Africa

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Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria and All Africa Alexandria: Easter message

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Easter message by Patriarch Theodoros II of Alexandria and All Africa

Alexandria, 15.04.2009

My beloved spiritual children, Greeks of the Diaspora, Arab-speaking Christians and Orthodox Africans,

This year too, from all the corners of the earth, from the Most Holy Tomb of our Lord, from every Altar that symbolizes that Tomb, will resound the joyous message that “Christ is Risen”. The hymns will announce to us, as the Angel did to the Myrrh bearers that “He whom you seek, Jesus of Nazareth, who was Crucified, is not here but has risen as He had said”. It is this message that we have to take to heart and have it characterize our lives. We have to transmit it as an event and as a trumpet-call of victory to all those being blessed with feelings of defeat and loneliness in this world. Continue reading →

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WCC’s ‘Homespun’ Economic Fallacy

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The World Council of Churches, which claims to speak for most Orthodox Churches around the globe, has formulated a number of proposals to reform the global financial system because of its inherent “injustice.” General Secretary Samuel Kobia sees the need for new transnational financial watchdog organizations that will “qualitatively regulate the growth in massive movements in capital.”

The problem here is that Kobia fails to understand that a global economy requires an international flow of capital — along with an international flow of goods and services and, very often, labor (indeed immigrant labor). In cataloging a long list of ills flowing from the current economic crisis, and the “neoliberal economic myth” of efficient markets, Kobia neglects to mention — or fails to see — how markets work to create wealth, economic growth and jobs. These are not things created by, as he would have it, “democratizing all global finance and trade institutions” across international boundaries. Nor is economic growth created by watchdog groups or ecumenical bodies. And Kobia also fails to see that in some of the most desperate regions of the developing world, including his own native Africa, more and more people are asking only for a chance to operate in a real market economy.

Here are some of Kobia’s more extreme proposals and my parenthetical responses:

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Obama Defeats ‘Social Darwinists’?

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Update (11/19/08) — In “Bush’s record in Africa receives well-deserved praise,” USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham gives us this:

This year, Bush signed a bill that authorized up to $48 billion to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria — most of it to be spent in sub-Saharan Africa — from 2009 through 2013. Since 2003, the Bush administration has provided funding to increase the number of Africans receiving anti-retroviral drugs from 50,000 to about 1.4 million, Frazer said.

— End update —

Bishop Savas of Troas

Did God ordain an Obama victory? You get that impression from Sava on a Rolla, the blog of Bishop Savas of Troas. In a post titled, “This is the Day that the Lord has made!,” the chancellor of the Greek Archdiocese celebrates the victory of President-elect Barack Obama in terms that can only be described as divine:

Do I expect miracles from the President-Elect? Am I confusing the man with the Messiah? Of course not. But neither is he the Antichrist, as some of his opponents would have you believe. Americans did a good thing yesterday, an inspired thing. They didn’t voice their opinion, they shouted it. A new day has dawned, a day that the Lord has most emphatically made. Are you as delighted as I am? Send up thanks to the Lord our God! Are you for any reason unhappy? Pray to the same God for our President-Elect’s enlightenment.

I don’t know. It’s almost like reading the Genesis account of Creation. OK, the Bishop’s guy won, and he has every right to celebrate. Then he goes — to put it nicely — really over the top.

The goal of government ought not to be to protect us from one another, to teach us to treat the other as competition or nuisance or threat, but to help us to help one another.

Could the Bishop be talking about those American citizens, many of whom were Orthodox Christians, who voted for John McCain? Or other Republican candidates? Or for President George W. Bush during his two terms? He doesn’t say so, but something here leads me to believe that the Bishop is doing just that.

Actually, one of the fundamental goals of government is to protect us from those who would do us harm, whether they live down the street or in another part of the globe. Read the newspaper on any given day, and you’ll see why this is so. And let’s take it a step further. As the American Founders foresaw, with God-enlightened genius, one of the main roles of government is to protect us from bad government and bad rulers

Finally, Bishop Savas tips his hand with this parenthetical dig:
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