Reflecting on the Treaty of Westphalia and Modern American Foreign Policy

When a crisis in the 17th-century Holy Roman Empire about princely authority and autonomy spiraled into sectarian warfare, Central Europe was plunged into the Thirty Years War. It was to be a conflict so debilitating and deadly that it would prove more proportionally costly in casualties for what is now Germany than even the Second World War. When the Peace of Westphalia finally brought the nightmare to a close in 1648, it was clear that domestic politics had to be separated from diplomacy for any stability to return to Europe. So came an emphasis on the sovereignty of states to police their own affairs while retaining a standardized system for dealing with each other as (ostensible) equals in the international realm. 

While no system can guarantee peace free from geopolitical upset, The Westphalian Peace was nonetheless an improvement over the religious wars of the past. Something like it would also be an improvement over the rampant, American-led liberal hegemony of today. The ideologies of permanent war have had disproportionate influence over the ruling cliques in Washington, D.C., from the Clintonite neoliberals to the Dick Cheney neoconservatives. There are very real material reasons for this, of course, such as defense contracting and the powerful lobbying behind it. But it was on purely ideological terms that America’s dangerous imperial overstretch was sold to a domestic audience. 

Those like former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power would have us believe that there are teeming masses of people abroad just yearning to have American bombs rained down upon them as a solution for their domestic woes. Yet for most of American history, this was not so. The early and rising United States was a nation of diplomats who had taken the lessons of Westphalia to heart. From George Washington and John Quincy Adams up through the start of the 20th century, the importance of keeping domestic ideological arrangements out of sober realist diplomacy was usually understood. It was Woodrow Wilson who departed from this arrangement with his commitment to establishing the United States as guarantor not only of the rights of its own citizens but also the people of foreign nations abroad. His unrealistic vision was rejected by both Congress and most of the world’s other great powers. Still, Britain and America were influenced enough by his thinking to stand aghast when first Japan and then Italy and Germany went about sabotaging the fragile postwar order. It would take a second, more destructive war, with the United States and the U.S.S.R. creating a peace out of their victorious power, to undo the damage that had been done. Two countries that could not have been more internally different became the crux of the most important wartime alliance of the 20th century. Largely forgotten was that the top crime pursued by the allies during the Germans’ postwar trial was that of “waging aggressive war.”

Since the end of the Cold War, and with the checks on America’s ambitions largely removed, we have seen this Wilsonian messianism return, and stronger than before. America’s cultural history of puritanism and faith in its own (culturally and historically specific) institutions has merged with an unchecked hubris. Interventions unrelated to the interests of the average American came in the Balkans and Somalia, and then expanded to nearly the entire Middle East and large swathes of Africa. The justification is always the 9/11 terror attacks. The Bush administration in particular merged all of these trends by marrying the images of apocalyptic religious struggle to the Wilsonian quest for a world order founded on a universal conception of rights. When weapons of mass destruction, the ostensible reason for the invasion of Iraq, failed to turn up, Bush quickly pivoted to another argument: that we would build a new and better Iraq Americanized through our concept of civil society. What we got was the rise of ISIS, sectarian strife, and an empowered Iran greatly expanding its influence throughout that region. It was an outcome abundantly obvious to the many experts who were opposed to the war from the outset.

Read the rest here.

Orthodox churches repeatedly vandalized by Muslim refugees on Lesvos

The tense situation on the islands of the northern and eastern Aegean, now home to tens of thousands of refugees, mainly from predominantly Muslim countries, is like a “time bomb ready to blow,” reports the Orthodoxia News Agency.

The locals have reached their limits and are in a constant state of anger and sorrow as the refugees repeatedly attack and desecrate their Orthodox holy sites.

In particular, residents of Moria, Lesvos complain that groups of illegal Muslim immigrants have repeatedly vandalized churches in the area and made direct threats against the Orthodox faith. The Church of St. Catherine is now locked, as residents try to block the entrance and protect it from being desecrated again.

The windows of the church have been broken, the holy cross has been thrown down, and the icons have been overturned. Refugees have also damaged the chapel of Taxiarchis (the Archangel Michael), the patron saint of Mytilini, the capital of Lesvos, breaking in to sleep there. 

With the help of the police, local residents managed to kick the refugees out of the Taxiarchis chapel, “but the picture inside the church was tragic.”

