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David P. Goldman posted this today on First Things’s blog First Thought.  He describes the economic situation in Greece and sketches out some of the social causes and possible outcomes.  In my heart I want what I read here to not be true–but I suspect my hopes are misplaced.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

On Feb. 12, I posted this item at my “Inner Workings” blog at Asia Times and on the Spengler blog at First Things:

Although Greece is an EC member, its finances and political system have the character of a banana republic. EC membership, though, enabled Greece to borrow far more money than any banana republic, such that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is about triple that of Argentina just before the latter’s bankruptcy in 2000. And because Greece is an EC member, the size and adumbrations of a bankruptcy would be much, much larger than that of any Latin American country.

Earlier I had assumed that we were watching a negotiation: Brussels would shout “Never!,” the Greeks would throw tantrums, and eventually some compromise would be reached and the situation would be stabilized.

Closer examination of the political situation in Greece makes me less optimistic. Greece may be suffering from an inoperable cancer, in the form of a degree of corruption that make a resolution without bankruptcy very difficult to implement.

Here are some comments by a political observer in Athens who has written to me privately: Continue reading →

Here’s my latest review for the Oooze. You can find this review and others here.

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne, $24.99)

The critiques I’ve read of Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith condemn it as heretical. Key to this judgment is that they all evaluate the book based on a canon of orthodoxy that I would characterizes as a loosely post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist theological standard. The irony of these critiques is that it is just this standard of orthodoxy that McLaren is rejecting. Flipping it around, though he doesn’t use the word, McLaren is calling his post-Reformation Protestant-Evangelical-Fundamentalist critics heretics and presenting himself (explicitly) as a new Martin Luther, a as man called by God to reform the Reformation and the daughters of that tradition. Continue reading →

Living In God's Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2009)

As some have argued here, the Church’s witness requires her to clearly articulate her anthropological vision.  The challenges that face both the Church and the larger society flow from competing visions of what it means to be human.

The articulation of an Orthodox understanding of the human person is central to our moral witness in the public square, to our evangelical witness in the human heart and (most importantly) the effective preaching of the Gospel from the pulpit.  If we cannot present a clear and compelling vision of human life, then on matters of personal and public morality, sexuality, politics and public policy, the Church cedes the public square and the human heart to increasingly pagan and disjointed culture.

Though her immediate concern is  the environmental movement, Elizabeth Theokritoff’s Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology, offers us an Orthodox approach to natural law grounded in Scripture and the Church Fathers and embodied in Christian worship and the lives and witnesses of the saints.  Theokritoff articulates for the reader a rich cosmological and anthropological vision that has implications not only for the environment but also economics and politics and it raises themes worthy of further exploration and study.  While I do not agree with her policy suggestions, — especially what I would argue are her misguided and very dangerous flirtation with population control — I do think those here interested in an anthropological response to contemporary issues would do well to read Living in God’s Creation.

You can read the whole of my review on Acton’s PowerBlog (Review: An Orthodox Christian Natural Law Witness).

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

On the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog, John Couretas has a good post (Got a feelin’ of Eco-Justice?) response to “the cascading daily disclosures of Climategate . . . global warming alarmist operating within the progressive/liberal precincts of churches and their activist organizations” have taken to dismissing science and playing ” the theology card!” Continue reading →