Does the Episcopal Church Actually Care about the Poor?

You hear a lot of talk about "peace and justice" and "concern for the poor" from the Episcopal Church and other liberal Protestants, but the high-minded humanitarianism they profess is really just a cover for their true priorities. They are not interested in helping the poor; the essence of their whole position is that the government should take money from people like you and me by coercion and use it to build a giant welfare state in which everyone becomes dependent on the government. This is a revolutionary and Utopian political agenda, which has always led to repression, slavery and unaccountable government in every place it has been tried so far. But they wouldn't get very far being open about what they really want, would they?

Remember when Obama made a mistake and said that he favored "spreading the wealth around" to Joe the Plumber during the last election campaign? His handlers panicked and went into overdrive denying that he was a socialist. It is one thing to be one, but quite another for the general public come to perceive you in that way. So with the Episcopal Church: talk about peace, justice and poverty relief to cover over your true agenda.

Once in a while, however, you get a chance to see their priorities on display, as in this story about the on-going anti-marriage, pro-pansexualism agenda:

A Michigan-based gay rights foundation has given more than $400,000 to a California seminary to help craft formal liturgies for the Episcopal Church to bless gay and lesbian relationships.

The Episcopal Church still officially considers marriage between a man and a woman, reflected in the marriage rite of its Book of Common Prayer. Many dioceses, however, unofficially allow priests to bless same-sex relationships and even marriages.

Because the church puts a high value on scripted liturgies, many same-sex couples want their own marriage/blessing rite since many bishops are reluctant to use the traditional husband-wife marriage liturgy for same-sex unions.

The church's 2009 General Convention gave the green light to collecting "theological and liturgical resources" that would form the basis of an official same-sex rite that could be added to the list of approved ceremonies.

Many observers expect the church, when it gathers again in 2012, to approve rites for same-sex unions, or at least give official approval to start the process, which can take several years.

Read the rest here.

Remember this little item the next time some liberal "poverty activist" tries to make you feel guilty because you are not supporting their socialist agenda. Ask yourself if they really care about the poor. If they can wast this kind of money on ridiculous games of pretending that homosexual relationships are really the same as marriage except in the obvious ways they are not, how committed are they to the poor?

Diagnosing the "True Believers" of the Left

Jamie Glazov is editor of the online FrontPage Magazine and a Canadian historian and the son of Soviet dissident parents during the Brezhnev era who made his way to Canada in 1972. He has published Canadian Policy Toward Krushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002). Now he has written a book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror (WorldNetDaily, 2009), in which he explores the fascinating question of what motivates people to embrace sociopathic murders such as Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. as secular messiahs or demi-gods. As Glazov puts it:

what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and emcompasses, as Satre puts it, all the people and the land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left's romance with the Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left's alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century. (p. 6)

I read this book with interest because I was puzzled as to how it was possible for the left to support Hamas so diligently over the past few years and in particular with regard to the Gaza flotilla stunt. How do people who profess to stand for "peace and justice" support a 7th century death cult which has genocide as its official goal and which is supported by a revolutionary Islamic state that is close to going nuclear, namely Iran?

I am now reading Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals, which is a very well-researched work on the refusal of Western intellectuals to face up to the true nature of Islamism. Hamas comes out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was greatly influenced by Nazi ideology, including anti-Semitism, during the second world war. Berman shows that, whereas fascist ideology was discredited pretty much everywhere in the world after the war, the Muslim Middle East constituted a significant exception. From then to now, fascist ideas have influenced the rise of militant Islamist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas and Hizbullah. Al-Queda is just one of a number of smaller movements in this general stream. As a concrete example of what this means, the Hamas Charter quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian secret police forgery based on a French document from the 1860s. The whole civilized world knows the Protocols, so beloved of Nazis everywhere, is a fake and a slander. But in the Muslim Middle East, this document is taken seriously as historically true. When the president of Iran denies the reality and extent of the Holocaust, we see how pervasive the fascist ideology is today in the Middle East.

