I appreciate greatly Kirsten Powers' reflections on the power of Christian faith to affect radical change in the believer's heart attitude towards those who murder beloved family members. She writes:
When Christians are in the news, it's usually because they have done something wrong — they've gotten on the wrong side of a culture war or cheated on their wife, or worse. What the world rarely gets to see is the powerful grace that flows from a deep faith predicated on the belief that we are all sinners in need of forgiveness.
The family members of those slain at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church bore witness to this central tenet of Christianity last week as the nation gasped in awe. "I forgive you," one after another told the stone-faced and unrepentant alleged killer, Dylann Roof, at his bond hearing.
Tweeting about the incredible scene, National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke noted, "I am a non-Christian, and I must say: This is a remarkable advertisement for Christianity." Thankfully, the circumstances requiring forgiveness don't always involve the murder of a loved one. But sometimes they do.
In addition to Rich Lowry's negative commentary on Pope Francis' encyclical posted previously, I now offer Maureen Malarkey's which is even more strident, but very much worth reading. She titles her contribution (published June 24, 2015), "Where Did Pope Francis's Extravagant Rant Come From?" Mularkey writes: [my bolding]
Subversion of Christianity by the spirit of the age has been a hazard down the centuries. The significance of “Laudato Si” lies beyond its stated concern for the climate. Discount obfuscating religious language. The encyclical lays ground to legitimize global government and makes the church an instrument of propaganda—a herald for the upcoming United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Accommodation by church hierarchy to green dogma has been metastasizing since the UN proclaimed Earth Day in 1970. Two decades later, Kevin Costner went dancing with wolves while the Fraser Institute prefaced “Religion, Wealth, and Poverty” (1990) by Jesuit scholar James V. Schall with this:
. . . the relatively sudden appearance of religion not primarily as worship or doctrine, but as social activism, has been not a little perplexing. Numerous sympathetic critics, many of the faithful, and interested observers sense that something is occurring with vast and unsettling implications for the well-being of the public order and for religion itself. They are not at all sure, however, that what is happening is itself in the best interests of religion or of the poor and outcast for whom it is said to be occurring.
Propelled by the cult of feeling and Golden Age nostalgia—enshrined in the myth of indigenous peoples as peaceable ecologists—that elusive something picked up a tincture of Teilhardian gnosticism as it grew. It bursts on us now as “Laudato Si,” a malignant jumble of dubious science, policy prescriptions, doomsday rhetoric, and what students of Wordsworthian poetics call, in Keats’ derisive phrase, “the egotistical sublime.”
Eco-Activists Thrive on Distortions
The document’s catalogue of distortions and factual errors are those of the climate-change establishment swallowed whole. There is no scientific consensus on man-made global warming, no consensus on the role of human activity in any of the environmental phenomena cited.
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore abandoned the organization in 1986, highlighting its abandonment of scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas:
By around the mid-1980s, when I left Greenpeace, the public had accepted most of the reasonable things we had been fighting for: stop the bomb, save the whales, stop toxic waste dumping into the earth, water, and air. Some, like myself, realized the job of creating mass awareness of the importance of the environment had been accomplished and it was time to move on from confrontation to sustainable development, seeking solutions. But others seemed bent on lifelong confrontation, ‘up against the man’ ‘smash capitalism’. . . .
In order to remain confrontational as society adopted all the reasonable demands, it was necessary for these anti-establishment lifers to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in zero-tolerance policies.
That was 30 years ago. Since then, “the ‘green’ movement has not only become more hard line, they have also become irrational and fanatical.”
Climate has fluctuated since the planet formed. Sea levels have been rising for thousands of years with no current increase in the rate. Catastrophic extinctions occurred millions of years before industrialization. Not so long ago in geological time, Arctic islands were covered in sub-tropical forests and no ice covered either pole. Climate temperature has been flat for nearly two decades despite rise in CO2. On it goes.
Enter Jorge Bergolio. Informed objection to the pope’s roster of pending disasters is widely available—but also, at this point, moot. Reducing greenhouse gases has just been deemed a religious obligation. What should concern us now is the ecclesial climate that yielded this extravagant rant.
A Short List of What’s Wrong with ‘Laudato Si’
There is nothing to admire in its assault on market economies, technological progress, and—worse—on rationality itself. Bergolio, whom we know now as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His grasp of economics is straitjacketed by the Peronist culture in which he was raised. “Laudato Si” descends to garish, left-wing boilerplate. The pope is neither a public intellectual, theologian, nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates all three.
One has solid grounds to wonder at the selectivity and inadequacy of current news reporting. Those who remember the previous "science" predictions of Paul Ehrlich may be pardoned for being skeptical of his latest dire warnings. Wesley J. Smith writes:
You may have read in the media that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction on the planet.