According to a recent report from the Guardian, there are more than 42,000 immigrants on Lesvos and a handful of other islands, who are “unable to leave because of a containment policy determined by the EU, they are forced to remain on the islands until their asylum requests are processed by a system both understaffed and overstretched.”

Police on Lesvos clashed with some 2,000 Afghani migrants and refugees who were participating in a protest rally from the Moria camp to Mytilini last Monday to demand better living conditions and a acceleration of asylum procedures. 

The conditions at the Moira camp are widely recognized to be extremely poor. 

Source

The Democrats

Sanders does not surprise me. The old lefty has always had the hearts and affections of that corner of the Democratic Party (and the others of the left) whose favorite color is red. Boot-edge-edge however, is a surprise. I really did not see him as a credible top tier candidate for multiple reasons. In any event I think Trump will crush either of them in the general election.

Sanders will alienate the center left and more than a few Democrats would stay home if he is the nominee, or they will hold their nose and vote for Trump. Boot-edge-edge will loose because Afro-Americans are by and large cool to outright hostile towards the alphabet people. And there is no Democratic path to the White House that does not require about 90% of the black vote. Bluntly, the Mayor of South Bend Indiana who is white and openly homosexual, has no chance of pulling off those kinds of numbers. I am still a bit shocked that he has leapt to the top tier of candidates.

Amy Klobuchar's campaign doesn't have the money or the organizational depth to go the distance despite her surprising third place finish last night.

Biden and Warren, both at one time seen as the two most likely nominees, are now on life support. Warren is probably done. Biden still has a slim chance but he has to carry South Carolina. If he loses there, it's pretty much game over.

With one exception the others should stop wasting everybody's time and stand down. Several already have. I was honestly sorry to see Yang never got any real traction. Like all of the Democrats, he is wrong on almost every issue I care about, but he isn't a nut and he had moments when he seemed willing to think out of the box.

That leaves the one wild card still waiting to make his appearance in the great game... Bloomberg. He's richer than Trump, probably by a factor, and is willing to spend whatever it takes to beat him. He has relatively little baggage beyond his wealth, which among Democrats is hugely controversial. He is liberal but not crazy. He is not corrupt or functionally illiterate. He grasps the dangers of the widening wealth gap, but doesn't think blowing up the economic system is the way to fix it. He has a dreadful view of gun rights. He has never shown much interest in the leftwing cause du jour, namely identity politics. He supports abortion rights but that flag is nowhere near the top of his masthead. And he is fairly centrist on crime and immigration (at least by Democratic standards).

If the Democratic center remains splintered and weak after South Carolina, he may become the anti-Sanders candidate. And I think he is the one Democrat who has a really good shot at beating Trump in November. But he won't show up on the ballot before March 3.

Will it be too late?

One of the main problems with electric cars

My 2¢...

•  Electric cars are the future. Like it or not, this is probably the last generation (give or take) of Americans who will be mainly accustomed to driving cars powered with gas fueled internal combustion engines. However, before electric cars (EV) take over the highways a few things are going to need to happen first.
• Range needs to improve. The better EVs are now getting effective driving ranges in excess of 300 miles. But EVs with that kind of range are still well outside of affordable for the average American. And while that's certainly an improvement, most of us are going to want a car with a range closer to 400 miles before seriously considering it. Long distance driving with the shorter ranged EVs is still possible but it would take a lot longer given the constant need to make prolonged stops for charging.
• The auto industry needs to get their act together and standardize the charging systems for their cars and make it more like current gas stations with a pull in, swipe your plastic, and fuel up system. Not everybody is a tech geek who has more apps on their phone than reactionaries like me have fiat currency bills in our wallet.
• Charging times need to be drastically reduced at the various commercial charging stations. I think we are probably at least ten years from the point where you will be able to fully charge an EV in 15 minutes or less. Until then I am probably not interested.
• EVs with decent range and mechanical reliability need to come down in price. The Tesla S (widely regarded as among the best of the longer ranged EVs) starts at around $80k and you can easily drop closer to $100k if you add on a few things. By contrast you can get a Tesla Model 3 for slightly under half that price. But again, these cars are not well suited for long distance road trips, especially those that would take multiple days using a gas fueled car. 

So yeah, I acknowledge that the future probably belongs to electric cars, but we have a ways to go before most people are going to be comfortable with it. 