So the question is why is the Left in bed with fascists and the answer is a bit surprising. Glazov argues that the true believer's journey begins with a sense of alienation from his own society and his fantasies about building a perfect society in which he will finally fit in. The type of person attracted to the Leftist fantasy world is one who has not internalized the kind of values that enable him to find meaning in life, who is spiritually empty and who has failed to develop lasting interpersonal relationships. This person then seeks material solutions to what is essentially his spiritual emptiness. Glazov elaborates:

Convinced that it is incumbent upon society, and not him, to imbue his life with purpose, the believer becomes indignant; he scapegoats his society - and ends up despising and rejecting it. (p. 6)

This person becomes a believer in the secular, progressive faith and seeks the redemption not of himself, but of society. As I wrote in an earlier post, Marxism is essentially a heresy of Christianity, and Glazov sees this as being true of modern, progressive religions in general:

Tortured by his personal alienation, which is accompanied by feelings of self-loathing, the believer craves a fairy tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible. The believer fantasizes about how his own individuality and self will be submerged within the collective mass of the whole. (p. 7)

It is especially ironic that people in the grip of this kind of escapist fantasy actually criticize Christians for being "irrelevant" and "too heavenly minded." Of course, it all has to end in tears. Utopian fantasies lead to hell on earth. Why?

The political faith rejects the basic reality of the human condition - that human beings are flawed and driven by self-interest - and rests on the erroneous assumption that humanity is malleable and can be reshaped into a more perfect form. This premise spawned the nightmarish repressions and genocidal campaigns of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist dictators in the twentieth century. Under their rule, more than one hundred million human beings were sacrificed on the altar where a new man would ostensibly be created. (pp. 7-8)

Note the essence of this argument: Leftist politics fails because it denies the truth about reality. This is a deeply Christian insight and it is a metaphysical one, not merely an ethical one. Marxism is bad not because it has led to excesses by zealots, but rather because it distorts and denies the metaphysical truth about the world.

So it is not possible to combine Marxist analysis of what is wrong with the world with a Christian solution. Why not? Because Christianity and Marxism do not view the world in compatible ways: one has to choose which vision of reality is true, but they cannot both be true. And these two visions of reality lead to radically different solutions.

Glazov stresses that the political faith is not a search for truth (p. 9), but rather a sacrifice of the intellect to a movement that promises to bring about Utopia. The true believer is ready to lose his own life for the cause because he does not believe that the individual is as important as the cause. This also hardens him to the suffering of the masses who are being reshaped by dictators in the name of the cause. Glazov writes:

Beneath the believer's veneration of the despotic enemy lies one of his most powerful yearnings: to submit his whole being to a totalist entity. (p. 11)

Support for the Stalinist regime actually peaked during the 30s when the show trials, gulags, and famines were in full force. Although he would never admit it in public, the true believer does not believe in spite of the murders and violence, he believes precisely in the murders and violence as the summit of what attracts him to this secular, political faith in the first place.

The psychology of the true believer in death cults like Hamas is alas all too familiar; we have seen it all before in the prostration before murderous regimes like that of Stalin by Western Leftists. Strictly speaking it is a form of madness, but it is a high-functioning form of madness in which the believer is ready with propaganda, highly argumentative and full of passion and feeling. But it is irrational and, in the end, destructive.

Getting Rid of the BS: A Product Many of Us Need

Here is the hot-selling product of the current election season, something many Americans can't live without. (I've seen evidence of a need for this product north of the border too: someone should grab the import franchise.)

Stanley Hauerwas - Hannah's Child: A Review

Stanley Hauerwas' Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir is an insightful, carefully crafted, self-analysis by a leading theologian. I have read Hauerwas' work over the past 15 years and I have watched his career with deepening concern. His relationship to Yoder has always raised many questions for me and this book only serves to intensify my concerns about Hauerwas' influence.

First, the major theme of the book is a surprising one. I never expected Hauerwas to reveal his own inner preoccupation with class in such a blatant way. It is no exaggeration to say that this book is a Horatio Alger story of "poor boy works hard and rises to conquer the world." Throughout the book Hauerwas stresses his hard work and how it enabled him to overcome a difficult personal life and the handicaps of being brought up in working class Texas. His living of the American Dream fittingly climaxed on Sept. 10, 2001 when Time named him "America's Best Theologian." He tells us over an over again how hard he works; there is no catching himself like Paul did when he said "I worked harder than them all - no, Christ worked in me. Grace seems strangely distant from this set of reflections - other than the admirable acknowledgment of the importance of friends and friendship for getting through hard times.

For all his radical talk, Hauerwas is, in the end, the quintessential American. What he has in common with Jerry Falwell causes his differences with Falwell to pale into insignificance. Both are self-made, successful men who rose from obscurity and near-poverty to fame and influence. Both are confrontational and loud. Both have sought to institutionalize their influence, one as an outsider to the Protestant establishment and the other within its bosom yet both have made a living out of criticizing liberal Protestantism.

