A friend sent me an article from the Hellenic Voice titled, “Religious Right must not set agenda for Orthodox Church.” Well, reasonable enough. But the article got so many other things wrong that I was tempted to simply quit reading half way through. The author, Harry Katopodis, seemed not to understand the difference between religious doctrine and political activism (which was one of the main faults of the Religious Right). Amazingly, his article was aimed at those Orthodox brothers and sisters who have been received into the Church from other traditions. You know, converts. Their conversion, the author suggested, has been a Trojan horse that has allowed the Religious Right to stealthily creep into the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Katopodis article begins with the assertion that “the Orthodox Churches in America are heading down two different paths over political involvement.” The article is much too long and repetitive to reprint so I’ll touch on just a … [Read more...]
Why Should the Islamic World Feel Besieged?
James G. Jatras, foreign affairs policy expert and advisor to AOI, faced challenges by Muslim scholars who contend that Americans are "Islamophobic" among other charges on Press TV. View the video: Why Should the Islamic World Feel Besieged? … [Read more...]
Invocation Prayer
The following prayer was offered by Fr. John A. Peck (see his Orthodox Church of Tomorrow below) at the Prescott (Ariz.) City Council meeting on Sept. 9. Fr. John is pastor of Prescott Orthodox Church, The "Mile High" Mission. Invocation Prayer O God, the God of principalities and powers, authorities and dominions, we ask You to send Your Most Holy, Good and Life-Creating Spirit upon this noble assembly, that You may bless what we do, and that we may do what You bless. Strengthen us to labor without partiality or favor for the increase of prosperity to the benefit of all Your people, to establish Your peace and Your justice among men. Guide us by Your Holy Spirit that we may not tolerate in our midst those who would lie, cheat or steal, who would circumvent justice for the righteous, or reward the transgressor. For You are the benefactor of our souls and bodies, O Christ our God, and to You we ascribe glory, together with Your Father, Who is from everlasting, and Your Most … [Read more...]
The Orthodox Church of Tomorrow
A new American Orthodoxy, one more vitalized by the Gospel, is taking shape now. There will be fewer parishes, more and younger bishops, a clergy that is better educated and morally rigorous. And, finally, the ethnic "coffee club" model of Orthodox Christianity will fade away. This is the vision of Fr. John A. Peck in "The Orthodox Church of Tomorrow," just published on the AOI site. "As frightening and disconcerting as it may seem to our leaders, they will learn that emerging from a cocoon, even a Byzantine cocoon, is not a bad thing," Fr. John writes. "Orthodoxy is about to take flight on new beautiful wings. Here he is on the future of the hierarchy in America: If our current slate of bishops has been mostly a disappointment, reducing their number will only tighten this closed circle, making the hierarchy less and less accessible, and more and more immune to things like, oh, the needs and concerns of their flock. The process of selection for the episcopacy will contain a … [Read more...]
Interview with Bobby Maddex, editor of Salvo
Salvo describes itself as a magazine committed to "deconstructing the damaging cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed the notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded the appetite for transcendence." Editor Bobby Maddex says Salvo aims for the type of reader that is "open-minded enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and invariably, it leads to Christ and his teachings." Maddex spoke recently with Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse, president of the American Orthodox Institute. Read the entire interview on the AOI site. Here's a quote from Bobby: Our "vibe," as you call it, was selected to counter the lies emanating from some of the hipper, youth-oriented, and hugely popular newsstand magazines-such as Rolling Stone and Wired. We were tired of the monopoly that these publications had on slick, edgy, and highly ironic content, especially since the worldviews that inhere in such content are so nihilistic, materialistic, and immoral. We are trying to … [Read more...]
AOI debuts new website for “The Clarion Review”
Clarion Review launches all-new Web site with new content Turning Cows into IdeasRoger Scruton, philosopher & farmer, tells us how to make farms profitable even if no one buys a thing: Very few farms are profitable, and ours exists more...as a rural consultancy and ideas factory. Our neighbors turn grass into milk and make a loss; we turn grass into ideas and make a profit. We keep horses of our own, which we look after, and allow our neighbors to use the pasture for their cows: cows too, viewed from the window, can easily be made into ideas. We also keep chickens, and occasionally pigs, which we turn into sausages, after their brief time as ideas. Aging, Individualism, and Our Middle-Class DreamsPeter Augustine Lawler, ethicist and critic, tells us how caring for the old competes with our work-a-day society's love of freedom and laboring: Surely there is little worse than to have Alzheimer's and be alone...Yet the currents of our time push us almost inescapably in this … [Read more...]