You may also have noted that one of the sources of the claim is Paul Ehrlich -- author of the hysterically wrong "The Population Bomb."
But for the most part the articles that have reported on the paper by Ehrlich and Anthony Barnosky (in Science Advances) do not mention that infamous book or Ehrlich's history of hyperbolic ecological fear mongering. Instead they simply identify Ehrlich as a Stanford University professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology. That's misleading by omission.
Scientists at Stanford University in the US claim it is the biggest loss of species since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. "Without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," said Professor Paul Ehrlich, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Putting it that way creates an illusion that Ehrlich would write an objective study. But Ehrlich is less a scientist than he is an ideologue who for decades has made a good living by preaching doom and gloom. His prognostications are almost always wrong.
The Telegraph's Tim Chivers penned a valuable column a few years ago outlining some of the assertions Ehrlich made in his book that turned out to be panicked rather than prophetic. From the column:
So, let's take a look at some of his predictions, made in 1968:
1) "The battle to feedall of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate," he said. He predicted four billion deaths, including 65 million Americans...
What actually happened: Since Ehrlich wrote, the population has more than doubled to seven billion -- but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25 per cent. Of course there are famines, but the death rate has gone down. I don't think a significant number of Americans have starved....
What Duggar's sisters say may surprise you. I found it an eye-opener. It looks to me like the tabloids and media have hyped and distorted the story (out of a desire to smear a Christian family?) and not taken into consideration the victims, the subsequent remedies, and legal confidentiality. John Jalsevac has written, "Dear Duggar critics: You can stop pretending to care about the victims now." (This interview took place on 6/5/15).
Upset by these signs, Pamela Geller requested Clear Channel to provide her organization (AFDI -"American Freedom Defense Initiative") an opportunity to pay for signs telling the truth. She writes:
. . . ICNA’s billboards in Atlanta claim that “Muhammad — peace be upon him — believed in peace, social justice, women’s rights,” along with a phone number to find out more about Islam. They’re planning on having 100 of these billboards around the country by the end of the year, while hosting conferences in various cities around the country about Sharia and Muhammad. [Ed: ICNA stands for "Islamic Circle of NOrth America}
We countered ICNA’s lies with the truth about Muhammad. Our ad reads, “Muhammad believed in war, denial of rights to women, denial of rights to non-Muslims, deceit of unbelievers,” and directs people to an AFDI website, TruthAboutMuhammad.org. At that site, we laid out abundant evidence for what we said about Muhammad – evidence taken from core Islamic texts.
We submitted our ads to go up in Atlanta in the same areas as the ICNA kitman billboards: Camp Creek Parkway at Desert Drive; at Mountain Industrial Boulevard at Stone Mountain Freeway; and at Chamblee Tucker Road at I-285.We countered ICNA’s lies with the truth about Muhammad. Our ad reads, “Muhammad believed in war, denial of rights to women, denial of rights to non-Muslims, deceit of unbelievers,” and directs people to an AFDI website, TruthAboutMuhammad.org. At that site, we laid out abundant evidence for what we said about Muhammad – evidence taken from core Islamic texts.
Clear Channel rejected our ad, saying it wasn’t very nice. So we submitted a different ad, using Muhammad’s own quotes. That way Clear Channel could not say we were editorializing or opining. Our new ad quoted Muhammad saying, “I have been made victorious through terror”; “I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women)”; and “I have been commanded to fight against people.”
Clear Channel rejected that ad, too.
ICNA is dedicated to “establishing a place for Islam in America” – which means a place for jihad and a place for Sharia. ICNA, like the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is a terror front group whose “Muslim advocacy” front masks their true Islamic supremacist agenda. Despite the carefully constructed myth surrounding Muslim Brotherhood groups in America, advanced by a hostile and pro-jihadist media, the truth about these subversives is out there.
If tolerance is so important, why aren’t Third World immigrants asked to be tolerant of American laws and morals? To the contrary, in any cultural conflict, Americans are expected to give way to immigrant values — or be accused of opposing “inclusivity.”
A quasi-religious movement now has a genuinely religious leader.
The pope’s encyclical on the environment is being hailed for its embrace of science, although it is about as scientific as the Catholic hymnal.
Pope Francis writes that Sister Earth “now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Really? Is that what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says?
I’m not Catholic, but I respect the pope’s humility and am moved by his love for the handicapped and his concern for the vulnerable. The Catholic Church is one of the pillars of Western civilization, and it has brought comfort and meaning to the lives of countless millions of people down through the millennia.
