Month: January 2012

A Counterculture of Modesty

From The Guardian, a book review titled The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century, begins with an unqualified assumption:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities’ affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.
Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too …. Continue reading “A Counterculture of Modesty” →

MED Christianity

Last year, I read Timothy Ferris’ new book, The Four-Hour Body. He’s a fan of the idea of the minimum effective dose (MED): “the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.” He applies it to things like time in the gym, surprising the reader with phenomenal muscle gains and fat loss with just 2 30-minute workouts per week. “Why waste your time on anything beyond what it takes to produce the desired result?,” is the unsurprising question/message from the author of The Four Hour Work Week. Continue reading “MED Christianity” →

True Religion, False Religion

Wow! Father Andrew Stephen Damick sure knows stumbled onto how to drive up blog traffic!

The Contemporary Christian Music equivalency tables probably say “If you like Eminem, you might like  .” Said Bethke perpetrated a YouTube rap/rant titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” It seems that 12,000,000 people have consented to watching it. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Continue reading “True Religion, False Religion” →

Insouciant Radicals

I have mentioned fairly recently the work of Evangelical Daniel Clendenin in understanding Orthodoxy and explaining it to his fellow Evangelicals. I discovered Sunday afternoon that I actually had retained a copy of  (and a link to) his “Why I’m Not Orthodox” article in Christianity Today, and that I had inaccurately recalled the exact words of his conclusion on why he remains Evangelical. Continue reading “Insouciant Radicals” →

Do not trust the press on religious topics

The Pope thinks the family is based on the marriage of a man and a woman. He is against divorce. He is against intentional marital infertility. He is against adultery.

I don’t have links, but could probably find proof that he is against polygamy and deliberately having children out of wedlock as a sort of lifestyle choice. All in all, not a fun guy by today’s insane standards.

So there’s the setup.

Now: suppose he give a speech touching on civil unrest, economic problems, religious freedom and family. And suppose that in that speech, he says this:

Blessed John Paul II stated that “the path of peace is at the same time the path of the young”, inasmuch as young people embody “the youth of the nations and societies, the youth of every family and of all humanity”. Young people thus impel us to take seriously their demand for truth, justice and peace. For this reason, I chose them as the subject of my annual World Day of Peace Message, entitled Educating Young People in Justice and Peace. Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, “openness to life is a sign of openness to the future”. In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells, as well as the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.

(Emphasis added, but read the whole thing as carefully as you like.)

How does Reuters report it?

Gay marriage a threat to humanity’s future: Pope.

Indeed, “some of his strongest comments against gay marriage.”

Do not trust the press on religious topics.

(Huge HT to GetReligion.com)