Year: 2011

Nigel Farage on the EU Descent into Bureaucratic Facism and Roger Scruton on the Recovery of Western Culture [VIDEO]

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Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, delivered a stinging rebuke to European Union bureaucrats recently accusing them of using the mechanisms of the EU to stifle democratic forces in Europe. The UKIP leader says Europe’s crisis is ‘like an Agatha Christie novel’, trying to guess who’ll be bumped off next. ‘The difference is we know who the villains are’ (City Wire). For background see: On Germany and Britain (and others).

Following Farage’s rebuke is a lecture by philosopher Roger Scruton. Scruton, arguably one the clearest thinkers speaking on culture and politics today, argues for the recovery and restoration of Western Culture. Scruton can always be trusted for insights not heard in mainstream discourse such as questioning what would happen if the Russian Federation would crumble and cause a immigration crisis in Western Europe, a good question. Another is his criticism of Western Elites concerning the assumption that majority opinion is de-facto wrong simply because it is majoritarian, something we could call a derived conceit. Scruton understands that religion drives culture, and this is one reason why his critiques are so penetrating.

Nigel Farage:

Roger Scruton:

Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to Birth — Visualized [VIDEO]

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Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond. (Some graphic images.)

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

Alexander Tsiaras is president and CEO of Anatomical Travelogue, Inc. and has more than 20 years of experience in the worlds of medicine, research and art. Much of the work for his book, “From Conception to Birth: a Life Unfolds,” was done in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, the National Museum of Health and Medicine of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and the New York University School of Medicine. Tsiaras is a regular keynote speaker at medical conventions worldwide, including the Visible Human Conference sponsored by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and by Medicine Meets Virtual Reality. He has also lectured with Stephen Hawking at the MIT Media Lab.

Frederica Mathewes-Green: Gay Rights [AUDIO]

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Frederica’s podcast does not offer the definitive answer on homosexuality, but it is laced with the graciousness, compassion, and fidelity to Orthodox teaching that has become her hallmark over the years. It’s worth a listen, even if only as a reminder that good people struggle with same-sex attraction who don’t adopt the ideological rigidity of the activist and others who insist on a moral parity between opposite-sex and same-sex behaviors.

Listen here:

Church that Held the 7th Ecumenical Council at Nicea to be Turned into Mosque

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Source: Vatican Insider

Hagia Sophia in Nicea, where the Seventh Ecumenical Council was held in 787, is about to be declared a mosque by the Turkish authorities.

As the Turkish press reports, the call to prayer was sung from the Muezzin last Thursday, for the first time since the founding of the Turkish Republish in 1923. The minaret was added to the church in the city that the Turks called “Iznik” in the Ottoman age. Last year it was restored. With the prayer to be said at the beginning of the Islamic feast of sacrifice on Sunday morning, the former church will be ready for Islamic religious ceremonies.

The decision by the office of the Administrative Council, the competent authority, has sparked fierce debate. Selcuk Mülayim, of the University of Marmara, an art historian, underlined the building’s importance in the history of Christianity and warned that the move would mark the beginning of protests from all over the world.

Iznik’s chamber of commerce criticized the move as lacking any sense, since the small city lives off tourism. Equally controversial is the issue of whether it is the Council’s duty to explain how the former church was changed from a museum into a mosque. The office explained that the building had been marked out by the community “unjustifiably” as a museum, since it had never been used as a museum before. Last year, a sign was posted in front of the restored church building, with “Museum” written on it; a guard made visitors pay for an admission ticket.

In Hagia Sophia, the bishops of the Roman empire gathered in 787 to decide over the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy, and to approve the veneration of icons. Nicea was also the meeting place of the First Ecumenical Council, in the year 325. The palace where the Council took place no longer exists. Hagia Sophia was transformed into a mosque by the Muslims in 1331, when they conquered the city.

After a fire, it was restored by the architect Mimar; it was later destroyed in the battle of Bursa in the Turkish war of independence in 1920. The ruins were restored in 2007 and have attracted Christian religious tourism.

What the Church Can Accomplish [VIDEO]

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+Jonah asked three years ago, where are our hospitals, our soup kitchens, our schools? Indeed, where are they? Below is a video of what a monastery in Russia is accomplishing. If they can do great things, why not us?

Starets Mihail started the monastery in 1994 with four brothers. Now, the monastery has 90 monks and they are raising 150 orphan children. Fr. Mihail was an orphan himself … The monastery is in Ucraina, 7 km from the northern Romanian border. They are serving in Ukrainian and Romanian languages because “we are Orthodox.”

HT: Monomahkos

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