The Oscars

Ok. Let's say it; 1917 was robbed in an effort to provide some PC cred for Hollywood's awokened. But is anyone really surprised? As far as I can tell the Oscars has become the biggest annual gathering of flakes outside of the supermarket cereal aisle.

But first, no fasting this week.

L.A. Wants To Seize Private Apartment Building to Prevent Rent Increases

Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary.

On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property.

The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000 per unit.

"We think it is important enough that we need to take action to preserve those units. We don't want to generate more homeless people," Conrado Terrazas Cross, Cedillo's communications director, tells Reason, saying that many tenants would not be able to afford the coming rent increases.

"I think it's a brilliant idea but I need to know: Are we in Cuba or Venezuela?" says Tom Botz, the L.A.-area developer who owns the building, about the proposal to seize his property.

Botz tells Reason he purchased the development company that built Hillside Villa roughly 20 years ago. The building's construction had been financed by a number of government grants and loans, including a $5.4 million loan from Los Angeles' since-abolished Community Redevelopment Agency in 1986.

A condition of that loan was that the developer rent out units in the building at below-market rates for 30 years. Other government grants and loans that helped finance the building came with their own specific affordability requirements.

The affordability requirements from the redevelopment loan were supposed to expire in June 2019. Beginning in May 2018, tenants in Hillside Villa started to receive notices that their below-market rents would be increasing in a year's time. In March 2019, tenants were given the option of signing new leases at the increased rates or face eviction.

Read the rest here.

Iowa

A few quick thoughts...

* There is absolutely nothing a computer can't screw up.

* There is no tech that can be made absolutely secure from tampering or hacking.

* You can't hack paper. Paper is not effected by viruses. Paper ballots are impervious to technological whims and failures. You can hold an election with paper ballots without electricity if necessary.

* These are the same people who think we should trust them to run the nation's health care system.

Quote of the day...

“I was pleased by the recent decisions by the Greek and Alexandrian Orthodox Churches to recognize the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as a fellow autocephalous church. Russia should never stand in the way of the Ukrainian people’s fundamental right to exercise their religious freedom. The Ukrainians can count on American support in that regard.”

-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Source

Free at last

Our Coming Debt Crisis

Ten to 20 years from now, we will not be talking about impeachment, and believe it or not, we won't still be talking about Donald Trump either. We will be talking about our debt crisis. For all the good that came from this era, the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations will all be remembered as the ones that caused the crisis that will hammer our children and grandchildren. To understand where we are, it's helpful to review the past few years of this issue's development.

At the Bush White House, where I worked for eight years, we knew we had a long-term entitlement program spending problem coming down the track, but we thought of it as far off in the future. Unfortunately, the Bush administration was horrible about spending. For an administration that campaigned on limited government, we increased non-defense discretionary spending 8% a year during our first term. We also added even bigger increases to the defense side. We introduced a new entitlement for prescription drugs for all Americans instead of targeting it for the needy.

By the second term, the budget hawks were trying to put on the brakes, but with war spending and then Hurricane Katrina, we never really got discretionary spending under control. Finally, with the financial crisis, we stopped even trying. Throw in the booming entitlements, and we left a really bad legacy. To George Bush's credit, he did expend a lot of political capital on Social Security reform. He jumped on this issue before the country was ready -- and nothing got done.
 
In 2008, federal government spending neared an inflation-adjusted record of $28,388 per American household -- the highest level since World War II -- up from $21,891 per household in 2001. Sixty percent of all that new spending was in areas unrelated to defense and homeland security.

During the Obama years, with all the talk of stimulus, the spending just got worse. President Barack Obama ran historically massive trillion-dollar-plus deficits his first few years, when he had a Democratic Congressional majority. Republicans in Congress tried to fight this massive spending with limited success. Some Republicans also tried to raise the entitlement issue, again with no real success. The Obama years were notable as a time when most Republican voters and politicians seemed to really care about our spending and debt problem.

After screaming about spending for eight years of Obama, Republicans have been pretty silent about it during the Trump years. There has been no Republican discussion of entitlement reform, which makes things look more than a little partisan after all the shutdown fights over spending under Obama. Trump has taken the entitlement issue off the table completely, which makes sense politically, because voters are not open to it, but from a policy perspective, we are getting closer and closer to the tipping point into a debt crisis.

Read the rest here.

