Welcome to the Cult of Government
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 … (more...)
Fr. Gregory Jensen On Our (Orthodox Christianity’s) Cultural Failings
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. … (more...)
Obamacare Ruling Reflects Technocratic Imperative
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 … (more...)
The Republic is Finished and the America We Knew is Gone
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 … (more...)
The Moral Promise of Free Enterprise [VIDEO]
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 … (more...)
Patriarch Bartholomew Coddles Environmental Extremists
- 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 … (more...)
The End of America? The HHS Mandate’s Threat to Freedom [VIDEO]
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) … (more...)
Christian Environmentalism that ‘Costs me Nothing’
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 … (more...)
Metropolitan Jonah Addresses the Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America
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 … (more...)
Fr. John Whiteford Asks: What is the Mainstream Orthodox View on Homosexuality?
Fr. John Whiteford comments on his blog News, Comments, & Reflections about an assertion made by Rebecca Matovic that professors, hierarchs, priests, and "many, many laypeople" agree with Dunn and his support of homosexual marriage. Matovic couches her views in the usual "I am loving but my opponents are bullies and dangerous" verbiage of the left, but Fr. John takes care of that in short order as … (more...)
Ancient Faith Live Tonight (Sunday June 17) at 8pm Eastern — Same-Sex Marriage
Is Same-Sex Marriage a Church vs State issue? Does the Church have anything to say to the larger culture about marriage? No, argues David J. Dunn, the author of an opinion piece that ran in the Huffington Post several months ago (Civil Unions by Another Name: An Eastern Orthodox Defense of Gay Marriage). Dunn argues that traditional marriage (one man and one woman) is a moral construct invented by … (more...)
Is Greece European?
I lived in Greece a while back and have returned five or six times since. The problems that caused Greece's economic collapse were evident even back in the mid-1990s and like all Greeks, I learned how to play the system in order to survive. We really had no other option. Getting around the rules was necessary if you didn't want to throw all your money and time away. For example, when I first … (more...)
The Orthodox Church of Tomorrow – Revisted
Four years ago Fr. John Peck published the essay below and boy did he get hammered. Creativity, a characteristic you would want to see in priests, is feared because sometimes it gets too close to exposing the sheer paucity of substantive ideas and compelling engagement with the larger culture that the Church, in order to be Church, should cultivate in their leaders. The truth is we have got some … (more...)
Eastern Right: Conservative Minds Convert to Orthodox Christianity
Source: The American Conservative | By Rod Dreher - Since the Second World War, Roman Catholicism has had enormous influence on American intellectual conservatism. The postwar rebirth of conservatism had two sources: libertarianism—a reassertion of classical liberalism against statism—and cultural traditionalism. For Russell Kirk and other leading traditionalists of the era, the Roman … (more...)
Reflections on the Ancient Faith Today Progam: Christianity and Same-Sex Attraction
This past Sunday (May 20, 2012), Ancient Faith Today interviewed Dr. Philip Mamalakis and Andrew Williams who specialize in counseling people with same-sex attraction. It was hands down one of the most illuminating and informed presentations I have heard on this complex and often contentious topic in quite a while. Without going into particulars (you can listen to the interview below), their … (more...)
