Multiculturalism Today

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
11/7/2010 – Chuck Colson –

“Multiculturalism,” wrote the British scholar Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute, “rests on the supposition—or better, the dishonest pretense—that all cultures are equal.”

So, the argument for multiculturalism goes, no culture is superior to another, and no culture should compete with any other. And if we understand that, we can all get along just fine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel went along with that idea for years but has recently changed her mind. Earlier this month she dared to tell a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party that multiculturalism is a failed experiment that needs to be rejected. [Read more…]

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Go With God

Nov. 2010 – Stanley Hauerwas –
An open letter to young Christians on their way to college
“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”

Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Be faithful in worship. In America, going to college is one of those heavily mythologized events that everybody tells you will “change your life,” which is probably at least half true. So don’t be foolish and imagine that you can take a vacation from church. [Read more…]

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The Green Bubble is about to Burst

11/5/2010 – S. Fred Singer –
There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the “smoking gun” that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist. [Read more…]

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Orthodox Christian Responsibility in the Public Arena

Fr. John Peck
Fr. John Peck
by Fr. John Peck –
First of all, let me begin by saying that it is my duty, as a priest and pastor, to impose moral standards on you. Part of my job and function is to teach Christian morality and to get us, as a body, to adhere to Christian moral standards, so before you come to me with complaints about the separation of Church and state, be aware that I am doing my duty in telling you what the Church, as the Body of Christ, teaches about life and responsibility.

Moral theology in the Orthodox Church in America is pretty loosey-goosey, as is clearly evidenced by the Reflections on Voting for Orthodox Christians article that was posted, at first anonymously, on the OCA website. I have said, and will say here, that a more poorly reasoned collection of moral mish-mush does not yet exist. If you have read it, you can see that what is being said behind the lines is, ‘Things like abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell experimentation are wrong, but we don’t like the candidate who stands against these things, and anyway, capital punishment is wrong, and harming the environment is wrong.’ The statement that we are forced to become ‘reluctant republicans’ or ‘reluctant democrats’ betrays the writer’s real concern, which is to look impartial politically. He would have been very welcome by the Soviets in Russia, as a Christian who does nothing about his Christianity… [Read more…]

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Why Has Communism Failed?

Anti-Communism_01_150x150 10/29/2010 – Ileana Johnson –
The last three years have been quite scary for me as I relived many things that I thought I left behind in communist Romania when I decided to immigrate to the United States in 1978.

I have deja vus every day. I wake up wondering what freedoms have I lost today completely, have been curtailed, or are in the process of being curtailed through laws that none of the Congressmen who voted for them have read. How much closer am I today to living in a totalitarian society?

I wondered to myself, “What happened to the separation of powers” and to the famous American “checks and balances?” What happened to the rule of law and equal under the law that Americans were so famous for? People shrug their shoulders, give me puzzled looks and cannot answer my questions. Everybody is putting their hopes on November’s mid-term election and its outcome. What if the election does not turn the way we hope it will? What then? Are we going to be content to live under communism? International law? One world government? [Read more…]

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The Church of the Green Dragon

10/30/2010 – Chuck Rogér –
One of the heads of the Green Dragon has hissed again. Urged by the King Corn lobby, the EPA recently raised the limit on ethanol in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent, a change that will harm Americans and the environment. The environmental justice-obsessed agency is actually driving injustice that will profit farming conglomerates. The Obama administration’s corporatist soul is showing.

Barack Obama’s “green economy” is a mirage, for greenies cannot compete in the free market. My fellow Cajun, George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux, recently pointed out that “two fuels” power competition: “entrepreneurial freedom” and “consumer sovereignty.” By subsidizing green technology, government weakens both. [Read more…]

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Deafening Silence, Moral Issues in the Election

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
10/27/2010 – Chuck Colson –

Next Tuesday, I hope you will do your Christian duty and head to the polls to vote for the candidate of your choice. I trust that your faith will guide you in your decision. Which candidate will best promote justice and preserve order? After all, those are the biblically-sanctioned roles of government.

And which candidate best exemplifies the cardinal virtue of prudence in his or her public and private life?

And which candidate will best promote the sanctity of human life, advocate for traditional marriage, and protect religious freedom? Well, if you’ve got an answer for that last question, then you’re among the few. Because for the life of me, I have never heard so little about these core issues during a political campaign. These core issues—human life, marriage, and freedom—which—all expressed so powerfully in the Manhattan Declaration and supported by half a million signatories, aren’t even on the political radar this year. And that, to me is shocking. [Read more…]

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Socialism and Reality

10/25/2010 – Steve McCann –
The images on the television screen emanating from Europe are a sobering reminder that socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and will always do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers. The riots in the streets of France and Greece, the announced layoffs of nearly 500,000 government employees in the United Kingdom, and the potential national bankruptcy of Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the current face of this failure.

Yet within the halls of power in Washington, D.C. there is a socialist/progressive cabal, and its titular leader Barack Obama, oblivious to this reality. These ideologues continue to cling to the belief that they have a unique ability to succeed where so many others have failed. The egocentric American Left know no bounds, and their determination to impose their will upon the United States has not and will not abate despite the results of any election. [Read more…]

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Democratic Ad: Catholic Church More Concerned About Abortion Than Poor

Democrat Ad Ignore the Poor10/26/2010 – Steven Ertelt –

A campaign postcard the Minnesota Democratic Party sent to voters in the Midwestern state is causing a strong reaction from pro-life advocates. It claims the Catholic Church is more concerned with abortion than helping the poor. The postcard features a large photo of a older but faceless Catholic priest holding a Bible and wearing the clearly-seen Roman Catholic collar.

The priest sports a campaign button in a red, white and blue motif with the words, “Ignore the Poor.”

The ad, in the estimation of National Catholic Register writer Matt Archbold is blatantly anti-Catholic and meant to tell voters the Catholic Church is more concerned about abortion than the plight of the poor.

“Sometimes there’s a little subtlety to anti-Catholic political rhetoric but not this time. This is in your face anti-Catholicism,” he said. “It’s anti-Catholicism is not one point of many. It’s the point.” [Read more…]

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God, Liberals and Liberty

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
America’s anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating — not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indispensible to liberty. Had Blow made a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world — for 234 years — the United States of America, has also been the most God-centered.

Yes, I know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America’s Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission (“Islam” means “submission”).

Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.

America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 25): “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [Read more…]

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