Raymond Rizk: Are we before the Spectacle of a Church Disintegrating?

Worth a read.

Quote of the day...

Your dumb home doesn't have a function that automatically regulates ventilation. But instead of spending 5-10% on the building cost on an electronic "smart" system that breaks down every few years and requires electricity to work, you open a window when it feels stuffy. -Wrath of Gnon

German [Catholic] bishops’ working doc calls for approval of contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination

January 29, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The working documents in preparation for the assemblies of the German bishops’ “Synodal Path” defend the use of contraception, the practice of masturbation, and an active homosexual lifestyle. Additionally, neither the question of the ordination of women nor that of making celibacy optional for priests is taken off the table.

In 2019, four panels of experts were preparing working documents to serve as the basis for discussion among the participants of the Synodal Path, a process that begins Jan. 30. A careful study of those four documents reveals that the Church in Germany would, in fact, be reinvented, in spite of claims to the contrary made by Cardinal Reinhard Marx.

The head of the German Bishops’ Conference had stated in an interview that the Synodal Path does not want to “reinvent the Church.” With the first assembly being scheduled for the end of January and the beginning of February, the two-year long “Synodal Path” is focusing on sexual morality, the lifestyle of priests, women in the Church, and the abuse of power. The working documents essentially follow the agenda of Professor Eberhard Schockenhoff to loosen the Church's moral teaching, which he outlined for the German bishops at their conference last March.

The working document’s chapter dealing with sexual morality is revealingly titled, “On the further development of Catholic teaching on sexuality.” The document demands sexual morality must develop “on the basis of insights of the human sciences, including the life experience […] of (faithful) loving people.”

The document describes that relying on the human sciences, namely “psychology, sociology, anthropology,” would open up the many prohibitions of sexual morality as proposed by the teaching authority of the Church, “which sees sexual activity only within marriage, and still directed strongly towards procreation.”

Consequently, the document justifies the use of contraception, the practice of masturbation, and an active homosexual lifestyle.

Read the rest here.

China bans Christians from holding religious funerals

Christians across China are prohibited from holding religious funerals for their deceased loved ones as the Communist Party continues to tighten its grip on the regulation of religion and religious activity.

Bitter Winter, a magazine documenting human rights and religious freedom abuses in China, reported that authorities throughout the country are enforcing policies that prohibit religious customs and rituals to be used during funerals.

In December, the government of Wenzhou city’s Pingyang county in the eastern province of Zhejiang adopted the Regulations on Centralized Funeral Arrangement.

Under the new rules, “clerical personnel are not allowed to participate in funerals,” and “no more than ten family members of the deceased are allowed to read scriptures or sing hymns in a low voice.”

The new rules aim to “get rid of bad funeral customs and establish a scientific, civilized, and economical way of funerals.”

Similarly, a village official from the central province of Henan told Bitter Winter that the local government convened a meeting for religious work assistants in April, informing them that all religious funerals are restricted.

Soon after, officials issued a document stipulating that clerical personnel should be “timely stopped from using religion to intervene in citizens’ weddings and funerals or other activities in their lives.”

In Wuhan, police stormed the funeral of a Christian member of a government-regulated Three-Self Church and arrested her daughter, who was praying for her mother at the time. The daughter was only released after the deceased was buried without Christian rituals two days later.

Read the rest here.

Boycott China.

World's Largest Orthodox Church Planned where Russia's Last Emperor was Murdered

The largest Orthodox church in the world will be built in the territory of the female monastery dedicated to the "Bread Dispenser" icon of the Mother of God. This cathedral should be capable of gathering nearly 40,000 faithful within its walls.

The starets of the monastery, Igumen Sergiy (Romanov), announced the project. He is an almost legendary and rather mysterious character, with links to many Russian public figures: the Duma deputy Natalja Poklonskaja (ex-Crimean prosecutor), the hockey champion Pavel Datsjuk, the singer Aleksandr Novikov, and others, including several entrepreneurs and oligarchs, all ready to finance the grandiose project.

Read the rest here. 

Solemn Requiem Mass for Louis XVI of France

Bloomberg Is Taunting Trump, and Trump Is Taking the Bait

WASHINGTON — A few days after Election Day in 2016, Donald J. Trump received a call on his cellphone from Michael R. Bloomberg, an old acquaintance he had clashed with during the campaign.

Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, had called to offer his congratulations, but the president-elect cut him off.

“You were very mean to me!” Mr. Trump said, according to people familiar with the call. Mr. Trump was referring to Mr. Bloomberg’s slashing speech that year at the Democratic National Convention, during which he called the Republican a “con” and called on voters to elect a “sane, competent person.”

Mr. Trump settled down almost immediately, then turned the conversation toward his latest predicament: quickly hiring people to fill out his government.

Mr. Bloomberg, according to the people briefed on the call, told him that when he was first elected mayor in 2001, he, too, had never served in government. What Mr. Trump should do, Mr. Bloomberg advised, was to “hire a lot of people smarter than you.”

“Mike,” Mr. Trump replied tersely, “there is no one smarter than me.” A startled Mr. Bloomberg paused before turning the conversation to a less fraught subject: golf.

Read the rest here.

Memory Eternal: Fr. Vsevolod Chaplin

The former spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate died suddenly on a bench near his parish at 51. Fr. Vsevolod gained a reputation for outspoken conservatism and occasionally made comments that caused controversy.  May his memory be eternal.

Church of England: Sex is for married heterosexual couples only

The Church of England has stated that sex belongs only within heterosexual marriage, and that Christians in gay or straight civil partnerships should be sexually abstinent.

Bishops have issued pastoral guidance in response to the recent introduction to mixed-sex civil partnerships, which says: “For Christians, marriage – that is, the lifelong union between a man and a woman, contracted with the making of vows – remains the proper context for sexual activity.”

The church “seeks to uphold that standard” in its approach to civil partnerships, and “to affirm the value of committed, sexually abstinent friendships” within such partnerships.

It adds: “Sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purpose for human beings.”

Read the rest here.

Given the recent trajectory of the CofE, I find this more than a bit surprising.

Methodist Church's Plan for the Future Does Not Include Its Older Members

COTTAGE GROVE, Minn. (AP) — A struggling Minnesota church is asking its older parishioners to leave in hopes of making it more attractive to young families.

Grove United Methodist Church in the St. Paul suburb of Cottage Grove is closing in June, with plans to relaunch in November. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship elsewhere, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The church is asking that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.

“I pray for this church, getting through this age-discrimination thing,” William Gackstetter said at church on a recent Sunday as the gray-haired heads around him nodded in agreement.

But church officials said the congregation needs a reset and the best way is to appeal to younger people.

The Grove United Methodist Church is the product of a 2008 merger with a larger church in Woodbury.

The Cottage Grove church has struggled with membership and finances. Seven years ago, Methodist officials said they could no longer pay for its minister, so the church switched to lay ministry, with weekly sermons by members. The church’s attendance and finances have stabilized recently, with an average weekly attendance of 25.

But Cottage Grove is growing quickly and the church should be growing with it, said the Rev. Dan Wetterstrom, head of the two-location Grove church.

The Methodists’ regional body is paying $250,000 to restart the church, Wetterstrom said. They have hired a specialist in starting new churches, 30-year-old Jeremy Peters who moved to Cottage Grove with his wife and two children for the relaunch, probably in November.

“It’s a new thing with a new mission for a new target and a new culture,” he said.

The older members will not be physically barred from attending, Peters said, but the expectation is that they won’t.

Read the rest here.

Unbelievable.

New York during the 1930s in Color

Home movies, likely shot over the winter of 1937-38. Very high quality showing street scenes, well known landmarks, harbor of New York with famous ocean liners and etc. Shot in kodachrome color, appx 41 minutes.

The Annual Theophany Russian Ice Water Dip

Quote of the day...

The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and comcribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

 
-Evangelist Billy Sunday January 17, 1920

American Nation Permanently Dry

Jerry Kammer: I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted

In 2001, when I was the new Washington correspondent for The Arizona Republic, I attended the annual awards dinner of the National Immigration Forum. The forum is a left-right coalition that lobbies for unauthorized immigrants and expansive immigration policies. Its board has included officials of the National Council of La Raza, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, as well as the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and the American Nursery and Landscape Association.

After dinner, the group’s executive director, Frank Sharry, made a pitch to business allies who wanted Congress to allow them unfettered access to foreign workers. “You guys in business get all the workers you want, whenever you want them,” he proposed. “No bureaucracy.”

