Culture

Leaders of the world’s Orthodox churches released a joint statement that touched on far ranging issues of interest to the Church, including the global economic crisis, the environment and the prospects for further pan-Orthodox consultations and a Holy and Great Council.

The primates were gathered for the Oct. 10-12 Synaxis of the Heads of the Orthodox Churches and Pauline Symposium at the Patriarchal Cathedral of Saint George in Istanbul, Turkey. His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I addressed the gathering on Oct. 10, saying that “such a Synaxis is deemed necessary and beneficial, especially in times like ours, when the personal encounter and conversation among responsible leaders in all public domains of human life is rendered increasingly accessible and essential.”

The Message from the Primates, posted on the Europaica site, also pointedly affirmed the Church’s role in the social sphere.

“Efforts to distance religion from societal life constitute the common tendency of many modern states,” the primates said. “The principle of a secular state can be preserved; however, it is unacceptable to interpret this principle as a radical marginalization of religion from all spheres of public life.”

The complete Message of the Primates follows:
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Salvo describes itself as a magazine committed to “deconstructing the damaging cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed the notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded the appetite for transcendence.” Editor Bobby Maddex says Salvo aims for the type of reader that is “open-minded enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and invariably, it leads to Christ and his teachings.” Maddex spoke recently with Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse, president of the American Orthodox Institute. Read the entire interview on the AOI site. Here’s a quote from Bobby:

Our “vibe,” as you call it, was selected to counter the lies emanating from some of the hipper, youth-oriented, and hugely popular newsstand magazines-such as Rolling Stone and Wired. We were tired of the monopoly that these publications had on slick, edgy, and highly ironic content, especially since the worldviews that inhere in such content are so nihilistic, materialistic, and immoral. We are trying to fight fire with fire, using the rhetorical and design tactics of our competition, but in the service of Truth and right living rather than narcissism and a do-what-feels-good behavioral ethic.

Turning Cows into Ideas
Roger Scruton, philosopher & farmer, tells us how to make farms profitable even if no one buys a thing:

Very few farms are profitable, and ours exists more…as a rural consultancy and ideas factory. Our neighbors turn grass into milk and make a loss; we turn grass into ideas and make a profit. We keep horses of our own, which we look after, and allow our neighbors to use the pasture for their cows: cows too, viewed from the window, can easily be made into ideas. We also keep chickens, and occasionally pigs, which we turn into sausages, after their brief time as ideas.

Aging, Individualism, and Our Middle-Class Dreams
Peter Augustine Lawler, ethicist and critic, tells us how caring for the old competes with our work-a-day society’s love of freedom and laboring:

Surely there is little worse than to have Alzheimer’s and be alone…Yet the currents of our time push us almost inescapably in this lonely direction. Lives moved by a veneration of independence threaten to leave us unprepared for depending and being depended upon, and so actually to increase the burdens of long-term care for the dependent in our society. The inability to think clearly about the basic human need of caregiving—and so the inability to provide effectively for it—may be the price paid for all the undeniable and wonderful technological success that characterizes our time.

Vigen Guroian on Flannery O’Connor’s Iconographic Fiction and Christian humanism.

Stephen Gatlin decipher’s Francis Collins’ chatter about God.

T.L. Reed’s short story “Weight on Lilies” depicts aging and things left undone.

Bart Fleuren finds the endangered species Homo Economus Christianus in some Third Ways.

Adrienne Su’s poem “Fear of Flying” reminds us of what we know we know.

Read the announcement of Clarion’s Web launch on Christian Newswire.

The Clarion Review is published by the American Orthodox Institute, a research and educational organization that engages the cultural issues of the day within the Orthodox Christian moral tradition.

The American Civil Liberties Union is threatening legal action against the U.S. Naval Academy unless it discontinues a tradition — believed to date back to the college’s founding in 1845 — of mealtime prayer, the Baltimore Sun reports.

“The government should not be in the business of compelling religious observance, particularly in military academies, where students can feel coerced by senior students and officials and risk the loss of leadership opportunities for following their conscience,” Deborah A. Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, wrote in a letter to the academy.

Over at the Scriptorium, John Mark Reynolds notes in “Let the Navy Pray” that everything that does not fit the ACLU’s “Utopian ideology” is viewed as something that must be swept aside:

Like all ideologues history does not matter, tradition does not matter, and there is no sense of proportion. Every public act must fit their cherished scheme. They are theocrats in reverse and just like the theocrats the pursuit of their ideas of perfection threatens to unravel the careful compromises that make our culture work.

The ACLU would apply to a service academy the same rules it applies to an elementary school. The military, an institution that deals with immanent peril and death daily, is not just like any other institution in our society.

Our Armed Forces have chaplains, because fighters from a very religious nation like America need and want them. The Armed Forces have always prayed, because we are a praying nation and men who fight are uniquely interested in speaking to the Deity. Secularists don’t agree that this matters, but then there are not enough secularists in this nation to defend it.

In the May 2008 issue of The Word,* published by the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, Gregory Cook looks at the ways Orthodox Christianity may “transfigure” America. “Orthodoxy has always been open to building on what is true and extant in any nation or culture,” Cook writes. “America should be no different.”

*Also republished here (non .pdf).

He quotes Metropolitan Antony Bashir:

Orthodoxy is a freedom-loving, democratic faith … it is at its best in our free America. If the best of Byzantium has survived, it is in the United States, and if there is an Orthodox political ideal, it is enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Cook’s article, “Words We Live By: Orthodox and American Ideals in Foundational Texts” is an excellent reflection on what it means to be Orthodox in America and what America has given the Orthodox.

While we’re at it on this Fourth of July, read the Declaration of Independence. Can anyone not be moved by these words?

WHEN in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL; that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments, long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to threw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

And, finally, here is a collection of quotations on freedom by Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev. One of my favorites:

Man’s freedom is indissolubly linked with his obligations. Man’s freedom is not a claim, but a duty, not so much what he demands as what is demanded of him. Man must be free. God demands and expects this of him.