Secondly, it is hard not to come sadly to the conclusion that Hauerwas' pacifism, which he talks about non-stop, actually is an expression of his deep-seated conformism. No, he does not conform to the flag-waving, military-admiring, freedom-loving Americanism of the working and middle classes. Of course not, but the reason is not because it is too American, but because it is gauche. His Americanism is upper class, liberal, main-line and informed by vaguely socialist (or at least anti-capitalist) sensibilities. But make no mistake, Hauerwas is not really alienated from mainline, liberal Protestantism in the US. When he attacks "liberalism" read "capitalism" and think of how little "daring" that move requires in the Ivy League circles in which he moves.

Near the end of the book, he claims that he believes that his whole life has prepared him for speaking to America in the post-9/11 context. He refuses to be silent and takes on "America" (read conservative America) for its sins and presumption about telling the everyone how to run the world. And yet, Hauerwas tells us that he accepted an invitation to join a group devoted to abolishing war from the world, despite the fact (and this is crucial) that doing so could be construed as being inconsistent with the kind of nonviolence he had learned from Yoder.

Yoder desired a world free of war. But he also saw quite clearly that Christians are committed to nonviolence not because nonviolence is a strategy to free the world of war. Rather, in a world of war, followers of Christ cannot be anything other than nonviolent. An appeal to abolish war might suggest that nonviolence can be translated into public policy based on grounds that do not require the cross and resurrection of Jesus. (pp. 272-3)

Well, yes, exactly. But why the hedging "might"? If Hauerwas actually does agree with Yoder on pacifism, why is this not presented in the book as the reason for refusing the invitation to help free the world of war? How is Hauerwas' position here all that different, really, from that of the US Catholic bishops' or the United Methodists' statements on war, which represent the liberal tradition of pacifism in the US? How is his position different from the pacifism of the social gospel movement in the inter-war period that was so effectively skewered by Reinhold Niebuhr as accomplishing nothing but making war more certain insofar as it delayed rearmament by the Western allies at a time when rearming might have deterred the German leaders on whose support Hitler depended?

I had thought that liberal Protestant Pelagian, utopianism that sought to instruct nation states in a fallen world on how to conduct their affairs was dead and buried so far as Hauerwas is concerned. Why is its pale, limp ghost haunting his theological memoirs?

Third, one wonders how on earth someone who is supposedly so opposed to liberalism (both theological and economic) could possibly survive in a string of theologically liberal churches and in a liberal Catholic and a liberal Protestant university. Clues are found throughout the book as to how he managed to win the praise of the liberal media, the liberal denominations, liberal theologians, liberal university administrators and liberal, northeastern Catholics like the Kennedy clan, all the while slamming liberalism.

For one thing, he routinely in an off-the-cuff manner makes slighting remarks about Evangelicals, as for example when he confesses that he does not like Southern Baptists. This says something about how easily he can label those who uphold orthodox theology without taking them seriously. On the other hand, he has a great falling out - not with liberal bishops in the post-Christian Episcopal Church (his latest denominational home), as one might expect - but with the neoconservatives at First Things over the Iraq War. He also tells us that he left one Methodist Church because the new pastor was interested in promoting outreach and evangelism through methods Hauerwas disliked. (He never mentions dissatisfaction with any of the churches he attended for their declining attendance, lack of missionary zeal or ineffective evangelism.) Also, I noted no criticisms of Katherine Jefforts Schori, Gene Robinson or John Spong, though Hauerwas found time to slam various Evangelicals, including Bill Hybels and Willow Creek.

Fourthly, this brings us to another major problem for anyone who wants to regard Hauerwas as an orthodox theologian in addition to his self-made Americanism and his conformism to the liberal Protestant establishment and that is his ambiguous attitude toward homosexuality. He tells us that one of the "best things" about the church he attended for a while in Durham was that it spent a whole year discussing whether to accept homosexuality in its leadership.

Later, he lets us know that he is free of "homophobia" by informing us that he is so oblivious to a person's sexual orientation that his wife had to tell him that a mutual friend was a homosexual. This particular passage in the book is painful to read; how disingenuous can one be? Hauerwas goes out of his way to establish his liberal tolerance "street cred" in an almost slapstick manner in the process turning himself into a parody of the anti-establishment, dissenting from modernity, "the church is not the world," anti-compromising Niebuhrian ethicist that he is reputed to be. Here is is prostrating himself before the idols of liberal modernity mumbling the mantras of inclusion all the while living off the royalties earned from people who take his radical stance "against the nations" seriously.

