams addressed the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts in a letter:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

From: TheAmericanMinute

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Prophets of Baal

The American Academy of Religion slides toward decadence.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40819
The Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Group within the AAR has set for its theme for the program: “Power and Submission, Pain and Pleasure: The Religious Dynamics of Sadomasochism.” It also has another session on the program, half of which is devoted to transgenderism.

Last year, Gagnon says, the group featured a session on the topic: “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing: Varied Views on Polyamory.” (Don’t bother looking up that last word in the dictionary. It’s not there yet. It means having sexual relations with more than one partner at a time.)

About the “Power and Submission” topic, the program explains:

Sadomasochistic or bondage/dominance practice (sometimes also referred to as “leather sexuality”) … offers a particularly potent location for reflecting on gay men’s issues in religion.

One of the papers presented by Justin Tanis of the Metropolitan Community Church, a homosexual “denomination,” if you will, is titled “Ecstatic Communion: The Spiritual Dimensions of Leathersexuality.”

Read the entire article on the World Net Daily website.

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George Strickland comments on editorial by Dr. Bouteneff

I’m highlighting Mr. Strickland’s comments because ideas within it deserve consideration.

Dr. Bouteneff’s article has stirred a great deal of debate in these pages. My response is drawn from Bouteneff’s statement: “Neither is there any one system of governance, be it monarchy, democracy, plutocracy, or theocracy, which the Church would sanction as such to be the Christian way of estasblishing and maintaining a state…Christians are not ipso facto socialists, capitalists, or monarchists. And such as we Americans are accustomed to the logic of democracy, democracy is neither the way in which the Church is govers itself, nor is it the only or obvious Christian kind of state…Christians…have to decide in each particular case what best meets the criteria of Christian life.”

There are many ideas packed in this statement, and I am limited in time in commenting on them. I start with a question. Through her long experience in history, has the Church had a period (until the time of America’s great experiment in democracy) in which the state has not directly attempted to control ecclesiastical affairs? Emperors, Czars, and dictators have all had their hands inside the doors of the Church, attempting to muzzle the voice of the Gospel. As an Orthodox Christian, I cannot imagine wanting to live in a state governed by the whims, greed and power-madness of absolute rulers. Christians for Czarists? No thank you.
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Dennis Prager on religion, law, and the left

“The religious have a belief in God-based moral law, and the Left believes in man-made law as the moral law. [W]hereas they cannot change God’s laws, those on the Left can and do make many of society’s laws. In fact, the Left is intoxicated with law-making. It gives them the power to mold society just as Judeo-Christian values did in the past. Unless one understands that leftist ideals function as a religion, one cannot understand the Left. Laws are the Left’s vehicles to earthly salvation.” –Dennis Prager

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MORE ON THE CONFUSION OF THE ORTHODOX

Fr. Patrick Reardon writes on the Touchstone Blog:

Two days ago James Kushiner included in this place his own criticism of the essay of Dr. Peter C. Bouteneff, “How Should Orthodox Christians Vote?” which was posted on Beliefnet. Boutneff’s very confused and confusing essay, we regret to say, has now been posted on the web page of The Orthodox Church in America. In response to it, other Orthodox Christians are weighing in. Yesterday Dr. Jonathan Chaves, professor of Chinese at The George Washington University, sent around to some friends the following sage comment, which he has given us permission to post here:

My take would be this: This essay is yet another example of the false “angelism” that afflicts so many of our contemporary intellectuals: “you can’t pin me down, I’m above the polarities of the moment.” But there is no “above;” at this point in history, the ideas that activate conservatives, certainly the traditionalist conservatives, are grounded ultimately in the great Christian heritage; contemporary liberalism is equally grounded in the Enlightenment and its essentially anti-Christian conception of human nature. A believing Christian today will have a very tough time accommodating to the current liberal doctrines, and will find that to do so will eventually necessitate relinquishing one Christian teaching after another.

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