“Sold!” yelled John Gay, a lobbyist for the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Mr. Sharry quickly added that the deal must include advocacy for “three little, tiny pieces of paper: a green card, a union card and a voter registration card” for unauthorized immigrants.

For me, a reporter who had long covered immigration in the Southwest and Mexico, the exchange was a revelation about the politics of immigration in Washington. Business lobbyists like Mr. Gay — conservatives who seek loose labor markets so employers can keep wages down — align themselves with liberal activists like Frank Sharry to pursue policies that serve their groups.

Who, I wondered, was lobbying for the American workers competing with the new arrivals? The answer, I learned, was no one. As the former labor secretary Robert Reich once put it, “There’s no National Association of Working Poor.”

This mismatch of political influence, combined with the social and fiscal consequences of a wave of low-skilled immigrants, led me to believe that immigration should be restricted so that its power to invigorate our country is not eclipsed by its potential to harm workers. I think immigration, like capitalism itself, should be regulated in the national interest, not shaped to serve the free-market libertarianism of the right or the post-national humanitarianism of the left.

That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist.

Read the rest here.

100 Years Ago: Last Call

And a century on, we seemed to have learned little.

RIP: Sir Roger Scruton

A great champion of political/social conservatism and traditionalism, Sir Roger Scruton has died.

Memory eternal.


On Being Consrevative.

The blue-state exodus gains momentum

Nine years ago I published a piece that asserted, “Voters around the country are concluding it’s better to be red than dead” — applying almost the exact opposite meaning to an old phrase referring to communism. New Census Bureau figures appear to confirm my prediction — mostly.

My point was that many voters were, and are, increasingly fed up with the high-tax, heavy-regulation and increasingly social wokeness model that has come to characterize most blue states — i.e., those dominated by liberal politicians and policies.

I argued that voters wanting to live in a business-friendly, fiscally responsible state that minimizes its tax burden would either vote out the liberals destroying their state’s economy or flee to a red state. The latest Census Bureau report highlights the red-state shift.

According to Election Data Service’s analysis of the Census Bureau report, “population projections point to a ten [congressional] seat change over 17 states across the nation by year 2020.”

Seven states are projected to gain one or more congressional seats after the 2020 election; 10 states are projected lose one seat.

The red-state leader is Texas, with a projected pickup of three congressional seats following the 2020 census — and that after gaining four congressional seats after the 2010 election. Florida will pick up two seats, and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon will each gain one, according to the analysis.
All 10 losing states – Alabama, California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia – lose only one seat.
Of the seven states gaining seats, five voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Of the 10 states losing seats, five voted for Trump and five for Hillary Clinton. 

But two or those five losing states that voted for Trump – Michigan and Pennsylvania – surprised most analysts, since they have been blue-leaners for several years. And West Virginia is losing population in part due to a struggling state economy that has been so dependent of coal.

Arguably, even some of the blue-state gainers may support my general point.

If you are blue-leaning Californian who wants to escape the Golden State’s drift into madness but stay on the left coast, Oregon might be a reasonable alternative.

Ditto for Colorado, which has turned from red to blueish over the last decade or so as Californians increasingly head for the hills, so to speak.

But that trend also highlights a problem: Some of the people fleeing destructive blue-state taxes and regulations appear to drag their pro-big-government philosophy with them — apparently oblivious to the fact those policies destroyed the state they are trying to escape. 

Read the rest here.

Bishop nixes Nicene Creed at Epiphany Mass to avoid offending unbelievers

ROME, January 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A northern Italian bishop refused to openly profess the Nicene Creed on the Solemnity of the Epiphany because he said he didn’t want to offend the Orthodox, Waldensians, and unbelievers who were present in the congregation. 

Bishop Derio Olivero of the Piedmontese diocese of Pinerolo announced at the end of his homily on January 6 that the profession of the Creed would be replaced with a moment of silence so that everyone could quietly recite their own beliefs. 

Addressing Catholic faithful, representatives of other religious traditions, and civic authorities at what was called the “Mass of the Peoples,” Bishop Olivero said, “Since there are also non-believers, everyone will say it in silence. Those who believe can say it and those who do not believe or are of other faiths will say in silence the reasons for their belief.”

Read the rest here.

