July 28, 2010
The (Muslim) Girls are All Right
A couple of items in National Review's The Week got my attention. I apologize if everyone knows about these things already; I don't keep up too well. The first concerned an actress who stars in children's movies, the Harry Potter ones to be exact:
Cute, isn't she? Her name's Afshan Azad. She's twenty-two now. The story goes that her father and brother - both British born and educated Muslims - beat her up and threatened to kill her because she refused to stop dating her Hindu boyfriend. They left her "badly bruised." The men are out on bail and awaiting trial. Afshan's taken refuge with friends in London. She has pleaded with the court to drop the charges against the two (I have no idea why), but the judge refused. There are rumors that an honor killing might have been in the offing. I don't understand why the father and brother were so upset. In this article, we find out that Hindus commit honor killings too, although the Western media tend to play those up while minimizing the Muslim variety, of which latter we also learn that Mom sometimes has her part to play.
July 27, 2010
The Manhattan Declaration and Christian Principles
See my post on that subject at the First Things blog "First Thoughts." A lot more can and should be said, but as a response to Steve Hutchens of Touchstone, I believe the post is a good conversation starter.
July 26, 2010
No Tea Party for Me
I'm just now reading the Tea Party's "Contract From America" for the first time. Not many surprises here. I sincerely wish them well and hope they achieve many of their goals. And I do mean "them", because as much as I agree with them on certain points, their underlying philosophy of government is wholly incompatible with an historically-aware Christianity. Specifically:
Individual LibertyOur moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.
The language of "individual liberty", seemingly divorced from the context of family and community, is foreign to the mind of the Church and demonstrably corrosive of public morality. The enshrining of individual "economic choices" as something sacrosanct - as though all economic choices were equally moral, as if their social consequences did not matter and were of no interest to the state - is likewise contrary to anything resembling historic Christian statecraft.
July 23, 2010
Nixon Goes to China
Under the title "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," Senator James Webb (D., Va.) says what no mainstream Republican politician would ever dare to say:
Outside the Magic Circle
July 22, 2010
Josh McDowell [hearts] Sharia
In this comment, I said that the real goal of the Dearborn police and the organizers of the Arab festival is to impose an unwritten, unconstitutional rule against all Christian witnessing to Muslims except at rented booths. (Notice that I am talking not about passing out literature but about having conversations.)
I was wrong.
It's worse than that.
But before I tell you, let me back up a bit. I've always had an admiration for famed popular apologist Josh McDowell, author of Evidence That Demands a Verdict. What I didn't know until very recently is that McDowell has recently gotten into Muslim evangelism. Sort of.
July 21, 2010
De-Christianizing Hospital Chapels
Hospitals Revamp Chapels Into Meditation Rooms:
Today, hospital chapels vary widely. Some still reflect their founders' religious roots. Others have been renovated to accommodate multiple religions, or their religious symbols have been removed so the rooms resemble waiting rooms or art galleries."There was a diversity for a long time that was Christian diversity," said the Rev. George Handzo, vice president of pastoral care leadership and practice at HealthCare Chaplaincy, based in New York City.
Staff and patient populations at many U.S. hospitals are much more diverse than they once were, and hospitals know it makes good business sense to accommodate them, Handzo said. "They don't want to lose those people to the place down the street."
The Agony of Famagusta
Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard Coeur de Lion, who in turn sold the isle to exiles from the defeated Crusader kingdoms, whose descendants ruled there for some three hundred years.
By the mid-15th century, when all the Christian world was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, Cyprus came under Venetian influence. It was destined to became an important possession in that illustrious city’s glittering Mediterranean commercial empire. The coat of arms of the Lion of St. Mark, and the protection of her galleys, preserved the island in Christian hands until July of 1571.
On some pretext, authenticated by a pliant mufti, the Sultan succeeded in nullifying a treaty of peace he had signed with Venice; and he declared, on fine Islamic principle, that since Cyprus had once been Muslim, it should again come under the peace of the ummah. “Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth!” He raised an army of nearly 100,000 men, many of them the dreaded Janissaries, the special forces of the Turkish military, and put it under the command of an ambitious general, Lala Mustafa Pasha, his former tutor.
