May 23, 2013

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Fr. John Whiteford Responds to Dr. David Dunn: On Tradition

July 3, 2012 6:39 PM
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Source: Fr. John Whiteford's News, Comments, & Reflections - Dr. David J. Dunn has begun a series of blog posts that continue issues related to our discussion about Same-Sex Marriage on Ancient Faith Radio. His first post is Ancient Faith Continued: Theology and Symphony. I will post his comments and then my response (emphases mine): Dr. David J. Dunn: I have met a lot of Orthodox Christians who see the Tradition as an unchanging deposit. They basically apply a naive fundamentalist biblical literalism to the Tradition of the Orthodox Church (“Tradition” with a “big-T” in the Orthodox Church refers to the Bible, creeds, rituals, dogmas, and diverse opinions of ancient theologians). For them, “the Truth” was delivered once in history, its meaning is clear, and thus our theology is unchanging and unambiguous. Fr. John Whiteford: We consider the Tradition to be an unchanging deposit, because as a matter of fact, this is what the Church … [Read more...]

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Fr. John Whiteford Responds to Dr. David Dunn: The Hypocrisy of the Christian Left

July 3, 2012 6:35 PM
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Source: Fr. John Whiteford's News, Comments, & Reflections In a Huffington Post article, David Dunn has pointed out what he sees as hypocrisy on the part of Christian conservatives: It is the view that Christians should vote their values, and this means we should legislate moral evils into oblivion. Thus if we believe life begins at conception, we should vote against abortion! If we believe marriage is between one woman and one man, we should vote against gay marriage! And if we believe in caring for the sick and the poor, we should vote against "Obamacare!" ...Wait a minute! Do you see the political hypocrisy? The Christian Right votes for candidates who are anti-abortion and anti-gay (at least on paper) because it believes we must pass laws to protect marriage and protect life (at least embryonic life), but it is unwilling to apply the same principle to "Obamacare." Infants in the womb have a right to life, but apparently adults do not have a right to life-saving medical … [Read more...]

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Fr. Peter Guillquist — May His Memory be Eternal

July 2, 2012 9:09 AM
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- I first met Fr. Peter when he stayed with my wife and myself during a speaking engagement he had in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He sure was a gracious guest and he also loved sports. He relaxed in our living room watching a football game as I recall. It was a great visit. I had converted to the Orthodox Church a few years earlier and watched with great interest the conversion of the former Campus Crusaders because it mirrored my own journey in ways. Seeing such a large group come in made it a bit easier actually. Throughout the years we keep in touch here and there. He was a real people-person as we say, and it was authentic and genuine. The man knew Christ, loved Christ, and it always showed by his graciousness towards me, my family, and the other people I would see him interact with in different settings and occasions. That is what I remember about Fr. Peter the most, his gregarious and generous spirit. We have lost a good man. For more information go to All Saints … [Read more...]

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Welcome to the Cult of Government

July 2, 2012 7:53 AM
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Source: Real Clear Religion | By George Neumayr Either say "long live the federal government" or die, Mexican government officials hectored Catholics in the early twentieth century, as depicted in the movie, For Greater Glory, an account of the Christian resistance to this persecution known as the "Cristeros war." Is Mexico's past America's future? After four years of in-your-face secularism from Barack Obama, it is not an idle question. "Darn tooting," Barack Obama said to militant feminists when they asked him, after the passage of the "Affordable Care Act," if he was going to force Christians to pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients of their employees. Under his secularist mandates, of which his HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate is the most obvious example, Americans are in effect forced to say "long live the federal government" or face financial death. Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the essence of the "Affordable Care Act," … [Read more...]

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Fr. Gregory Jensen On Our (Orthodox Christianity’s) Cultural Failings

June 29, 2012 12:13 PM
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Fr. Gregory Jensen wrote the following response to my essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone). It's good, really good in fact, and I am posting it here to generate discussion that not only analyzes the reason for the present decline but to generate discussion of where to go from here. Excerpt: American Orthodoxy is as secular as the rest of America. Like the Catholic Church and the various Protestant communities...we have discovered that he who drinks the king’s wine sings the king’s song. Thank you to Fr Hans Jacobse for his recent essay (Catholic Online: The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone) and for the many thoughtful comments it has inspired. As to whether or not the latest decision of the SCOTUS supporting the constitutionality of the Patient Affordability Act is the end of the Republic or not I can’t say. If however our' Republic is rooted in virtue understood as … [Read more...]

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Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative

June 28, 2012 2:17 PM
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Why is anyone surprised? Obamacare was never going to be overturned. Not that it is constitutional, as the Constitution was originally conceived. It surely isn’t. But that Constitution has been terminally ill for a long time. Now it is dead. Why would the Supreme Court’s conservative chief justice rewrite the individual mandate’s penalty to be a tax, when the law’s authors unequivocally stated it was not a revenue generator during the legislative process? Let’s call it the “technocratic imperative” — faith in big government solutions for societal problems — a mindset that generates a far stronger gravitational pull than the standard conservative/liberal paradigm. The technocratic imperative is why, when push comes to shove, conservative judges almost always move “left” and liberal judges almost never move “right.” The case was always about two contrasting approaches to law and government. Opponents of Obamacare mounted a legal challenge to the individual … [Read more...]

