Month: August 2010

“New York state and its Port Authority officials need to hang their heads in shame,” says George Patsourakos, on his blog Theology and Society. Patsourakos, a regular commentator on the AOI blog writes:

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center — attacks by extremist Muslims — resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. Nevertheless, New York state and Port Authority officials are seriously considering building a mosque at this very site. To even consider having a mosque at this site shows a heartless and unsympathetic attitude and disrespect by these officials toward the innocent victims who were killed there on 9/11 by Muslim terrorists. Having a mosque at Ground Zero is a very similar situation to having a Nazi Monument next to the Holocaust Museum. Both of these ideas should be put to rest, because they are an insult to their victims.

Meanwhile, New York officials have shown little or no interest in rebuilding St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church — a 300-member church that was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. The World Trade Center site’s owner says a deal to help rebuild St. Nicholas Church was offered and rejected by leaders of the church, over money and other issues.

Read the entire post on the Theology and Society blog.

Jim Wallis

For years I’ve been critical of Jim Wallis, the self-styled “prophetic voice” (his term) of Progressive politics in the American public square. “Prophetic voice” is a term that borrows from the Christian moral lexicon to lend moral authority and offer religious cover to secular Progressive ideology. Wallis operates in the mold of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and conflates Christian thinking with Marxist social dogma.

Like the NCC, Wallis was lost in the wilderness for decades. “Christian Progressives” are dogged by a sense of their own irrelevance. An ideology which unequivocally dismisses religion doesn’t have much room for professional religious types like Wallis or the NCC. He seemed to have found his voice after the Obama election however, rising to become one of Obama’s “religious advisers” and all around gadfly on the Progressive speaking circuit and occasional appearances on MSNBC.

But there’s trouble in Wallis land. It turns out George Soros has been pumping cash into the Wallis organization, maybe millions. Marvin Olasky of World Magazine has been scouring the Wallis records and uncovered the uncomfortable dalliance. Wallis denied it as long as he could but had to issue a “clarification” a few days ago admitting it was all true. You can read about it here and here.

Soros spends his considerable wealth supporting hard-left causes (Moveon.org for example). He also funds the Center of American Progress, the Progressive think-tank at which Pat. Bartholomew spoke last year during the Mississippi Riverboat Cruise promoting global warming. The trip ended in a Patriarchal admonition to support the Geneva Accords that advocated the centralization of the economies of each EU member member state under one bureaucracy.

The diplomatic effort collapsed after the leak of emails from East Anglia uncovered that much of the global warming “research” was fraudulent. The EP squandered considerable moral capital on the trip, and has wisely refrained from making any statement about global warming since the collapse. Maybe he learned something Wallis has not: You cannot serve God and mammon.