Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Category: Christian Witness

You are Here :
Christian Witness

Bringing along new faith bloggers

The Social Media Club, a project of the non-profit BrainJams organization has a very interesting site and some admirable projects in the hopper.

The Social Media Club states that they are:

…organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

I am particularly interested in their Adopt A Blogger project. In regard to the project they state:

The idea came from our discussions with BrainJams in New Orleans – to formalize some practices in which many bloggers are already engaged – to help people who don’t know about blogging to learn how and make the most of the tools.

This is particularly important for those of us who are among the leaders in representing underrepresented Churches in the social media sphere.

You can easily count the number of Orthodox (Eastern, Western, and Oriental) as well as PNCC social media sites on the web.

It is my feeling; a feeling echoed by others, that we need to bring along faith bloggers, most especially the young who are strong witnesses to orthodox faith. We need to teach them about responsible communication (versus polemics, sophistry, or demogogary), good web design, good web ethics, and proper standards.

It looks like a great project, one I would love to lead, at least in our Church. Faith, witness, ethics, apologetics, and technology for all. That’s at the core of responsible Christian social networking. Web 2.2 here we come…

Christian Witness, Perspective

Righteous suffering

Peter of The Age to Come comments on the Prayer of Jabez and on our false notions of who and what God is. In pointing to this post the Young Fogey states, —God is not a vending machine.— Exactly right, God is not a slot machine dispensing happiness because we deserve it or ask for it.

I’ve reflected on this line of thinking from the perspective of the disaffected person seeking Christ, the person disaffected by our definition of them.

You know who ‘they’ are, the homosexual, the liberal, the conservative, the widow, the orphan, the aged, the poor, the Arab, the ‘free choice’ supporter, the person seeking cures through embryonic stem cell research.

It is our obligation as Christians to witness to these people, to acknowledge their pain and suffering, to lighten their load by our humanity and support, and in the end to show them that the world’s concept of an entitlement to happiness is a straw man.

We need to get away from hellfire condemnation (you have no right to suffer because your suffering is pure selfishness) and move to truthful charity.

This is not calling an evil good – we cannot veer from, or change God’s message. It is rather an act of catechetical guidance, helping them along the path to regeneration and from there on the road to Theosis. We need to assist them, and the world, in understanding that suffering is an on-going act of righteousness. Righteous suffering being suffering with purpose, and that purpose having true affect.

Christian Witness

God in our humanness

From a beautiful reflection on our humanness from Huw Raphael: The Icon of God

In his homily Father Victor wondered how many of us could look at another human and see the icon, no matter how damaged.

…and upon expansion reveals why Thou shall not kill (murder, war, abortion, the death penalty, killing oneself through smoking, drugs, etc.) is a grave affront to God.

Christian Witness, Current Events, Media

Standing in the dock – for the truth

Robert Fisk writing in The Independent takes a stand against Holocaust deniers in Turkey. He’s ready to stand-up for the truth.

Check out: Let me denounce genocide from the dock: Suddenly, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting “Turkishness” (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of “civil war” – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger…

A thank you to Serge, the original blogging Young Fogey (ref. here) for pointing to this.

Christian Witness, Current Events, Political

State trumps Church

The New York State Court of Appeals rules that State interests trump religious faith. The beginning of a very slippery slope (just imagine Quakers and the Amish marching off to war).

This follows along with rulings from the IRS as to what ministers may or may not preach, and other New York State rulings that could require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions.

The ball is now in the Church’s court.

Will they shut down services and allow the state to pick-up the slack, hold their nose and provide coverage, privatize their outreach services spinning off hundreds of not-for-profits that will have to fend for themselves? There’s a hundred other iterations as to what could happen (imagine making people sign an election stating that they do not want the coverage – people would win any lawsuit filed based on such a measure) None of it clean, none of it good.

The Bishops of the Roman Church need to get on the same page and strategize. Otherwise you will see scandal caused by Bishops going in a hundred different directions in opposition to Church teaching.

Let the teachers teach.