Kosovo prelude to Georgia?
In yesterday's Washington Times, James George Jatras looks at the unintended irony in Washington's opposition to the expected Russian recognition of an independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the wake of the Bush Administration's support for an independent Kosovo. Jatras, an advisor to AOI, asks: If Moscow stepped over the line in its crushing military response to Mr. Saakashvili's offensive, what do we call 78 straight days of NATO's bombing throughout Serbia, destroying most of that country's civilian infrastructure? If Russia is to be faulted for imperfect implementation of the Sarkozy agreement, what can be said about Washington's violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which ended the 1999 Kosovo war and reaffirms Serbian sovereignty in the province? The standard reasons cited for making Serbia an exception to the rule we demand in Georgia is that NATO intervened to stop genocide of Kosovo's Albanians and that they will never again accept being part of … [Read more...]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
"During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. The most difficult thing of all to bear was that I could not get my works judged by people with literary training. In 1961, after the 22nd Congress of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party and Tvardovsky's speech at this, I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Alexander Solzhenitsyn's momentous decision to publish his slim volume on Gulag life (he feared not only the destruction of his manuscript but "my own life") ended his period of "secret authorship" and put him on the path of a literary career that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. But his work meant so much more than that. Solzhenitsyn, who died … [Read more...]
ACLU Wants to Sink Navy Prayers
The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening legal action against the U.S. Naval Academy unless it discontinues a tradition -- believed to date back to the college's founding in 1845 -- of mealtime prayer, the Baltimore Sun reports. "The government should not be in the business of compelling religious observance, particularly in military academies, where students can feel coerced by senior students and officials and risk the loss of leadership opportunities for following their conscience," Deborah A. Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, wrote in a letter to the academy. Over at the Scriptorium, John Mark Reynolds notes in "Let the Navy Pray" that everything that does not fit the ACLU's "Utopian ideology" is viewed as something that must be swept aside: Like all ideologues history does not matter, tradition does not matter, and there is no sense of proportion. Every public act must fit their cherished scheme. They are theocrats in reverse and just like the … [Read more...]
‘Requiem for the Romanovs’
Robert Moynihan, writing for Inside the Vatican, has a moving report on the world premiere of a "Requiem Concert" in Russia's largest church, Christ the Savior, in a commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family on the night of July 17, 1918. The historical texts and music were by Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Vienna, Austria, head of the Russian Church representation to the European Institutions. Alfeyev also participated in the performance, reading Scriptural passages in which the sufferings of Christ seemed to foreshadow the sufferings of Christians in communist Russia. In the article "Requiem for the Romanovs," Moynihan wrote: No one can contemplate the bloody murder of four lovely, educated, refined, innocent girls, and their young brother, without a shudder. This sense of horror is multiplied by the sense that the children in some way represented the nation itself. The czar "incarnated" the "essence" of the Russian nation, … [Read more...]
New Leader for Korean Orthodox
Metropolitan Ambrosios Aristotelis Zographos was enthroned on July 20 at St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Seoul as the Church's second metropolitan, reports the Union of Catholic Asian News. Around 450 clergy and laypeople of the Orthodox Church from South Korea and abroad attended. The Orthodox Metropolis of Korea, which is under the Ecumenical Patriarchate, has about 3,000 members with eight local clergymen, including two deacons, and two nuns, the news site reported. It administers seven churches and one monastery. In his enthronement speech, the new metropolitan spoke of the Orthodox Church's "unknown treasure" of patristic traditions. He called on all members of the Church in South Korea to bear faith witness through its liturgical and spiritual traditions. "Nowadays, many non-Orthodox Christians around the world recognize the uniqueness of Orthodox spirituality and seek to learn it," he said. More on the Orthodox Metropolis of Korea here. HT: The Western Confucian … [Read more...]
