Month: October 2010

Patsourakos: An “icon” of Stalin is sacrilege

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 388

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 394

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 400

George Patsourakos, an AOI Observer commentator, recently posted this essay on his website Theology and Society.

In a news story that shocked Christians throughout the world this week, it was revealed that Joseph Stalin — the Russian tyrant responsible for murdering millions of innocent people — was pictured on an icon at an Orthodox Church in Moscow.

Joseph Stalin portrayed in 'icon.'

The icon appeared in the Church of Saint Nicholas, and depicts Stalin with Matriona, the blind saint, in an alleged meeting between her and the Russian tyrant. Apparently this icon, whose author is unknown, had been donated to the church by a parishioner.

According to a legend — one that has been rejected by the Orthodox Church — Stalin visited Matriona in 1941, and she predicted victory over the Nazi Germans who had attacked Russia. Her prediction turned out to be correct, and this made Stalin more religious at that time, but he died as an atheist.

Although he was a student at an Orthodox seminary in neighboring Georgia, Stalin was expelled at the age of 20 in 1899, because of his revolutionary activities.

After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin took over as head of the Soviet Union and remained its dictator until his died in 1953. He eliminated threats to his power by means of purges and widespread secret executions. Indeed, Stalin was responsible for the murder of millions of innocent people during his dictatorship.

So why in the world would Russians today want to praise this “butcher of millions of people,” and include his image on a church icon?

The answer is that many Russians today are still impressed — even mesmerized — with Stalin’s military acumen that resulted in Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II.

On the other hand, this victory also proved to be very costly, because more than 20 million Russians were killed in defending their nation.

Another major reason that some Russians still revere Stalin is the fact that he did manage to make the Soviet Union into a world superpower — the most powerful nation in the world, after the United States.

But what about Stalin’s murders of millions of innocent people? Also, what about the repression and fear he instilled in all of the Russian people? Should these critical aspects of Stalin’s dictatorship be ignored, in order to justify his image on an icon and displaying that icon in an Orthodox Church?

Of course not! In fact, painting an image of Stalin on an icon, and displaying that icon in a church is a sacrilegious tragedy — a tragedy that contradicts the teachings of Christ and everything that Christianity represents.

Srdja Trifkovic: Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate

16 Comments

Source: Chronicles of Culture

Srdja Trifkovic

Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010.

Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding. This means it is not merely a place of worship, but also a physical expression of the Mohammedan stake to a place at first, and eventually a symbol of Jihad’s triumph over the hated infidel—crudely visible in the prison bars of St. John’s Cathedral in Damascus and Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

The gall of the project’s promoters is evident in its name, “Cordoba House,” which is not inspired by that old canard, the “Golden Age.” The mosque in Cordoba was built after the Muslim conquest of southern Spain. The invaders razed the Church of St. Vincent to erect their triumphal monument. And now a second Cordoba Mosque, right next to the scene of jihadist carnage, is meant to signify “bridge-building” and “interfaith dialogue.” Such idiocies are only possible in a society seriously, perhaps terminally diseased.

Continue reading →

Deprecated: str_replace(): Passing null to parameter #3 ($subject) of type array|string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/functions/image.php on line 116
class="post-8169 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-blog-archive tag-environment tag-environmentalism tag-green-patriarch tag-neo-paganism tag-new-atlantis-magazine tag-orthodox-church entry">

Enviromentalism as Religion: Doesn’t the EP get it?

2 Comments

Do you want to understand why the Ecumenical Patriarch’s coddling of environmentalism is not only wrong-headed but dangerous? First read Environmentalism as Religion in the New Atlantis magazine. Then recall that His All Holiness threw the full moral weight of his office behind of the Geneva Protocols, a crown jewel of environmental activism, during the Mississippi River Boat cruise last year.