From the Albany Times-Union: Court of Appeals defends health care law: Mandatory group insurance coverage of prescription contraceptives ruled constitutional:

ALBANY — The 2003 law requiring employers that provide group insurance coverage for prescription drugs to include coverage for prescription contraceptives is constitutional, the state’s highest court ruled today.

The Court of Appeals rejected a request by Catholic Charities of Albany and others for an injunction that would have forced the state Insurance Department to allow them an exemption from the Women’s Health and Wellness Act, like other religious institutions whose employees all share the same faith.

“Plaintiffs believe contraception to be sinful, and assert that the challenged provisions of the WHWA compel them to violate their religious tenets by financing conduct that they condemn,” Associate Judge Robert S. Smith stated in an 18-page decision. “The sincerity of their beliefs, and the centrality of those beliefs to their faiths, are not in dispute.”

What is at issue, Smith said, is the balance between an interest in adhering to the tenets of the organizations’ faith and the state’s interest in “fostering equality between the sexes, and in providing women with better health care.”

In the debate before the law was enacted, legislators found that granting a broad religious exemption like that which Catholics Charities sought would leave too many women outside the statute, Smith said, “a decision entitled to deference from the courts.”

“Of course, the Legislature might well have made another choice, but we cannot say the choice the Legislature made has been shown to be an unreasonable interference with plaintiffs’ exercise of their religion,” Smith wrote. “The Legislature’s choice is therefore not unconstitutional.”

Christian Witness, Current Events

Stem cell research – the truth

From Catholic On-line: Catholic bioethics priest ‘cuts through spin’ on stem-cell debate

COQUITLAM, Canada (CCN/The B.C. Catholic) —“ Society needs to cut through hype surrounding the stem-cell debate, a debate that has incorrectly identified the Catholic Church as standing against stem-cell research aimed at medical breakthroughs, said the director of U.S. Catholic bioethics center.

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, Pa., spoke to some 200 at Our Lady of Fatima Parish here Sept. 27 on stem-cell research and accompanying moral issues in a talk, —Cutting Through the Spin of Stem Cells and Cloning.”

Although Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk is only 40 years old, he has accomplished more academically than most do in a lifetime. He has a doctorate in neuroscience from Yale University, four undergraduate degrees in molecular and cellular biology, chemistry, biochemistry and philosophy, as well as two degrees in advanced theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He has addressed state legislatures, and regularly travels around Canada and the United States to speak on stem-cell research.

“It is incorrect to say that the Roman Catholic Church is against stem-cell research,” he said to begin his talk. “It is only correct to say the Roman Catholic Church is against embryonic stem-cell research. The ethical concerns differ with the source of the stem cells, because you do have to destroy an early and vulnerable human to get embryonic cells…”

Which coinsides with the view of the PNCC.

Christian Witness, Current Events

What if you posted a sign

…and nobody ‘got it’? From today’s Albany Times Union, the Columbia County (NY) Quakers have posted a billboard for peace. Here’s an excerpt from Village’s sign of troubled times: Billboard touting peace causes reactions from surprise to confusion:

CHATHAM — The idea was to solicit designs for a “Billboard for Peace.”

The picture a group of Columbia County Quakers chose is about as far as can be from your typical peace symbol.

Since last month, drivers on the busiest road in the village of Chatham have passed a billboard that evokes the imagery of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

The sign on County Route 66 shows a hooded man with no shirt and his hands tied. It cites the biblical injunction to “love your enemies.”

And it asks, in big red letters, “Is This Love?”

An Old Chatham Quaker Meeting committee chose the image over a half-dozen milder submissions, such as a yellow ribbon with the slogan: “Peace. The Ultimate Support.”

“These are not mild times,” said Jens Braun, 48, a committee member who teaches peace studies at Berkshire Community College. “These are times when we are doing some things which I think historically we will look back on and really regret.”

Amen to that.

Christian Witness

Finding Christ

I’ve been thinking on the issue of Rod Dreher’s entry into the Orthodox Church, and people’s reaction to that decision. I think these quotes are apropos to all who consider the questioning of a person’s journey to God, and their selection of the way to Theosis, to be their duty:

An old man was asked, ‘How can I find God?’ He said, ‘In fasting, in watching, in labours, in devotion, and, above all, in discernment. I tell you, many have injured their bodies without discernment and have gone away from us having achieved nothing. Our mouths smell bad through fasting, we know the Scriptures by heart, we recite all the Psalms of David, but we have not that which God seeks: charity and humility.’

