Antioch exits the NCC

Terry Mattingly email newsletter

Summer is the season for church conventions that talk about hot issues.

Last week’s 47th convention of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America passed a resolution that addressed both sexuality and the Iraqi war. But this time the lofty words led to an historic change.

The assembly voted to oppose “divisive and dangerous” positions taken by “left-wing” and “right-wing” groups. To be specific, it rejected “support for same-sex marriage, support for abortion, support for ordination of women to Holy Orders, support for the concept of war that is ‘pre-emptive’ or ‘justifiable’ and the labeling of other faiths and their leaders with hateful terminology.”

The archdiocese — a blend of Arab-Americans and many converts — vowed to avoid groups that “promulgate these extreme positions” and renewed its commitment to seek Orthodox unity in North America.

Then the delegates cheered as Metropolitan Philip Saliba announced his decision to withdraw from the National Council of Churches USA.
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Today I spent the day…

painting a school for migrant workers in Imokalee, a town about fifty miles east of Naples in the heart of the agricultural district in S. Florida. It’s the area that grows many of the vegetables you eat in winter.

What I learned about the migrant worker situation was that many migrant workers are in the US not because their poverty at home (Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, etc.) is so desperate that stoop labor in US fields is the only way they can live. Rather, the pay they receive is so high compared to their native countries that working for four or five years alllows them to return home and set up businesses. They manage to send home about $250/week to countries where the average yearly wage is $800. After their work in America ends, they take the money to move from poverty into the middle class.

I asked the man in charge of the school and housing for migrant workers if that meant the population changes every four years. He said yes. I was always under the impression that hopelessness and despair drove them northward and they never returned. The poverty does drive them, but they return relatively wealthy. After four or five years of work they go back and don’t return.

The migrants have no insurance (they are counted in the uninsured census we hear about all of the time), but they have access to free medical care in a clinic (a small hospital actually) they can use any time. They stay in homes (some appallingly run down but others adequate for a family) that costs about $250/month. (The organization running this school and housing association has the food growers comprising over 50% of their board of directors. Clearly many of the growers are not the hard-hearted and greedy charlatans they often are portrayed to be.)

Migrant children are allowed free education in US schools, but because the migrant population is so transitory (they move to wherever the work is because they want to earn as much as they can as quickly as possible), their children don’t learn as well as they would if they remained in one place. In recent years, more families stay home while the husband comes up alone to work. (His rent averages $120/month.)

What I learned is that the migrant situation replicates the experience of almost every other immigrant group in America. They come to America because of the opportunity this nation provides for a better life.

There are others points worth pondering as well. For example, despite the tremendous physical hardship the migrant workers endure, many migrant families manage to stay intact. There is usually a Catholic church near the migrant camps that serves the families. It’s a stark contrast to American poverty which is more a function of family breakdown rather than a scarcity of goods and services.

Also, there is something honorable in their work that we can admire.

Anyway, we got the school all painted.

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The politics of faith

US News and World Report Dan Gilgoff

Democrats kick off a multifront campaign to connect with religious voters

Just because Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean got in hot water last month for calling the Republicans “pretty much a white, Christian Party” doesn’t mean he’s not hunting for white, Christian votes. At a meeting last week with liberal evangelical preacher Jim Wallis–which began with a prayer led by Dean’s chief of staff, who is a Pentecostal minister–Dean drilled the antiabortion Wallis on how to make party rhetoric on abortion rights more values-friendly. “Nobody is pro-abortion,” Dean said, according to a party official. “But do you want the government telling you what to do in your personal life?”
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A moral muddle on the left

Boston Globe Cathy Young

THE BOMBINGS in London on July 7, which killed 53 people and injured many more, were a powerful reminder that terrorism remains a clear and present threat in our cities. But they were also, to me, a reminder of something else. As annoying as I frequently find the right these days, with its cynical partisanship, its arrogance of power, and its politics of religious zealotry, my discontent with conservatives will never send me into the liberal camp — because the response to terrorism even on the moderate left remains an egregious moral muddle.
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Orthodox Church in America Explores Leaving WCC, NCC

Institute for Religion and Democracy Steve Rempe

The one million-member Orthodox Church in America (OCA) is examining a proposal to remove itself from both the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches. The proposal will be reviewed by the OCA All-American Council, which meets in Toronto July 17-22.

According to the position paper Orthodox Relations, “The most advisable course for the Orthodox Church in America would be to eventually withdraw from the NCC and the WCC.” Any withdrawal would be done in consultation with those Orthodox churches that remain members of the councils.

