Month: October 2010

Wesley J. Smith – Bioethics: Creating a Culture of Death

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The Fall 2010 Lecture Series at St. Tikhon’s revolves around various life issues and the first speaker in the series is Wesley Smith who is a lawyer and an award winning author as well as a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute. He is introduced by the Dean of the Seminary, Fr. Alexander Atty.

Listen here:

Frederica Mathews-Green also has a podcast reflecting on a recent lecture by Wesley J. Smith.

Listen here:

Podcasts courtesy of Ancient Faith Radio.

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Orthodox Priest: Thieves Hijacking the Language of the Christian Moral Tradition

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That’s the title of my latest essay on Catholic Online. (Click here for the nice lead in they gave me, and here for the article). Full text below.

By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

NAPLES, FL. (Catholic Online) – In a recent Catholic Online article (Social Justice: Take Back the Term from the Thieves and Build a New Catholic Action) Deacon Keith Fournier writes about a question he was asked at a recent conference:

…the host of the conference made a suggestion that we get rid of the term “Social Justice” because it is now used by ‘the left”. He asked for my thoughts. I strongly disagreed. I insisted that we take back the phrase from those who have stolen it, either on the “the right” or “the left”. He then suggested the Church does not use the phrase “Social Justice”. An attendee did a “google” search of the Vatican documents on his handheld device and reported it was used thousands of times in the magisterial teaching of the Church.

Fournier is right on two counts: The Christian moral vocabulary properly belongs to Christians, and we should not cede the vocabulary to the thieves.

The problem is not limited to the term “Social Justice” alone. Many of the familiar terms drawn from the moral tradition are used in ways that are different today than in generations past. Nothing is sacrosanct. For example, as recently as a decade ago the idea that same-sex partners who “loved” each other had a “right” to “marriage” was inconceivable. Today many people shrug it off. To many, the “redefinition” of marriage seems self-evidently true and morally proper.

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