…and…

An old man said, “Every time a thought of superiority or vanity moves you, examine your conscience to see if you have kept all the commandments, if you love your enemies and are grieved at their sins, if you consider yourself as an unprofitable servant and the greatest sinner of all. Even then, do not pretend to great ideas as though you were perfectly right, for this thought destroys everything.”

Both from the Apophthegmata Patrum (the Sayings of the Fathers of the Desert)

In Orthodoxy and me (which looks like it has been taken down) at Mr. Dreher’s blog, Crunchy Con he stated:

A few weeks back, I mentioned to Julie on the way to St. Seraphim’s one morning, “I’m now part of a small church that nobody’s heard of, with zero cultural influence in America, and in a tiny parish that’s materially poor. I think that’s just where I need to be.”

Exactly – a family’s search for personal and communal holiness.

That search may follow one line in one person’s life or may traverse a winding mountain road in another’s. Regardless, who are we to criticize, and criticism of him and his family has been scathing and deeply uncharitable considering that it largely comes from allegedly devout Roman Catholics. All we can do is witness, and Mr. Dreher has that one down.

Christian Witness, Saints and Martyrs,

The other side of St. Vincent of Lerins

St. Vincent of Lerins’ quote regarding the consistency and continuity of catholic belief (basically the belief expressed in the first 1,000 years of Christianity) is often quoted in responding to some of the weirdness (things human) that creeps into the Church. I’ve often quoted him in this regard myself.

“Id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est; hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum.” [Such teaching is truly Catholic as has been believed in all places, at all times, and by all the faithful.]

Today’s Office of Readings offers us St. Vincent’s take on the development of doctrine; sort of the other side of the St. Vincent coin.

In the quest for unity we see the difficulty in reconciling developments vehemently clung to with the fullness of Christian faith. Maybe St. Vincent will help.

St. Vincent of Lerins ora pro nobis.

Is there to be no development of religion in the Church of Christ? Certainly, there is to be development and on the largest scale.

Who can be so grudging to men, so full of hate for God, as to try to prevent it? But it must truly be development of the faith, not alteration of the faith. Development means that each thing expands to be itself, while alteration means that a thing is changed from one thing into another.

The understanding, knowledge and wisdom of one and all, of individuals as well as of the whole Church, ought then to make great and vigorous progress with the passing of the ages and the centuries, but only along its own line of development, that is, with the same doctrine, the same meaning and the same import.

The religion of souls should follow the law of development of bodies. Though bodies develop and unfold their component parts with the passing of the years, they always remain what they were. There is a great difference between the flower of childhood and the maturity of age, but those who become old are the very same people who were once young. Though the condition and appearance of one and the same individual may change, it is one and the same nature, one and the same person.

The tiny members of unweaned children and the grown members of young men are still the same members. Men have the same number of limbs as children. Whatever develops at a later age was already present in seminal form; there is nothing new in old age that was not already latent in childhood.

There is no doubt, then, that the legitimate and correct rule of development, the established and wonderful order of growth, is this: in older people the fullness of years always brings to completion those members and forms that the wisdom of the Creator fashioned beforehand in their earlier years.

If, however, the human form were to turn into some shape that did not belong to its own nature, or even if something were added to the sum of its members or subtracted from it, the whole body would necessarily perish or become grotesque or at least be enfeebled. In the same way, the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firmer over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age.

In ancient times our ancestors sowed the good seed in the harvest field of the Church. It would be very wrong and unfitting if we, their descendants, were to reap, not the genuine wheat of truth but the intrusive growth of error.

On the contrary, what is right and fitting is this: there should be no inconsistency between first and last, but we should reap true doctrine from the growth of true teaching, so that when, in the course of time, those first sowings yield an increase it may flourish and be tended in our day also.

All Right Reserved © 2005 - 2023