Among the reasons cited in the report for withdrawing from the church councils are the increasingly political agendas that they pursue. “The very politically-oriented theologies of many Protestant denominations have often threatened to derail the agenda of councils away from dialogue and unity, and towards political advocacy and activism,” says the report. “. . . [T]he ecumenical organizations in which we participate, in their theological and social views, are oriented towards policies which are not in harmony with Orthodox views.”
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The Episcopal Church Self-Destructs over Homosexuality

Breakpoint Allan Dobras

Episcopalians Defend the Consecration of a “Gay” Bishop

The Episcopal Church has been flirting with a disastrous schism for the last thirty-five years, and now a formal breakup seems inevitable following an unapologetic June 17–22, 2005, appearance before the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) in Nottingham, England. The purpose of the meeting was to hear the church’s defense of its consecration of “gay” Bishop V. Gene Robinson.

Over the years, the denomination continued to hang together as it blundered through several divisive issues while causing its rolls to plummet by about 1.3 million congregants, or nearly 40 percent of its membership. Remarkably, the church had managed to survive clergymen like Bishop John S. Spong, who institutionalized heretical teachings in the denomination, the failed heresy trial of Rt. Reverend Walter Righter, who opened the church to the ordination of homosexual deacons, and the church’s persistent embroilment in leftist politics.

Now, ramifications from the consecration of Bishop V. Gene Robinson are sending shockwaves through the Anglican community, and the denomination is on the brink of imploding. The June 2003 election of Rt. Reverend Robinson to the office of bishop was the final straw for the traditionalist-minded American Anglican Council (AAC) and a number of conservative prelates—primarily from Africa—who put pressure on the Worldwide Anglican Communion to respond to what they thought to be contrary to church doctrine.

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Their Will Be Done: How the Supreme Court sows moral anarchy

Wall Street Journal Online ROBERT H. BORK

What do the nomination of a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor, constitutional law, and moral chaos have to do with one another? A good deal more than you may think.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay wrote of America that “providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Such a people enjoy the same moral assumptions, the cement that forms a society rather than a cluster of groups. Though Jay’s conditions have long been obsolete, until recently Americans did possess a large body of common moral assumptions rooted in our original Anglo-Protestant culture, and expressed in law. Now, however, a variety of disintegrating influences are undermining that unanimity, not least among them is the capture of constitutional law by an extreme liberationist philosophy. America is becoming a cacophony of voices proclaiming different, or no, truths.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “if each undertook himself to form all his opinions and to pursue the truth in isolation down paths cleared by him alone, it is not probable that a great number of men would ever unite in any common belief. . . . Without common ideas there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not.”

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Justice Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted ” ‘moral fact’ that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.” Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that “at the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution, and neither has any definable meaning other than that a common morality may not be sustained by law if a majority of justices prefer that each individual follow his own desires.

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Adult Stem Cells can Multiply, Come From Human Skin Research Shows

Pittsburgh, PA (LifeNews.com) — Some adult stem cell success stories are raising new questions about whether there’s a need to explore unproven embryonic stem cell research. In what’s being hailed as a groundbreaking study, scientists at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh have discovered that adult stem cells have the same ability to multiply as embryonic stem cells.

The discovery means that adult stem cells could play an important therapeutic role. Before this research, it was generally believed that embryonic stem cells had a greater capacity to multiply than adult stem cells.
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Hairsplitting at the Court

TownHall.com George Will June 28, 2005

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rendered two more hairsplitting, migraine-inducing decisions about when religious displays on public property do and do not violate the First Amendment protection against “establishment” of religion. In a case from Texas, where a Ten Commandments monument stands outside the state Capitol, the court, splintered six ways from Sunday, said: We find no constitutional violation. The second case came from Kentucky, where the Commandments displayed in several courthouses are surrounded by historical symbols and documents — e.g., copies of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Star Spangled Banner — to comply with the “reindeer rule,” more about which anon. On Monday the court recoiled from Kentucky’s displays, saying, they are unconstitutionally motivated by a “predominately religious purpose.” Not enough reindeer?

Never mind the court’s minute reasoning about the finely tuned criteria it has spun over the years. Instead, consider — as the court should have done years ago, when it began policing religious displays — a few facts about the era in which the Establishment Clause was written.

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de Tocqueville on religion and freedom

“When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the higher powers of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?” -Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

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