Author: Fr. Johannes Jacobse

30 former Charismatic Episcopal Church members and others are received into the Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday (2008).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_yEagBxGw[/youtube]

In addition you can see the new building and renovations that took place during Lent to accommodate the new members.  St. John the Theologian Orthodox Church, San Juan Capistrano, California.

… and a view into anchorite monasticism from a Romanian hermit.

Sad news today. Paul Weyrich passed away. Here’s part of the news release:

Paul M. Weyrich, 66, who helped found the Heritage Foundation and at one time was one of Washington’s most visible conservatives, died this morning. At his death, he was president and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

Heritage announced this morning: “Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage’s prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005. Weyrich will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.”

Paul Weyrich was a conservative in the true sense of the word: a man who drew from the enduring principles, most of them rooted in his deep faith in God. Mr. Weyrich was a deacon in the Melkite Church, an office he faithfully served in gratitude to His Savior whom he now sees face to face. I saw this in a visit with him last January. I attended the March for Life in Washington, DC and called Mr. Weyrich for an appointment to see him. He graciously consented and we talked for over an hour. He invited me to address his legendary Wednesday afternoon luncheon and tell his audience about AOI, which I did.

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A quote from Catholic historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) in “Religion and the Modern State” (1936):

Religion gradually retreated into man’s inner life, and left social and economic life to the State and to a civilization which grew steadily more secularized. A man’s debt to religion was paid by an hour or two in church on Sundays, and the rest of the week was devoted to the real business of life — above all, the making of money. Such a division of life into two compartments — and very unequal ones at that — was not the Christian solution, nor could it be permanently successful. If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what happened in the case of modern Europe. The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole man.

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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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