Month: August 2010

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Fr. Peter Preble interviews Fr. Hans Jacobse on the Mosque at Ground Zero

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Fr. Peter-Michael Preble interviewed me (more of a running conversation actually) about the building of the mosque at Ground Zero after my article was published on Catholic Online. In it I discuss some of the ideas that inform the argument I made in the article.

Fr. Peter blogs at Shepherd of Souls, and Fr. Peter-Michael Preble. He hosts the Shepherd of Souls podcast on Ancient Faith Radio.

Listen here:

What About the Ground Zero Church? Archdiocese Says Officials Abandoned Project

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Someone told me that Rush Limbaugh also mentioned it today. Maybe building the Church will get traction now.

Source: Fox News HT: Michael Bauman

St. Nicholas Church

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward.

The sidelined project is the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, a tiny, four-story building destroyed in 2001 when one of the World Trade Center towers fell on top of it. Nobody from the church was hurt in the attack, but the congregation has for the past eight years been trying to rebuild its house of worship.

While the mosque project cleared red tape earlier this month, negotiations between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the church stalled last year — and will not be revived, according to government officials. Though the particulars of the two projects are completely different and on the surface unrelated, the church and its supporters see a disconnect in the way the proposals have been handled.

An archdiocese official said Tuesday that the situation has created “consternation” for those still struggling to jump-start talks over the church.

Read the entire article on the Fox News website.

Unpublished paragraphs for the Orthodox audience

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STOP THE PRESSES! HELLENIC VOICE PUBLISHED ARTICLE AFTER ALL! SEE: THE HELLENIC VOICE!

Below are the paragraphs that I included in my article (Ground Zero is American Holy Ground. No Mosque Near Ground Zero) that was intended for an Orthodox audience. The Hellenic Voice, which has published everything else I submitted, apparently decided not to go with it. It was written nearly three weeks ago, long before the issue exploded into the national consciousness.

Orthodox Christians however, can do something about this. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was part of the wreckage of that catastrophic day and needs to be rebuilt. Why not rebuild it as a memorial to the fallen Americans (this would include not only Greek Orthodox Americans but all Americans regardless of religion) who died that day?

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese has the legal, political, and most important, moral and historical authority to rebuild St. Nicholas. It could function as a place of retreat and refuge; a place to find meaning about an event of unfathomable meaning much like the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington does for veterans and their loved ones, or Ellis Island does for the children of the immigrants who passed through it.

We are no strangers to suffering and understand that the only safeguard to culture is religious faith – concrete, existential encounter with the risen Christ who makes all things new, who transforms death into life, who breathes life into people that are dispirited and weary of the confusion and turmoil in which they live. That is what the Church, if it indeed lives in Christ, offers to broken world.

A project like this would require visionary leadership and courage. But great things can happen with vision and courage. The Orthodox Christian tradition was the well from which many of the ideas that shaped America was drawn. America in turn grew to shelter and bless those people whose forbears drank from that well. We can give something back to America and strengthen those original foundations by our gift.

Full article (with additional paragraphs) below.
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A Mosque in New York for a Christian Church in Mecca

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Source: Pajamas Media

The principal mosque in Rome has a surface area of 30,000 square meters and can hold thousands of believers. The Christian church of Mecca has a surface area of zero square meters and can hold zero believers. In fact, there is no Christian church in Mecca. In other words, Rome is an open city and Mecca is a closed city.

There has never been opposition by Muslims to the exclusive character of Mecca. Their main sanctuary is located there, and it is forbidden for non-believers to cross the city limits. No other sanctuary of any world religion is closed to members of different creeds. The Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Jews’ holiest site, can be visited by anyone — Muslims, Christians, or Buddhists. The Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican, the center of the Roman Catholic religion, is open to any person that wishes to visit its splendor. Hindu and Buddhist temples welcome anyone who walks in, but not the Muslims’ main mosque.

Muslims claim that their religion contains the final message of God and that all other religions express falsehoods, lies, and distortions — which means that adherents to other religions cannot be accepted as equal human beings with the same rights. Churches are banned in Saudi Arabia. In “modern” Turkey, it is, in reality, impossible to renovate an old Christian church, let alone create one. In a traditional Islamic country, adherents of different religions who refuse to accept Muhammad as their prophet have to live a life with restrictions and special rules. They are the so-called “dhimmis” — people who believe in a single God but who should be treated with special restrictions because of their refusal to follow the prophet Muhammad.

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In search of God particle, atoms smashed at record speed

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Most of this is above my pay grade but it sure is fascinating. I like watching things like this with one eye cast on Darwin, by which I mean the (preposterous) notion that order rises out of matter rather than order preexisting the rise of matter (the latter functions as the philosophical presupposition in the Darwinian creation narrative). I don’t really understand how this new research fits in so if anyone can enlighten us, I would appreciate it.

Source: ZEENEWS

Geneva: Replicating conditions preceding the Big Bang that formed the universe, scientists at the world’s biggest atom smasher here today collided two proton beams into each other at record speeds that could herald a new era of discoveries.

“We are on the threshold of a new era of science and if we are lucky, within a few months we would be able to make a string of new discoveries,” Guido Tonelli, a spokesman at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), told reporters.

Scientists gathered across the five control rooms of the 27-km long underground Large Hadron Collider (LHC) burst into cheers as the detectors recorded the collisions of proton beams at 7 trillion electron volts or close to the speed of light.

Dubbed as the world’s largest scientific experiment, the USD 10 billion LHC holds the promise of revealing details about theoretical particles and microforces, Satyaki Bhattacharya, a Delhi university professor who has been involved with the experiment, said in New Delhi.
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