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The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone

June 28, 2012 1:15 PM
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With this morning's decision that Obamacare will stand as the law of the land means that America -- home of the brave, land of the free -- is no more. This great country, the one to whom all great refugee movements of the world for over two centuries saw as the light to escape poverty, political bondage, and hopelessness now turns its back on that legacy of freedom for what will, in a very short time, amount to a bowl of pottage. The turn to tyranny won't happen overnight and it won't be recognized as tyranny -- not at first anyway. But as freedom gets chipped away the straight jacked gets tighter and then hardens to envelop the mind like a steel casket. By the middle of the next generation those who gave away their freedom in the name of freedom will be cursed by their own children. The children will weep by the waters of Babylon, unearthing old movies and books of an America they never knew. "Why did you not shout out against the decline?" they will cry. Antonio Gramsci, that … [Read more...]

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The Moral Promise of Free Enterprise [VIDEO]

June 25, 2012 6:48 PM
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The words happiness and free enterprise don’t usually appear in the same sentence. But Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, shows that the two are intimately and profoundly connected. The free enterprise system not only creates wealth, it creates the best chance we have to achieve personal satisfaction. Source: Prager University … [Read more...]

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Patriarch Bartholomew Coddles Environmental Extremists

June 23, 2012 8:01 PM
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- Taking care of the environment involves more than clean air, clean water, recycling and the other factors that we usually associate with responsible stewardship. It also involves ideas about the economy, human relationships, structuring communities, the meaning and value of work, the value of the unborn and aged and so forth. Every environmental program incorporates ideas about these factors even if they are not explicitly stated. In order to think clearly about environmental care, we have to look past the surface and examine the ideas that make up any environmental program. We have to ask ourselves do the programs promote human flourishing or impede it? Are trees and animals valued at the expense of the human person? Is man a blight on the earth who should be restricted from meaningful work and prosperity, or is his role as steward of creation a blessing to it? Below is an essay written for AOI by an anonymous author (I agreed to withhold the author's name) that describes the … [Read more...]

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The End of America? The HHS Mandate’s Threat to Freedom [VIDEO]

June 22, 2012 8:57 PM
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Source: Acton Institute The Obama's Administration's mandate requiring the Catholic Church to conform to government dictates on contraception and abortifacent drugs is more than a war on the Catholic Church argue Jennifer Roback Morse and Eric Metaxas. It's a war on freedom. Eric Metaxas and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse articulate the grave dangers of the Health & Human Services (HHS) Mandate with regard to religious freedom in America. Eric Metaxas is a public intellectual and author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, the thrilling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A German theologian in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer is remembered for his clandestine efforts to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis in the struggle for human freedom. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is an economist. She is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a non-profit focused on promoting the sanctity of marriage as the critical foundation for families, communities, and society. … [Read more...]

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Christian Environmentalism that ‘Costs me Nothing’

June 21, 2012 5:48 PM
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By John Couretas In his June 18 keynote address at the opening ceremony of the Halki Summit in Turkey, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew looked forward to the start of the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainability, June 20-22. He noted that attendees at his environmental gathering were “deeply frustrated with the stubborn resistance and reluctant advancement of earth-friendly policies and practices.” He called for greater sacrifice and personal responsibility (emphasis added in the quote below): Permit us to propose that perhaps the reason for this hesitation and hindrance may lie in the fact that we are unwilling to accept personal responsibility and demonstrate personal sacrifice. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, we refer to this “missing dimension” as ascesis, which could be translated as abstinence and moderation, or – better still – simplicity and frugality. The truth is that we resist any demand for self-restraint and self-control. [ … … [Read more...]

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Metropolitan Jonah Addresses the Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America

June 20, 2012 7:20 PM
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This talk is so clear about the emerging divide in all corners of Christendom (Orthodox included as the debate on these pages on same-sex marriage reveals) that anyone committed to the clarification and strengthening of the Classical Western Tradition should read it. That narrative shaped Christendom for centuries -- both East and West -- because it drew from anthropological constructs grounded deep in the Gospel of Christ that proclaims that man was created to be free. Met. Jonah presses for the recovery and restoration of that tradition. Unfortunately, few in American Orthodoxy are aware of what may soon be lost. In Old World Orthodoxy, only the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church seems to understand it because of their first-hand experience with the materialism of Soviet Communism and the madness it unleashed. Constantinople increasingly adopts the ways of the European Socialist and the other Patriarchates are beset with local problems. Here are three important … [Read more...]

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