The maddening thing is that he never really comes out and says whether he agrees that homosexuality is morally good or not. He writes:

"I remain unsure if we can call the relationship between gay people 'marriage,' but I know that David's friendship enriches Paula's and my marriage. I hope and pray for the day when Christians can be so confident in their understanding of marriage that we can welcome gay relationships for their promise of building up the body of Christ. That I have such a hope and that I pray such a prayer have everything to do with my and Paula's friendship with David. I think, moreover, that this is the way it should work." (p. 223)

Oh, please. This waffling, sentimental, "thinking with your emotions" approach is pretty hard to take coming from someone who thinks that anyone who takes a strict just war position is simply being unfaithful - end of story. Hauerwas has shown himself capable of careful thought and of taking hard stands; this kind of liberal sentimentalism is beneath his dignity.

In conclusion, I found this book honest and open and, for that reason a worthwhile piece of writing. It is a well-written representative of the genre. I only wish that I had not had to learn what I learned about a theologian I respect through that honesty and openness.

I cannot say that I find Hauerwas to be a true Yoderian in his view of pacifism and I do believe that there is a reason he has chosen to self-identify with dying liberal Protestantism in such a way that his criticisms of it become an in-house debate. If his life's work was to open up a path of radical discipleship for the next generation, then that work has been a failure. It is too bad, because the potential was there for far more than liberal tolerance, anti-Evangelical class snobbery and liberal pacifism.

Is There a Distinctively Anabaptist Witness?

The Anabaptists like to think of themselves as a "Third Way" neither Protestant or Roman Catholic. Many Anabaptists also view their distinctive "peace witness" as neither left or right and disdain to be lumped in with either liberal Protestantism or conservative Evangelicalism. But if we focus on the middle-class, college-educated, urban Mennonites in North America for a moment, do they really offer a distinctively Anabaptist witness?

It would seem that they do not because all they talk about is a kind of pacifism that they want nations like America and Israel to adopt. They condemn all war, but they condemn war by America and Israel disproportionately while remaining silent on human rights abuses, oppression of women and violent acts of terror committed by Muslims and any other non-Western group against Western targets. In this they simply echo the Western Left, with its tacit alliance with first Communist and, after the end of the Cold War, the Muslim enemies of the West.

Most of the Mennonites I am talking about do not self-identify with Evangelicalism, although a branch of the movement, the Mennonite Brethren, do so. The mainstream of the Mennonite denominations, however, identifies more with liberal Protestantism, (which, ironically, is the religion of the establishment elite), but maintain the pretense of offering a distinctively Anabaptist witness.

The Amish and many conservative Mennonite groups do have a distinctively Anabaptist witness. They are a true "Third Way" because they actually withdraw from the power structures of society and strive to influence no one - preferring to strive for Christian perfection as a separate society.

But the middle-class, college-educated, increasingly urbanized Mennonites who write books, run the Mennonite Central Committee and teach in the colleges and seminaries have less and less of a distinctively Anabaptist witness as the years pass. They are increasingly difficult to see as being significantly different from liberal Protestantism. Maybe the 16th century Anabaptists simply were liberal Protestants several centuries ahead of their time. That is a depressing thought, but one that most contemporary Mennonites seem determined to make plausible.

Marxism: The Great Western Heresy

The greatest threat to peace, justice and freedom in the word today comes, not from Christianity as the Left would have you believe, but from the heretical offshoot of Christianity known as Marxism.

When I speak of "the Left" I am using a deliberately vague word whose meaning expands and contracts depending upon the context. It is an umbrella term that includes a number of different categories of people, publications and organizations, all of which trace their intellectual heritage back to Karl Marx (just as groups as different as the Roman Catholic Church, Baptists and Messianic Jews all trace their heritage back to Jesus Christ.) Let me list some of them:

1. Communists - or Marxist/Leninists or Stalinists - unreconstructed cold warriors; many European countries still have Communist parties capable of winning seats in the legislature.
2. Social Democrats - Marxists who renounce violence to achieve their collectivist goals; often believe in a highly taxed, tightly regulated and state monitored "free" market to generate wealth.
3. Progressives - an American movement originating in the early 20th century and dominant in today's Democratic Party that seeks to head off full-blown Communism by transforming America into a European-style, social democratic state.
4. Big Government Liberals -or Welfare State Liberals are liberals in the process of losing their faith in liberalism and becoming socialists in all but name. There is a controversy whether people who self-identify in this way are cynically using a more palatable political label or whether they are honestly trying to prevent Communism by moving in a social democratic or welfare state direction. (The same goes for Progressives.)
5. Liberation Theologians - attempt to combine Marxist analysis with a secularized, politicized, immanentized version of Christian eschatology
6. Anti-Globalization Protesters - also known as Anti-Capitalists; you see this show on TV every time there is a G20 or G8 Summit. These people simplistically identify Capitalism as the source of all evil in the world, but some will not admit to being socialists or communists. The hard core of the movement, however, is definitely Marxist of some kind and the rest are fellow-travelers.
7. Anarchists -claim to believe that no government would be better than imperfect government; it is difficult to believe that they believe in what they claim to believe. Underneath the anarchist exterior is usually a Utopian core. They feel free to tear down without proposing an alternative order because they naively believe that whatever arises after the destruction of the current political order would necessarily be better than the status quo. If you didn't believe that, then you would be no better than a common criminal.
8. Environmentalists - not all those concerned with pollution, but those with a Utopian, anti-industrialist society streak; the latter often make common cause with Marxists.
9. Feminists - second wave Feminists originating in the 1960s use Marxist analysis instead of appealing to Christian humanism and Enlightenment rationalism as earlier Feminists did.