Fortunately the UN sponsored protocols were dead on arrival when the East Anglia fraud was exposed a month later. But the Ecumenical Patriarch has yet to explain why he supported them. Why employ such a reckless political strategy that could easily boomerang and undermine an already fragile moral authority? (We tried to warn him.)

So why did he do it? And why does he persist in defending global warming as legitimate science and, even more troubling, build moral exhortations around it? Why insist on continuing the defense — the sanctification really — of the ideology?

Could it be that the plan all along was the self-investiture of the Ecumenical Patriarch as the titular head of environmentalism? Do his advisers envision a convergence between the religious dimension of the movement and the international prominence they so desire? If anyone has a better explanation, I’m all ears.
Continue reading →

Religion and the Environment: The Link Between Survival and Salvation

19 Comments

I want our leadership to provide thoughtful analysis on cultural issues but too often we get the thin gruel of popular piety dressed up in Church-speak. Take this latest missive from Constantinople on the environment for example. Where to begin? There is no reflection about the falsification of data by global warming apologists, no awareness that the movement has been largely discredited. Then, adding to the ignorance, it launches into a moral screed using the same suspect science as justification.

In our efforts, then, to contain global warming, we are admitting just how prepared we are to sacrifice some of our greedy lifestyles. When will we learn to say: “Enough!”? When will we direct our focus away from what we want to what the world needs? When will we understand how important it is to leave as light a footprint as possible on this planet for the sake of future generations? We must choose to care. Otherwise, we do not really care at all.

Do not really care? If we make any choices at all, the first one must be to think clearly. We must choose to make proper distinctions grounded in fact and experience. We must choose to put off popular pieties masquerading as moral imperatives that are manipulated by celebrities, politicians, activists and others for their own ends.

Moreso, we must choose to recognize the difference between hectoring and serious moral reflection. Will all due respect to Constantinople, it simply is not true that if we don’t accept the fraudulent science of the global warming lobby we are greedy, selfish, and ignorant people. There’s enough political correctness in the world already, thank you. We don’t need it in the Church.

I’ll leave the parsing of the piece for the commentators. Meanwhile, compare this missive with the speech given by Vaclev Claus, President of the Czech Republic, recently. Claus shows us what clear thinking looks like. Constantinople should take a page from his book.

His All Holiness was presented with the Hollister Award by the Temple of Understanding in New York on Tuesday, October 19, 2010. Others who received the award were Prince El Hassan bin Talal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Prof. Karen Armstrong.

CNN invited His All Holiness to contribute an opinion article for their online edition and it can be viewed on their website at: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/19/bartholomew.souls.planet/index.html

Continue reading →

Deprecated: str_replace(): Passing null to parameter #3 ($subject) of type array|string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/functions/image.php on line 116
class="post-8123 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-blog-archive tag-culture tag-terry-mattingly entry">

Mattingly: ‘Don’t ask’ policy puts chaplains in vise

19 Comments

Terry Mattingly

Source: The Republic

The setting: The office of a priest who serves as a military chaplain.

The time: This hypothetical encounter occurs soon after the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that forbids gays, lesbians and bisexuals to openly serve in America’s armed forces.

The scene: An officer requests counseling about tensions with her same-sex partner as they prepare for marriage. The priest says this would be inappropriate, since his church teaches that sex outside of marriage is sin and that the sacrament of marriage is reserved for unions of a man and a woman.

[…]

What happens next? That question is driving the tense church-state debates that continue behind the scenes of the political drama that surrounds “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

[…]

A letter from Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America to the chaplains board was even more blunt: “If our chaplains were in any way … prohibited from denouncing such behavior as sinful and self-destructive, it would create an impediment to their service in the military. If such an attitude were regarded as ‘prejudice’ or the denunciation of homosexuality as ‘hate language,’ or the like, we would be forced to pull out our chaplains from military service.”

Read the entire article on The Republic website.

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function nuthemes_content_nav() in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php:58 Stack trace: #0 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include() #1 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #2 /home/aoiusa/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #3 {main} thrown in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php on line 58