Month: June 2015

The SCOTUS decision to legalize gay marriage reveals that the corruption of American cultural gatekeepers and institutions is nearly complete. This ruling legitimates the homosexual agenda which at bottom is not about civil rights but the inversion of the moral bedrock of Christian civilization. Religion is the ground of culture wrote philosopher Russell Kirk and when religion changes so does the culture.

The decision codifies into law a definition of the human person that strikes at the heart of the Christian understanding of who God created man to be. All persons and institutions will be judged by the litmus test of homosexuality. When the cultural transformation is complete, the assault on the Church will begin. It will come sooner than we think.

Dostoevsky warned of just such transformation to his fellow Russians when the gatekeepers of Russian culture embraced a vision of man contrary to the received moral tradition, in his case Russian Orthodoxy. He saw a great darkness that would come as a result of their corruption. He was correct.

The conservative judges on the Court recognize the same thing. Judge Anthony Scalia wrote:

Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

Gay marriage has never been about marriage. Gay marriage has been about the moral sanctioning of homosexual couplings. It was and remains the wedge issue for the legal codification of homosexual behavior and the overthrow of cultural norms by using the coercive power of the courts. At bottom it is a revolt against Christ and Christian civilization.

Dark days are ahead. There will be no compromise with the forces that will be mobilized against Christians and Christianity as a result of this ruling. Liberty has lost, and next comes the attempt to extinguish the Light that illumined it.

(For more see my essay: Homosexual Marriage at the Dusk of Liberty.)

Source: Acton Power Blog

The latest monograph from the Acton Institute, The Cure for Consumerism by Rev. Gregory Jensen, will be available for free starting this Wednesday, June 10, and ending Friday, the 12th, at midnight. This is the second monograph in the Orthodox Christian Social Thought Series.

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a rapid growth of human flourishing, but critics of the market economy have argued that these improvements have led to consumerism and rampant materialism.

This monograph will explore the possible cures for consumerism. Can society actively choose to consume less? Does our economic system need a complete overhaul?

Rev. Jensen will explore these possibilities, synthesizing insights from the spiritual tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church with modern social science. This monograph will offer practical solutions to consumerism, putting both faith and economic freedom to work for the common good.

To read a sample or to learn more about The Cure for Consumerism, be sure to visit www.CureConsumerism.com. On Wednesday, you can get your free copy at Amazon.

Fr. Gregory Jensen

He blogs at Koinonia and the American Orthodox Institute. In 2013, he was a Lone Mountain Fellow with the Bozeman, Mont.-based Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC).

A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying “You are mad, you are not like us.” —St Anthony the Great (d. AD 356)

“What is truth?” —Pontius Pilatus to Christ only hours before His execution (John 18:38).

Bruce Jenner’s public transition to his female alter ego “Caitlyn” on the cover of Vanity Fair received widespread praise in progressive circles. President Obama took the time to hail Jenner’s “courage” in coming forward and sharing her story. What is clear as one reads of the fawning coverage of Jenner’s transition to becoming, apparently, a woman is that the West has become so dedicated to the Enlightenment value of the absolute will of self that it has abandoned adherence to both morality and reason, deifying the individual will and setting it above all things.

There is no room for dissenting views in an intellectually totalitarian society, and that is what we are rapidly becoming. Anyone who sensibly and politely dissents from calling Bruce Jenner “Caitlyn” will be labeled a hater, a bigot, an intolerant ass worthy of public condemnation and ostracizing. We live in an insane time when crazy things like mutilating the body in order to accommodate spiritual illness — and that is precisely what this phenomenon is — are considered normative, and normal reactions are considered hateful.

For a man to mutilate his body to “become” a woman — which is both biologically and scientifically impossible — is something every civilized society should condemn and reject as tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly destructive to the soul. Yet our society is ever more allergic to the very notion of there being a soul, an afterlife, an ultimate account, a God. Christians, and conservatives of every and even no religion, urge the far simpler, easier path — for a person who thinks himself or herself “transgendered” to do the sensible thing and begin to reconcile his or her sadly disturbed, confused mind to his or her natural body. This can and should be done through appropriate channels of guided, professional spiritual and psychological healing.

The inescapable reality is that Bruce will forever be Bruce. His DNA will forever be male. No amount of “corrective” surgery can change that. All that will be female in him is a kind of facade, the plastically and surgically applied exterior appearance. Bruce, even posing as Caitlyn, will never be able to have a womb, that thing which truly separates women from men. This 65 year old grandfather will never be able to give birth, no matter what he does to mutilate his body into resembling that of a woman. If he goes through with full “gender reassignment surgery”, or “gender harmonization surgery”, as it is now being called, Bruce will have grafted, fake female genitalia in the spot where his male genitalia were sliced and mutilated.

In every way, should Bruce choose to go through with the surgery, his body would become a mutilation. He needs our fervent prayers that God protect him from such a tragic path. If he tragically decides to take the extreme step, he will bear the ultimate responsibility, but so will the horrific, immoral plastic surgeons and pseudo-psychologists who encouraged his delusion, who encouraged him to mutilate himself rather than do the far easier, sensible thing and reconcile his mind and soul to his beautiful, natural, God-given body.

At the rate he is going, Bruce will have taken a profoundly hurting man, a man still physically whole, with a fully functioning male anatomy, and butchered him. Any sensible, thoughtful society would pity him, would pray for him to still find healing, and beg him not to go further down the path into madness. Yet we live in an insane society that praises him for being so brave, so true to himself, that he dares to risk all to be who he wants to be. We have elevated the self-will over and as a replacement of God. We are now a truly atheistic society in which we subordinate all things to the individual will.

The truth is, whether you’re a theist or not, either God or nature made Bruce male. No amount of plastic surgery can change that. Instead of trying to reason with Bruce, instead of encouraging him on the far easier path of reconciling his hurting mind and soul with his beautiful, God-created male body, we now live in a society that encourages and normalizes people who are sadly running from their true selves, running from any concept of ultimate Truth, running from and rejecting the very concept of there being a reality beyond the self will.

The idolization of the self-will is complete. Truth in our society is dead.

Ryan Hunter is pursuing his BA in History at Stony Brook University in New York. He is the University’s “Researcher of the Month” for June 2015. He plans to pursue a PhD in either Russian, British, or Byzantine history. His interests include Church history, theology, the Empire periods of most civilizations, and political theory. He has written widely for the Institute on Religion & Democracy’s blog Juicy Ecumenism. Read Ryan Hunter’s essays.