Month: November 2008

The World Council of Churches, which claims to speak for most Orthodox Churches around the globe, has formulated a number of proposals to reform the global financial system because of its inherent “injustice.” General Secretary Samuel Kobia sees the need for new transnational financial watchdog organizations that will “qualitatively regulate the growth in massive movements in capital.”

The problem here is that Kobia fails to understand that a global economy requires an international flow of capital — along with an international flow of goods and services and, very often, labor (indeed immigrant labor). In cataloging a long list of ills flowing from the current economic crisis, and the “neoliberal economic myth” of efficient markets, Kobia neglects to mention — or fails to see — how markets work to create wealth, economic growth and jobs. These are not things created by, as he would have it, “democratizing all global finance and trade institutions” across international boundaries. Nor is economic growth created by watchdog groups or ecumenical bodies. And Kobia also fails to see that in some of the most desperate regions of the developing world, including his own native Africa, more and more people are asking only for a chance to operate in a real market economy.

Here are some of Kobia’s more extreme proposals and my parenthetical responses:

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Rod Dreher over at Crunch Con believes the OCA has turned a corner:

Amazing. Just amazing. And prophetic. This is a national religious leader who is right for the time. Listen to it here by clicking on the “Vision for the Future” audio link. Excerpts (forgive any transcribing errors, please):

He talks about the need for Orthodox Christians to engage the world in service:

Where are the Orthodox hospitals? Where are the Orthodox schools? Where are the Orthodox charitable institutions? It’s a beautiful thing to build a medical clinic in a remote village in Ethiopia. But it’s also a beautiful thing to build a medical clinic in a remote village in Kansas.

More:

The fundamental institutions of our culture are falling apart. … [Traditional Episcopalians, for example] are crying out in pain. They see their church as having abandoned Christianity, and surely it has. If it endorses gay marriage. If it endorses homosexuality. If it endorses abortion. If it endorses euthanasia — this is an abandonment of Jesus Christ and the Gospel. No wonder those people are so hurting. … We need to open not only our doors but also our hearts.

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Terry Mattingly has been following the news coverage (non-coverage?) of the election of Metropolitan Jonah to lead the Orthodox Church in America and flags a story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Reporter J.M. Brown offered this:

Longtime friends from Santa Cruz County said the 49-year-old bishop has the ability and humility to serve the entire church, which means ironing out a well-publicized financial scandal involving misuse of church funds and bridging gaps between various sectors of the orthodox faith, including the Greek, Arab and Russian Orthodox churches.

“His election points to a very strong determination to change the way things have been done in the past,” the Rev. Mel Webber, the pastor of Prophet Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Santa Cruz for 11 years, said in a phone interview from Pittsburgh Thursday. “He’s got the skills to become one of the most enlightened leaders this church has seen in a long time.”

In “Turkey Shocked by Chain Smoking, Raki-Swilling Atatürk,” Spiegel Online reporter Daniel Steinvorth reports on the controversy over a new film released to mark the 70th anniversary of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

… Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül showed that the seven-decade anniversary can also be celebrated in another way — one perhaps more to the liking of the Kemalist Thought Association. At a ceremony at the Turkish embassy in Brussels, he gave a lecture on the difficult formation of the Turkish State and the expulsion of Greeks and Armenians, a fact which Gönül described as a “very important step.” At the end of the day, he said, modern Turkey would not be as we know it, “if Greeks still lived on the Aegean and Armenians still lived in different parts of Turkey today.”

In other words: the historical expulsion, deportation and extermination of the two population groups, as the thinking goes, are to be welcomed.

Between 1.5 and 2 million Anatolian Greeks were forced to leave their home in the process of the population changes. In return, half a million Greek Muslims came to Turkey. In 1955 another 100,000 Greeks left their home city of Istanbul following anti-Greek pogroms in a chapter of Turkish history which the once multicultural metropolis prefers to keep quiet about.

Later in the week, Gönül would correct himself, saying that Turkish minority groups, like the Armenians and the Greeks, enrich the country.

Still, Turkey’s official writing of history reveals a deep reluctance to tackle the “disappearance” of the Armenians. While Armenian sources say 1.5 million Armenians died in massacres and death marches during World War I, Turkey speaks of deaths on both sides, claiming there were 300,000 Armenian victims at the very most.

Turkish politics professor Baskin Oran was well aware how strong Gönül’s words sound beyond Turkish borders. “Because the Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia were sent away, industrialization was been delayed by at least 50 years,” he said.