While these nine distinct groups differ over tactics and although some are more extreme than others, all share a common hatred of:

1. Natural law - the belief in objective moral rules and principles that are based in the way reality is; may be specifically Christian or may be rooted in other religions or worldviews.
2. Free enterprise and Private Property - even though many of the movements mentioned above claim to respect private property and the market mechanism, the fact is that doing so makes them inconsistent Marxists. For Marx, private property is equivalent to the disobedience of God's command in Gen. 3 as the cause of original sin.
3. Individual Freedom under the Rule of Law - The state is superior to the individual in all forms of Marxism, which is to say that "Social Justice" (or equality) trumps "Individual Freedom" (or liberty).
4. Judeo-Christian Religion - The Ten Commandments is the basis of Western law and natural law is understood as being congruent with natural law.

Some of these groups claim merely to use Marxist analysis to diagnose the nature of the problems of the world (eg. Latin American Liberation Theology), while others believe that Marxism provides the positive solution as well as the diagnosis of the problem. It is not easy to tell what an individual person believes because in some cases it would make no sense to diagnose capitalism as the problem if socialism is not the solution. In such a case what would the solution be?

All believe that America and Israel are evil and must be severely weakened, if not destroyed. (Anti-Colonialism is often code for Anti-Americanism). They all believe that after a purging of capitalism and liberal democracy from the world there will emerge, somehow, a new world that will be better. All the ideological descendants of Marxism are essentially Utopian. This is the new religion that has come to dominate the Western academy and academic freedom is a tool it uses to eradicate all traces of the Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophical heritage that undergirds the West from the academy.

It is no stretch to call this multi-faceted movement, which traces its roots back to all or aspects of the thought of Karl Marx, a new religion. It is actually a Christian heresy, however, which means that it is a corruption of and a departure from Christianity. A new religion that has its origins in Christianity is a heresy and one that does not have its roots in Christianity is simply another religion, but not a heresy.

1. Eschatology - the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which is heaven come to earth after the return of Christ, the final judgment and the resurrection of the dead, is transformed into an earthly political kingdom founded through revolution (or, in the progressive version, through continuous socio-political progress).

2. Redemption - the Christian teaching that God becomes incarnate in Jesus and sheds his blood to propitiate his own justice so that sinful humanity can be redeemed is transformed into the doctrine that bloody revolution and mass murder are the prerequisites for the coming of Utopia and therefore all Marxist-inspired revolutions from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot to Castro and so on have all been bloody and the blood is seen as redemptive.

3. Sin - the Christian teaching that human beings are born in sin by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve and then go on to actualize this evil tendency by their own free will is changed into the idea that individuals are born innocent but suffer evil because a corrupt socio-economic system (Capitalism) dominates the world. (Where evil came from before the invention of Capitalism is not explained, but if you go back far enough in history, they believe, you find matriarchal, socialist, free-sex Utopias all over the place. When somebody invented private property - that was the beginning of evil in the world.)

So Marxism is a Christian heresy and Modernity is the period of Western civilization in which this heresy gradually replaces and drives out orthodox Christianity. We are living in the period after Christendom in the sense that we live in the declining phase of Western culture during which time time the heresy predominates, although orthodox Christianity is far from dead. Yet the center of the Christian world is moving south as the Marxist heresy spreads throughout the West. Whether or not some form of Marxism will triumph in the West is not yet known, nor do we know which form it will take if it does. But this we know: if it does triumph Christianity will be eradicated.

