Category: Faith & Ideology

New(ish) Blog Recommendation

Especially to Orthodox readers of this blog, I commend a new (to me) blog “A Vow of Conversation.” The author, Macrina Walker, says of herself:

When I first started this blog I was a Roman Catholic monastic. I am now exclaustrated from my monastery and am preparing to enter the Orthodox Church. I am South African, am presently in the Netherlands and my life is in a state of flux.

I’m looking forward gradually to reviewing her promising “Completed Series” as well as subscribing to her new postings.

Are gay rights in conflict with religious freedom?

I began a few days ago to write about (a) whether there’s a conflict between the robust religious freedom we’ve known in the past and “the gay rights movement” and (b) whether the Obama administration is friendly toward the latter to the detriment of the former.

The piece sort of spun out of control. Things are just too interconnected. So I’m starting fresh, determined not to allow my modest objective to sink beneath the waves of “TMI” (too much information). Continue reading “Are gay rights in conflict with religious freedom?” →

Hope

“Do not grumble against Heaven because it does not fulfill all your hopes. Grumble against yourselves, because you do not know how to hope. Heaven does not fulfill hopes, but hope.” Prayer XXXIII, Prayers by the Lake, St. Nikolai Velimirovich

Catholic or Sectarian?

Father Gregory Jensen thinks as he drives, apparently. “Sectarian or Catholic? Thoughts From Another Long Drive” is a recent result. (His use of the adjective “Catholic” definitely is not limited to “Roman Catholic.”)

[A] sectarian approach limits itself to what is wrong with others.  Whether from the right or the left, sectarianism is an ideology masquerading as Christian theology …

Life as a disciple of Christ necessarily places us in a tension with not only the fallen world, but also with ourselves.  As the late Fr Alexander Schmemmann never tired of repeating, it is this fallen world that God loves and for which His Son suffered and died on the Cross …

The pastoral–and spiritual–failure of sectarianism is that, unlike Christ, it fails to balance “harsh sayings…with the easy and appealing words so that watchfulness is encouraged” (Venerable Bede, Commentary on the Apocalypse, 21.8 quoted on ACCS, NT vol XII: Revelation, p. 361).  Underneath this, indeed underneath all my willingness to judge, to condemn, to withhold forgiveness, is a watchfulness that is not encouraging but suspicious and distrustful.  If in the immediate this is directed toward my neighbor it ultimately finds its roots in my own lack of faith in God and trust in the providential working of His grace in your life and mine.

He links to an editorial that cautions against the creep of a sectarian spirit into relations among the diverse Orthodox in North America (not between the Orthodox and the surrounding culture), and that caution is timely for reasons I’ll not go into here.

But the sectarian spirit also can taint the relationship of believers to the surrounding culture. Think purse-lipped Church Lady.

I don’t think that surrounding culture, especially in North America, is without it’s own secularized ideology and sectarianism, but in the spirit of Catholic/Orthodox self-criticism, it’s good to be mindful of the need to balance “harsh sayings…with the easy and appealing words so that watchfulness is encouraged.” “Love the sinner while hating the sin” is a pretty lame effort, as it misses a true call to watchfulness.

It may be even better to apply some of the harsh sayings to our own scotomatous contributions to cultural decadence. I’m not giving the cultural left a free ride by any means, but let’s grant, for just one example, the legitimacy of this question (which I’ve distilled from multiple SSM advocates):

“To date, which has more damaged the institution of civil “marriage”:

  1. Same-sex marriage; or
  2. Heterosexual cohabitation, fornication, intentional conception and birth outside marriage, and intentional avoidance of conception and birth inside marriage (i.e., marriage viewed as a license for heterosexual ‘religious’ people to engage in sundry intentionally barren erotic acts)?”

I’ll even grant the tiresome Frank Schaeffer (who, by the way, is a former religious right leader – at least in his own mind) 0.5 points (on a 1000 point scale) for pointing out, inside a tirade meant to tickle the ears of his liberal audience by insinuating sexual license, that Churches full of fat people (gluttons) might want to be circumspect about the stridency of their condemnation of loose and gay sex.

Reason’s God

Father Stephen, blogging today on reason generally and philosophical proofs of God particularly:

The God of the philosophers is not the same as the God revealed to us in the God/Man, Jesus Christ. As I often say to those who “do not believe in God” – “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in, I may not believe in Him either.”

There are things for which reason is useful and things for which it is not. Reason is not the universal human tool – it’s just a useful tool.

The existence of God (the Christian God) cannot be proven in the manner which reason requires. He is not an object such that He can be observed, nor is He a mathematical theorem or formula that can be derived from something else. He is not the consequence of anything – thus He does not exist at the end of a chain of logic.

The claim of the Orthodox faith (other Christians may say different things – I take no responsibility for them) – is that God is unknowable. It also puts forward the paradox that the God who is unknowable, has made Himself known to us in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. We know God because Christ has made Him known.

This claim of the Church is more than a statement about an event in our world’s history. The Orthodox claim is that the God who made Himself known in the Incarnation, continues to make Himself known through our participation in His life ….

That jumped out at me, but there’s more. See it all here.