Islam

Patriarch Kirill at the funeral of Fr. Daniel Sysoyev

The Russian Orthodox priest gunned down in his church last week was buried yesterday in Moscow. There has been an intense amount of media coverage of this crime and most of the speculation, by the media and police authorities, centers on a suspected Islamist killer in light of Fr. Daniel Sysoyev’s outspoken and aggressive campaign to promote Orthodox Christianity among Muslims and other non-Christian communities.

From the Moscow Times:

Church insiders said the attack, which happened late Thursday in southern Moscow, could have been the work of radical Islamists, who had regularly threatened him for preaching to Muslims. Law enforcement officials said they believed religion was the primary motive in the killing.

The 35-year-old Sysoyev, who led the St. Thomas Church on Kantemirovskaya Ulitsa, was shot point-blank four times by an unidentified man wearing a medical face mask, police said. He was severely wounded and died in an ambulance.

Vladimir Strelbitsky, a 41-year-old regent who was nearby during the attack, was also shot and remains hospitalized in serious condition.

Citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Interfax reported that the killer called Sysoyev twice shortly before the shooting. Viktor Kupriyanchuk, the church’s elder, told Kommersant that the killer burst into the church shouting, “Where’s Sysoyev?” When Sysoyev stepped forward from behind the altar, the assailant shot him several times and attempted to flee.

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Pope Benedict’s trip is off to a good start and the intense media coverage (1,300 journalists covering the trip by one estimate) is already bringing much needed attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. The Bishop of Rome has a deep appreciation for Eastern Christianity, as did his predecessor John Paul II. In his Vespers homily delivered in the Greek-Melkite Cathedral of St. George in Amman, Benedict said this:

The ancient living treasure of the traditions of the Eastern Churches enriches the universal Church and could never be understood simply as objects to be passively preserved. All Christians are called to respond actively to the Lord’s mandate — as Saint George did in dramatic ways according to popular record — to bring others to know and love him. In fact the vicissitudes of history have strengthened the members of particular Churches to embrace this task with vigor and to engage resolutely with the pastoral realities of today. Most of you trace ancient links to the Patriarchate of Antioch, and your communities are thus rooted here in the Near East. And, just as two thousand years ago it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians, so also today, as small minorities in scattered communities across these lands, you too are recognized as followers of the Lord. The public face of your Christian faith is certainly not restricted to the spiritual solicitude you bear for one another and your people, essential though that is. Rather, your many works of universal charity extend to all Jordanians — Muslims and those of other religions — and also to the large numbers of refugees whom this Kingdom so generously welcomes.

Present for the homily were His Beatitude Gregorios III Laham, the Greek Melkite Patriarch, Emeritus Archbishop Georges El-Murr and His Excellency Yaser Ayyach, Archbishop of Petra and Philadelphia. Also attending were representatives from other Churches in the East — Maronite, Syrian, Armenian, Chaldean and Latin — as well as Archbishop Benediktos Tsikoras of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Benedict’s visit was anticipated with some anxiety by local Catholics, who recalled the angry reception his September 2006 Regensburg speech received in the Muslim world. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz a few days before the trip, the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, was hoping that there would be no more of that. Continue reading →

In the June issue of Reason Magazine, Ezra Levant details his long and unnecessary struggle with Canadian human rights watchdogs over charges that he insulted a Muslim extremist, who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. This sorry episode also cost Levant, the former publisher of Canada’s Western Standard magazine, about $100,000. Read “The Internet Saved My Life: How I beat Canada’s ‘human rights’ censors.” (HT: RealClearPolitics). Levant sums it up this way:

The investigation vividly illustrated how Canada’s provincial and national human rights commissions (HRCs), created in the 1970s to police discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services, have been hijacked as weapons against speech that offends members of minority groups. My eventual victory over this censorious assault suggests that Western governments will find it increasingly difficult in the age of the Internet to continue undermining human rights in the name of defending them.

In a review of “Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays on Global Concerns” by Archbishop Anastasios Yannoulatos (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), I talked about the archbishop’s critique of human rights laws and how they should be properly understood by Christians.

In the essay “Orthodoxy and Human Rights,” Anastasios takes a critical view of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and the later development of these declarations into exhaustive lists of economic, social, and political rights. Anastasios makes an important distinction between rights declarations, and their enforcement through legal and political forms of coercion, and Christianity’s preferred method of persuasion and faith. “Declarations basically stress outward compliance,” he says, “while the gospel insists on inner acceptance, on spiritual rebirth, and on transformation.”

Anastasios reminds us of Christianity’s contribution to the development of political liberty. “Human rights documents,” he says, “presuppose the Christian legacy, which is not only a system of thought and a worldview that took shape through the contributions of the Christian and Greek spirit, but also a tradition of self-criticism and repentance.” Those words should be hung from banners everywhere new constitutions and declarations are being drafted. Continue reading →

It used to be that I would skip printed interviews in magazines and journals, and especially in newspapers. They seemed like rehashings of what the interviewee had already said–perhaps better–in print. As an editor, interviews also struck me as filler for slow issues. And so it went for years that I did not read a single interview even while enjoying interviews on television and especially on the radio.

What you could call my prejudice against print interviews was only broken by that maker and breaker of prejudices: experience. I read a couple of deft interviews, which appeared, strangely enough, in leftist publications like Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Slate (I have not seen many interviews, and especially many notable ones, in what could be called conservative or right-wing publications. If you know of some, please post them as a response). I say strangely enough since I had never thought that certain genres or print formats were more or less preferred by one side or another in the culture wars. After a little reflection on my last five years of reading, I concluded that whereas the left seems to run the gamut in its literary output, the right is mostly an article, book, and blog literary culture. I have joked with friends who sit on boards of right-leaning institutes that without the article, tri-fold pamphlet, monograph, and dinner-speech, western civilization would disappear. A more revealing comment may be what a not unrenowned conservative friend of mine told me “I just don’t have time for fiction,” he looked toward his vast library, “it requires too much self-disclosure.” There are notable exceptions, yet this seems fair, considering the temperament of many famous litarati of the right and left.

Be that as it may, printed interviews can do in a short space what an essay cannot, and this is its virtue and its temptation to vice. An interviewee can offer a collection of thesis statements, roughly argued, with implications and connections from and between them, without the reader thinking that too much has been said too soon.  Sometimes, when the interviewer is knowledgeable of the interviewee’s corpus, the questions can generate felicitous syntheses of the corpus, with strings strung between seemingly disparate subjects. In this way there is serendipity in the interview–a coming upon what was perhaps not thought before by the author, or understood by the reader. There is a dialectic. Yet, unlike live interviews, the printed interview is usually edited after the fact for content, with many things being restated. This allows the interviewee to hone what he said, and perhaps edit out what is sub par.

Recently, the Clarion Review, published by the American Orthodox Institute, began printing interviews by prominent European intellectuals. The first two were with Roger Scruton, Britain’s most prominent conservative philosopher, and Remi Brague, an influential French scholar and academic, who specializes in medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theology and culture, and their interrelations.

I encourage you to read these provocatively titled pieces, certainly if you find yourself with my old prejudice against the printed interview. Continue reading →