Divorce, Baptists and the Real Issues We Face as a Society

While the Episcopal Church and the misleadingly named Evangelical Lutheran Church in America press ahead with the pansexualist agenda of the sexual revolution by approving of homosexuality as holy, the Southern Baptist Convention is wrestling this summer with a different issue: divorce. In the liberal denominations the issue of divorce has been practically de-ethicized: it is just accepted as a fact of life to which no moral judgments should be attached. But the Baptists still think the Bible is true and the Bible takes a severe view of covenant-breaking.

At this year's convention, the following resolution was passed. The resolution articulated the conviction that the SBC must:

1. Realize "how damaging Southern Baptist accommodation to the divorce culture is to our global witness for Christ."

2. Confront "the spiritual wreckage left in our Southern Baptist churches by our own divorce rates and our silence about the same."

3. Acknowledge that "areas where Southern Baptist churches predominate in number often have higher divorce rates than areas we would define as 'unchurched' and in need of evangelical witness." (This is correct. Mississippi's divorce rate is 82 percent (13,000 divorces vs. only 15,900 marriages). Arkansas' rate is 63 percent; Kentucky, 59 percent.)

4. Confess that "Even the most expansive view of the biblical exceptions allowing for divorce and remarriage would rule out many, if not most, of the divorces in our churches."

5. Admit that "The acceleration in rates of divorce in Southern Baptist churches has not come through a shift in theological conviction about Scriptural teaching on divorce but rather through cultural accommodation."

Dr. Richard Land, President of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and the church's most prominent spokesman for two decades, told me that this astonishing resolution emerged from "a growing revulsion by conservative Christians that too many Southern Baptists and other Christians are quoting the Bible by the yard, and practicing it by the inch."

"We have thoroughly conservative leadership in our denomination, and yet the numbers getting divorced are getting worse, and people are just appalled. We clearly believe that the churches have failed to teach and uphold a standard of a biblical concept of marriage. It is harming our witness terribly."

Therefore, the Southern Baptist resolution urged its churches to:

"Address the spiritual wreckage in our Southern Baptist churches by our own divorce rates and our silence about the same."

Proclaim the word of God on the permanence of marriage, and provide on-going enrichment opportunities.

Marry only those who are "biblically qualified" and understand the meaning of lifelong love and fidelity, a covenant "until death do them part."

Urge those "in troubled or faltering marriages to seek godly assistance and where possible, reconciliation."

Divorce is one of the greatest social problems of our time; it is a key factor is related social issues like poverty, mental health, promiscuity, inadequate parenting, depression, etc. If we could lower the divorce rate by 10% we would literally save lives, pull children out of poverty and help children succeed in school.

We Evangelicals are far from perfect and divorce is a tremendous problem in our churches. But the necessary first step is to confess and repent of our sin and to resolve to turn from it. There is no other starting point if we wish to confront one of the greatest social problems of our time. If we want to be relevant to our contemporary situation, we cannot do so without taking the issue of divorce with full seriousness.

Baby Aliza Turns Our Family Upside Down! What Fun!

Blogging has been light the past few days and will be light for the next few days. Sleep has been scarce and I have laid down for a nap the past two afternoons when Issac has been sleeping. (That is normally when I have time to read, blog, etc.)

Bonnie and I are spending a few weeks in Alberta with our daughter Beth and her husband Chris helping with their 22 month old Isaac as they welcome their new baby into the breathing world.

Aliza Emmanuelle was born at 10:16 pm (Alberta time) on July 12. She was 7 lb., 7 oz. and 20 inches long. She is beautiful and perfectly healthy. At the top is her is her first picture taken in the delivery room 12 minutes after she was born.

What a joy and privilege it is to be a grandparent! We are thrilled to be here and to help, but more than that to be a part of an extended family that depends on each other. Bonnie and Chris were in the delivery room and took part in the whole process while I stayed home and took care of Isaac.

Issac is an active, bright and extremely happy little boy and it takes a large amount of energy to keep up with him, let alone help him learn and grow. He is fascinated by Dr. Seuss books right now and is starting to learn his ABC's and numbers. He already knows his colors and shapes and helps me read many of his books. He also likes playing soccer in the huge living/family room here and having tickling matches. His favorite Bible stories are Daniel in the lion's den and Zacchaeus. He already loves to hold his baby sister and can pronounce her name perfectly. He is learning to be gentle and how to be a good big brother.

Today's families are too often fragmented, but the Divine plan for families is for them to be an inter-generational institution for the forming of Christian disciples. It is our privilege to participate in our family long after our children have grown into adulthood. Thank God for placing us in families.