July 20, 2010
The Modern State Against the Church
LifeSiteNews.com has a timely interview with Catholic attorney Christopher Ferrara. Some quotes:
Now, in terms of life issues and positive law, the fundamental problem is that political modernity no longer cares about the question, ‘what is man?’ And certainly not the question, ‘what is man for?’ which is to know, to love, to serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
Of course, because in this new commercial society, which is all the modern state is – it’s a trading ground, ‘city of pigs,’ the very thing that [Greek philosopher] Glaucon and Socrates ridicule in the Republic, the very thing that Aristotle dismisses as an inadequate notion of the state – the city of pigs, the commercial society is what we now have.So the western world is one vast trading zone, hosted by secular governments which now completely prescind from the question of what man is, or what man is for, and pretend to be religiously neutral, when they’re not.
Because if the state says, ‘we don’t care what man is, what man is made for,’ it has already embraced an anti-theology. And in fact, the very function of such a state is to protect itself from religion. Not to guarantee the free exercise of religion, but to protect itself from religion.
Next Dearborn Video
This one is from David Woods's camera. It recapitulates some of the time period shown in other videos but gives a good wide shot of the scene which refutes a claim by the city mayor that Acts 17 was blocking a tent entrance and forcing a crowd to form by way of a bottleneck. (Remember too that in a previous video, we saw that David Wood actually asked a police officer if they should move and was told, "No, you're fine.")
Notice again here that at no time are the Acts 17 guys asked by police to stop their conversation, nor do the police make any attempt to disperse them or the group around them. Every video of the arrests of the men shows them being arrested summarily. It is particularly chilling, as I have already mentioned, to see Nabeel discussing the deity of Jesus and the atonement and being interrupted in these theological disquisitions by a policeman who asks him to "come over here" and puts handcuffs on him immediately.
David's narrative is, as always, interesting and entertaining.
I continue to be amazed that the city does not drop the charges. David's take on their thinking is in the comments here.
July 18, 2010
The Great "Diversity" Fraud
The following has received enough attention, lately, that I won't even bother providing links:
"...Participation in such...activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. 'Being an officer or winning awards' for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, 'has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.' Excelling in these activities 'is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.'"
July 17, 2010
Dearborn video footage--egregious violations of constitutional rights
The Acts 17 missionaries have finally gotten back their video footage from the Dearborn police. (Hey, it only took 25 days.) The lies in the police reports are shocking and are revealed by the footage.
It's really a toss-up which of the two arrest videos now available on-line is the most infuriating. I'm going to post first the one that I, personally, was most struck by, but they are both in this entry.
First, the arrest of Nabeel Qureshi for having a good conversation about Christianity with a group of Muslims. The video also contains quotations from the utterly lying police report.
Continue reading "Dearborn video footage--egregious violations of constitutional rights" »
July 15, 2010
Land, Guns, and Gold: Will They Save You?
Respectable (and not-so-respectable) pundits have been predicting a worldwide economic collapse for the better part of three years now. The advice of these "doomsday investors" to their wealthy clients amounts to this: buy rural property, preferably a self-sufficient farm, somewhere far away from the big cities; and stockpile essential supplies, especially gold, guns and ammunition. It's an old idea that is becoming mainstream.
I live on twenty rural acres, just outside of a small town but almost two hours away from the nearest major city. Here we raise goats for meat and milk, cows for beef, and chickens primarily for eggs. We planted 150 fruit trees a few years ago, and the orchard is just now coming into production. We also grow some vegetables and melons in our kitchen garden, and an amazing quantity of figs from three ancient fig trees. Wild blackberries grow on the property, which my children harvest for the making of pies and jam. We don't own any gold, but we do keep a shotgun, a rifle, and a .357 revolver with plenty of ammunition on hand. Our water is supplied from a domestic well and a regional irrigation project, so we're independent of city water systems (but still dependent upon public utilities). It's not "self-sufficiency" or "independence" by a long shot, but it does put certain problems at a distance.
Therefore, I do consider myself qualified to have a few opinions on the "buy farms, gold, and guns" solution proposed by the doomsday investors.
Continue reading "Land, Guns, and Gold: Will They Save You?" »
