Month: July 2010

Source: The Republic

Terry Mattingly

Officers will be elected.

Political issues will be discussed. Lofty resolutions will be passed.

At least one long business session will include a proposal about clergy benefits and salaries.

[…]

But something unusual happened recently during the 219th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). An official “ecumenical advisory delegate” — Father Siarhei Hardun of the Orthodox Church of Belarus — used his moment at the podium to deliver a message that was courteous and stunning at the same time, if not genuinely offensive to many in the audience.

Read the entire article on The Republic website.

Source: Colson Center

Source: Today’s Zamann

Patriarch Bartholomew

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has quietly led the gesture to the Orthodox, who face a shortage of candidates to succeed İstanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, 70, and serve on the Holy Synod, which administers patriarchate affairs.

Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a citizen. But the Orthodox community in Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, has fallen to some 3,000 from 120,000 a half-century ago, drastically shrinking the pool of potential future patriarchs.

"The specific call Erdoğan made to give citizenship to those who will take up an official position at the patriarchate came in response to the problems they have," İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan's chief foreign-policy adviser, said in an interview.

Continue reading →

Fr. Gregory Jensen, contributing editor to AOI blog and editor of Koinonia blog recently published this essay on the Acton Institute website.

Fr. Gregory Jensen

Privacy in our culture has come to serve not a deepening of community life but an ever deeper sense of social isolation.  Even otherwise laudable behavior is increasingly justified not by the goodness of what is done but by the modern sense of privacy.  Even among those who ought to know better, the Gospel is presented in terms that are almost wholly personal without any sense of its public character and demands.   Our sense of isolation from each other has become so profound that even to suggest that there is a human nature and that true happiness is only possible when we live in conformity to our nature, is seen a provocation and an assault on the radical autonomy of the individual.  

Paradoxically, when privacy is in the service of isolation it is also the source of what Peggy Noonan (The Eyes Have It) describes as our increasingly "exhibitionist culture."  She writes that more and more we "know things about each other (or think we do) that we should not know, have no right to know, and have a right, actually, not to know.”  While technology has a role to play here, Noonan sees the cause as rooted in the loss of what I would call the right sense of personal privacy.  Lose this, Noonan says, and "we lose some of our humanity; we lose things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as, actually, children of God."  And with this loss comes as well the loss of a truly civil society.  "We also lose trust, not only in each other but in our institutions, which we come to fear. “ 

Continue reading →