Fired for Stating Catholic Doctrine

Meghan Duke, at First Things, has an update on the case of Dr. Kenneth Howell, who was fired by the University of Illinois for stating that he agreed with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on homosexuality while teaching a class on Roman Catholic thought. You can read the letter sent from the Alliance Defense Fund here, which they sent to the University demanding Dr. Howell's reinstatement. The letter presents a very strong prima facie case for the University having acted unjustly.

Thomas Peters at Catholic Vote Action has a report here and an update here. You can read the actual email to his class by Dr. Howell that prompted the complaint here and you can read the complaint here.

I'm not sure why the university has over-reacted so irrationally. They appear to be terrified by "gay rights activists" and are seeking to make a sacrificial lamb out of a Christian so they won't have to take a stand. But they may have miscalculated badly; this letter from the president to the fired professor's lawyers seems to imply that they may be beginning to realize that fact.

No matter how convinced homosexuals are that their behavior is right, they do not have a right to have everyone else agree with them, just as the Roman Catholic Church does not have a right to force everyone to convert to Christianity. If homosexuals and their well-meaning but not rational friends don't back off and give Christians room to dissent, then it will be a fight to the end with one side losing and the other side winning. The anti-Christian forces may find that pushed into a corner, the other side may exhibit strength they do not suspect.

Stalin, the NY Times and Walter Duranty

The following post, "Crimes of the NY Times" by Vladimir Steblina, is from American Thinker. When you read about the NY Times slamming Pope Benedict XVI or Sarah Palin or whoever, just think of this story and think of how much credibility that paper actually has. The information in this post is completely true. If you want to read more about Stalin's manufactured famine in the Ukraine, try The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by distinguished historian, Robert Conquest.

The reference librarian's answer was brief and to the point "There is no record of it. It never happened. Your father lied."

My father had the misfortune to be born in June 1917 in the southern Ukraine. He spent the first thirty years of his life under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler and survived them all. He never lived in a free country until we immigrated to America is 1956.

As I was growing up, my father told me stories of his life. They were not pleasant. Stories of the Red Army sweeping across the farm in 1926 and taking all the horses. The Communists returning a year later and confiscating the farm, shooting my grandmother, and making my father an orphan at the age of 10.

He told stories of surviving in the Black Sea marshes by fishing for pike and trapping ducks and other wildlife. The German army marched into the Ukraine in 1941. Here the stories included surviving summary execution by the Germans not once, but twice.

He went to Germany as a forced laborer and spent the war years there. The only funny story I can remember him telling is when the United States Air Force bombed the local brewery in Austria and the streets ran with beer for the drinking. Even that story had the backdrop of war.

But the story he always kept coming back to was the famine in the early 1930s. He had already been an orphan for five years when the Soviet government removed all food and seed stocks from the Ukrainian people, sealed their borders, and waited for them to die. And die they did, by the millions.

It was this story that prompted my visit to the library. I looked in the subject card catalog and could not find any books under the Ukrainian famine. So I went to ask the reference librarian and there got her "definitive" answer.

Like any son, I had issues with my father. But I never knew him to lie or overstate facts. At that time, I was the same age he was when the famine started. So I just chalked it up to a local famine that somehow got blown out of proportion in the telling.

Then, in the late 1980s, I received a phone call from my father. In an excited voice, he said "The truth is finally out. The world now knows the truth." I immediately knew what he was talking about. He was tired of people doubting his story, same as the rest of the Ukrainians who survived the famine only to have their stories denied. The Harvest of Despair documentary was shown on the local PBS station.

Further investigation brought to light the fact that New York Times reporter Walter Duranty knew of Stalin's murder of ten million people and refused to report it. To add insult to injury, Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1930s for his reporting from the Soviet Union.

But it gets worse. A British reporter, Gareth Jones, discovered the truth and started writing stories about the famine. The New York Times published Walter Duranty's rebuttals, admitting that times were tough in the Soviet Union, but there was no Holodomor, or "murder by famine" killing millions of Ukrainians, even though the Ukrainians themselves knew the truth. America's "newspaper of record" with its worldwide reputation convinced the world that they, not Gareth Jones, had the story correct. And so people continued to die.

Nearly eighty years later, the New York Times has still refused to apologize to the Ukrainian people for its complicity in the murder of ten million people. They still hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in their building.

The reference librarian was wrong. There is a record of it. It did happen. The New York Times lied, and ten million people died. My father told the truth.

For that I will never forgive the New York Times.

Nor should anyone.

Academic Freedom is Dying Out in Western Universities

There is a lot of talk about academic freedom but it is increasingly under attack by the Left in Western universities. Fierce battles take place between those committed to free inquiry and those committed to utilizing the university as a vehicle for leftist ideological purposes.