That doesn’t mean that climate science, economic policy, cost-benefit analysis are its core competencies. No one has ever said: Yes, but what did Gregory VII do to fight the onset of the Medieval Warm Period?
The pope’s at times lyrical encyclical draws on a beautiful tradition of respect for nature and its creatures represented by the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, and is suffused with an intense regard for the poor. But anyone who takes the encyclical as a serious guide to public policy deserves a stern talking to from the nearest tough-minded, ruler-wielding nun.
World Magazine selected the following as their 2015 books of the year:
To be eligible for consideration for this year’s awards, books must have been published between May 1, 2014, and April 30, 2015.
[Note: I highly recommend visiting World Magazine's article for more extensive descriptions not only of the winners but also the "runners up," many of which I can easily envision beating the winners.]
Fiction WINNER: The Book of Strange New Things, by Michael Faber
These days, in books from secular publishers, we expect to see pastors depicted as hypocrites and missionaries as agents of exploitation. Instead we find empathy and splendid writing in this poignant work from Michael Faber.
Accessible Theology WINNER: enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship, by Sam Andreades
In this insightful work, Andreades skillfully and truthfully guides readers through at least three crucial cultural debates: Are men and women different? How should husbands and wives help each other? What about same-sex marriage?
Current Events/Public Affairs WINNER: America in Retreat, by Bret Stephens
Stephens shows how isolationist rhetoric is on the rise in America along with balance-of-power appeasement. The consequence may be more disorder than we bargained for, including world war and the avoidable sacrifice of countless lives. (Short audio talk)
History/Biography WINNER: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson
Larson masterfully tells the story of those responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania and makes us empathize with the ordinary men, women, and children who were war’s collateral damage. The appeal to emotion as well as intellect makes Dead Wake our history/biography book of the year
Vatican City, Jun 16, 2015 / 03:09 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Can a country with deep Christian roots like Mexico find itself at the mercy of demons? Some in the Church fear so.
And as a result, they called for a nation-wide exorcism of Mexico, carried out quietly last month in the cathedral of San Luis Potosí.[more . . .]
The political Left has come up with a new buzzword: “microaggression.” Professors at the University of California at Berkeley have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “microaggression” against minorities and women. Supposedly it shows that you don’t take their grievances seriously and are therefore guilty of being aggressive toward them, even if only on a micro scale. [more. . .]
. . . But the status of a great nation is built on more than raw power. It includes intangible qualities like respect, admiration, and, yes, fear. We don’t need all three of them; no major power does. But we need at least one of them at any given moment, and right now, we’re bottoming out in each of these measures. . . [more . . .]
Coulter’s latest book, “Adios, America” is an uncompromising attack on the policies, justifications and rhetoric of amnesty. It’s full of the punchy quotes she’s known for, such as “Americans ought to be suspicious about being told incessantly fences don’t work. It’s like being told wheels don’t work”, accompanied by a broad survey of the entire immigration and illegal immigration debate. [more . . .]X
In the 1950s and before, ”passing” referred to a black person who presented himself to the world as white. So is it progress when a Caucasian flips it? Shall we all celebrate another historic “first”? Rachel Dolezal, the first white to pass as black? There is already a lot of discussion on Twitter about “race and what it means.” There will presumably be a back and forth about attempting to appropriate some other group’s suffering, but let’s face it, the left in general has a huge case of oppression envy. It’s the coin of the realm. Being oppressed, or being a member of a group thought to be oppressed, brings real world benefits like deference, university professorships, and much more. This racial consciousness is an American disease that began as oppression, moved on to guilt, and has now entered the realm of farce.
Me: It's perhaps of interest that the woman in question, Rachel Dolezal, is a college teacher, more specifically, she serves as "professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University, where her research interests include 'the intersection of race, gender and class in the contemporary diaspora with a specific emphasis on black women in visual culture.'” This information may further the negative opinion now gathering momentum towards what passes as education on college campuses today.
The first eight minutes show Dolezal rambling on about the mysterious hate crimes committed against her and her kids. The action starts at 7:55, when the interviewer surprises her by asking her to confirm that the black man she claims is her father really is her father. It’s all downhill from there. [Brief transcript below]
“I was wondering if your dad really is an African American man,” Jeff Humphrey of KXLY4 asked Dolezal.
“That’s a very … I mean, I don’t know what you’re implying,” Dolezal said.
“Are you African American?” Humphrey said.
“I don’t understand the question,” Dolezal said. She walked off-camera as Humphrey asked: “Are your parents, are they white?”