Here is a story about yet another Christian academic who has been fired by the Leftist censors.

The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church's teaching that homosexual sex is immoral.

The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center.

Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam.

"Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY," he wrote in the e-mail. "In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same."

An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell's e-mail "hate speech." The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.

"Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing," the student wrote. "Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another."

Howell said he was teaching his students about the Catholic understanding of natural moral law.

"My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches," Howell said in an interview with The News-Gazette in Champaign. "I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I'm teaching and they'll never be judged on that."

Howell also said he makes clear to his students that he's Catholic and that he believes the church views that he teaches.

Later, the article quotes the president of the American Association of University Professors as saying that professors need to be able to tell students what they believe.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said professors should be able to tell students their own views and even argue in favor of them, provided students can disagree without being penalized.

"It's part of intellectual life to advocate for points of view," said Nelson, an emeritus English professor at the University of Illinois. "Hopefully when they go out in the world, they can emulate that. They can argue a case, and do it in a well-informed and articulate way, and can make a more productive contribution to our democracy that way."

The university is retreating from the basic principles that make a university a university. Universities were invented in Christian Europe and now exist all over the world, but Leftist, anti-Christian ideologues are destroying the university by replacing academic freedom with censorship of anything that promotes orthodox, historic Christianity.

This kind of attack on freedom of religion and free speech does nothing to advance openness in scientific inquiry and it reduces the opportunities for students to study Christianity from the inside with someone who professes it, rather than being fed a caricature by someone committed to subverting it.

This Blog is Medieval

In the minds of many contemporary "progressives" the word "medieval" has become an insult to hurl against anything that is barbaric and "insufficiently progressive." Tim Collard protests against this trend to defame the Medieval era in post called: "What is Medieval about Stoning People to Death?"

I was pleased to hear today that Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian lady convicted of adultery by one of that hellhole’s kangaroo courts, will not now be stoned to death, though it is still possible that she will be judicially murdered in some other way. (My reading of the Koran is that the Prophet demanded that four male Muslim witnesses had actually seen the act in progress before an adultery charge could be proved; but who am I, a benighted Anglican, to comment?)

Thanks are also due to prominent figures around the world who spoke up for Mrs Ashtiani, including our own William Hague. I don’t want to qualify my praise by carping, but I do take issue with Mr Hague’s choice of language. In condemning the proposed execution, he called death by stoning a “medieval punishment”. Following Mr Liam Fox’s dismissal of Afghanistan as “a broken 13th-century society”, one begins to wonder just what the new government has against the period.

As one who has enjoyed a lifetime love affair with the Middle Ages, I am pained by this. There really wasn’t a lot of stoning going on in medieval Europe.

This is a good point. As Collard goes on to note, it is not that the people of Medieval Europe were angels; there was violence in those centuries. But compared to the Dark Ages that preceded them and the modern era, the violence was not as extreme. There was law and order, peace, trade, the rise of universities, the beginnings of constitutional monarchy, the great synthesis of Aristotle (representing science and reason) and Augustine (representing Biblical revelation and Christian theism) into a unified and intellectually brilliant worldview.

Language matters. The way we speak is important. Even the term "The Middle Ages" (which I try to avoid in favor of "Christian Europe" or "Medieval Europe") was invented in the Enlightenment to describe the period between the "Dark Ages" and their own supposedly "enlightened" time (as they "modestly" saw it). They undoubtedly would have liked to label the entire period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance as "The Dark Ages" because of the influence of Christianity on Europe in that period, but that was a stretch even for the rebellious imaginations of the 18th century French Philosophes. The truth is that the period of the conversion of Europe was its true "Enlightenment" and the period of atheism and humanism in modernity that stems from the "Enlightenment" is an increasingly dark era of nihilism. The 20th century was the darkest, most violent and most fanatical of any century in Western civilization going back to the Roman Empire. The culture of death characterizes Enlightenment Europe, not Medieval Europe.

So I think we should stop allowing the use of the term "Medieval" as an insult or as a symbol of barbarism and backwardness to go unchallenged. The Postmodernists have made a good start on turning the term "modern" into an insult. Maybe we should build on that and start saying things like: "Stalin that dirty rotten murderer and arch-modernist . . . " or "The regime in Iran has adopted most of the worst of modern fascist techniques of repression." We can follow up by really ticking off the progressives by saying: "If only they could be more Medieval."

But hey, it would make a lot more more sense than calling the stoning of women "medieval" when it is done by a theocracy that lives in the 7th century desert and hates Christendom.