In 1971 at the huge Urbana Missionary Convention, John Stott (d. 2011), the great Anglican preacher, teacher and writer (0ver 50 books translated into 65 languages), gave a series of Scriptural expositions on John 13-17. Though an Anglican minister, his worldwide ministry displayed what C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity; Stott taughtwhat all Christians worldwide hold in common. In 2004, the Jewish commentator, David Brooks, drew attention to Stott in a New York Times article extolling Stott as the world's best exemplar of thoughtful evangelicalism.
It happens that I have a personal copy of the proceedings of that great 1971 Urbana Conference published under the title Christ the Liberator. Recently I read John Stott's teaching on John 13 and was delighted to discover that audio recordings of Stott's addresses to that Convention are available on YouTube. I post them below for everyone's edification.
For talks on John 14 (and part of 16), 15, and 17 click "Continue reading..." below.
I find Greenfield's article important, incisive, and illuminating. He writes:
What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race, religion and culture with none of the disadvantages.
Islam is a religion when mandating that employers accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to bring it into the schools, places that are legally hostile to religion, American students are taught about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and recite Islamic prayers to learn about another culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t is a race.
Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in every advantage of race, religion and culture, while expeditiously shifting from one to the other to avoid any of the disadvantages.
The biggest form of Muslim privilege has been to racialize Islam. The racialization of Islam has locked in all the advantages of racial status for a group that has no common race, only a common ideology.
Islam is the only religion that cannot be criticized. No other religion has a term in wide use that treats criticism of it as bigotry. Islamophobia is a unique term because it equates dislike of a religion with racism. Its usage makes it impossible to criticize that religion without being accused of bigotry.
By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not as a particular set of beliefs expressed in behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait that like race cannot be criticized without attacking the existence of an entire people. The idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is denounced as racist.
Muslims are treated as a racial collective rather than a group that shares a set of views about the world.
I watched the CBN report below on Tuvia Tenenbom's bookCatch a Jewwhich taught me that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being egregiously inflamed by European (and also American) NGOs. After watching the video, I came across Paula R. Sterns' poignant review rejecting Tenenbom's expectation of Israel's demise in spite of Germany and the left, the NGOS, European anti-Semitism and the UN (not to mention Arab and Iranian hostility). Worth watching and hearing also are Caroline Glick's musings before introducing Tuvia Tenenbom. The book sells for $19.67 on Amazon but the current Kindle price is $1.99!! Here's the important CBN video report:
JERUSALEM, Israel -- When it comes to Middle East peace, the world often asks what prevents Israelis and Palestinians from making it work. A new book blames a hidden party for fueling the hate between the two.
CBN News took a closer look at the frightening influence of some European, and even American, groups.
Anti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe, with attacks in France and Austria doubling since 2013. Already this year there were deadly attacks at a kosher supermarket in Paris and terror shootings of Jews in Copenhagen.
A new book, called Catch the Jew, claims Europeans are fanning the flames of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by exporting anti-Semitism to the Middle East.
The book is full of humor, and Tenenbom uses salty and sometimes crude language in his accounts.
"There's not only Jews and Arabs here, the way I thought, fighting it out, there is another tribe here and the tribe is called Europeans, some Americans, but mostly Europeans," author Tuvia Tenenbom told CBN News.
Tenenbom says European governments are funding organizations that say they help Palestinians, but in fact are so anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, they create friction and even fabricate things against Israel.
"In reality, they have come to this land to implant and instill hatred in the heart of every Muslim against the Jews, and [they] also sponsor self-hating Jews," Tenenbom said.
The article below testifies to an undeniable truth: there is nothing Israel can do to placate Palestinian hostility to Israel's existence. As Gold Meir said: "Simply put the root issue is the Arab attitude to Israel’s very existence …They don’t want us here." The article:
In 2008, Barack Obama said, “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel – and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”
Seven years later, President Obama will go down in history as the most hostile American President towards the State of Israel in modern memory. And Obama still refuses to accept the fact that in Israel there is a democracy, and the people have yet again chosen Likud. He chooses to believe his hostility to Israel is about the Likud – and he is wrong. It’s about the State of Israel.
During a recent interview with The Atlantic, President Obama said “…I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of … kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir…” Obama continued on, claiming that there is “a very concerted effort on the part of some political forces to equate being pro-Israel, and hence being supportive of the Jewish people, with a rubber stamp on a particular set of policies coming out of the Israeli government.”
The truth is that Obama is simply out of touch with reality.
Obama – who has regularly advocated for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines, wouldn’t like Golda Meir’s words on the subject. She asked, “Now they say we should go back to the ’67 borders, but that’s where we were so why was there a war? And we had ’47 borders … we didn’t like them very much but we said yes to them. But there was still a war. And after the ’48 war they said we should go back to the ’47 borders. But that’s where we were … and that’s where they wanted to get us out from … They still nurture a hope that at some time we’ll disappear.”