Cancer Death Rate in U.S. Sees Sharp Drop

The cancer death rate in the United States fell 2.2 percent from 2016 to 2017 — the largest single-year decline in cancer mortality ever reported, the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday. Since 1991 the rate has dropped 29 percent, which translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if the mortality rate had remained constant.

“Every year that we see a decline in cancer mortality rate, it’s very good news,” said Rebecca Siegel, director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the organization’s report, which was published online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Experts attributed the decline to the reduced smoking rates and to advances in lung cancer treatment. New therapies for melanoma of the skin have also helped extend life for many people with metastatic disease, or cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.

Progress has slowed for colorectal, breast and prostate cancers, however.

The rising rate of obesity among Americans, as well as significant racial and geographic disparities, likely explain why the decline in breast and colorectal cancer death rates has begun to taper off, and why the decrease in rates of prostate cancer has halted entirely.

Read the rest here.

United Methodist Church's future looks bleak

If the reports are true, then “a tentative plan” has been put in place “to split the [Methodist] church over differences on same-sex marriage and the inclusion of gay clergy.”

In 2019, “The division, which has been brewing for years, came to an impasse last May when delegates in St. Louis voted 438-384 to ban gay marriage and the inclusion of gay clergy.

“A majority of U.S.-based churches opposed the ‘Traditional Plan’ but were outvoted by conservatives in the U.S., Africa and the Philippines,” Fox News reported.

Assuming that this split actually takes place, what will happen to these two branches, one conservative and the other liberal?

The answer is easy, based on history and common spiritual sense.

History says that the conservative branch will grow and the liberal branch will diminish.

Read the rest here.

Iran Declines To Sign Colin Kaepernick After Reviewing Workout Video

TEHRAN—Colin Kaepernick sent his workout video to Iran after learning they may have recently opened up a position but has yet to receive a phone call.

Kaepernick condemned American attacks on Iranian terrorists last week, inciting rumors that he may have found a team interested in him in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Iranian officials have dispelled the rumors, stating clearly and unequivocally that "we have no interest in signing Kaepernick at this time, but we wish him well in his future endeavors."

"It's disappointing to see that Iran is as hateful as America," a downcast Kaepernick said in a press conference. "I expected to be welcomed as a hero over there, but apparently, they too are biased against people with dark skin." Kaepernick plans to protest Iran's hate by continuing to kneel during the American national anthem.

Iran has clarified that they agree with Kaepernick ideologically, but they need someone who can throw.

Source.

US Forces Kill Two Senior Iranian Military Officials in Targeted Attack

One of those figures was the head of Iran's equivalent to military intelligence and black-ops.

...The high-profile assassinations are seen as a massive blow to Iran, which has been locked in a long conflict with the United States that escalated sharply last week with the storming of the US embassy perimeter in Iraq by pro-Iranian militiamen following an American air raid on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia. 

Soleimani, who has led the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards and has had a key role in fighting in Syria and Iraq, acquired celebrity status at home and abroad. 

He was instrumental in the spread of Iranian influence in the Middle East, which the United States and Tehran’s regional foes Saudi Arabia and Israel have struggled to keep in check. 

He survived several assassination attempts against him by Western, Israeli and Arab agencies over the past two decades. 
 
Soleimani’s Quds Force, tasked with carrying out operations beyond Iran’s borders, shored up support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad when he looked close to defeat in the civil war raging since 2011 and also helped militiamen defeat Islamic State in Iraq. 

Source.

New Archbishop of York: ‘Bible has to fit the current culture’

The incoming Archbishop of York believes biblical teaching on sexuality should come second to 21st century Western cultural beliefs.

Stephen Cottrell is currently the Bishop of Chelmsford and will take over from Dr John Sentamu next year to become the second most senior clergyman in the Church of England.

Bishop Cottrell made his comments on the Bible in 2017 as he welcomed the Archbishops of Canterbury and York’s plea for a “radical new Christian inclusion”.

 ‘Culture’

He said it would be wrong to ignore the “damage” that is done by rejecting Western society’s current view of human sexuality.

“I am not sure the church has ever before had to face the challenge of being seen as immoral by the culture in which it is set.”

Read the rest here.

Mass for the Feast of the Holy Innocents According to the Orthodox Western Rite

Horus Ruins Christmas (2)

Christianity Today: Trump Should Be Removed from Office

It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.

In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.

The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray for leaders (as well as ordinary citizens) on both sides of the political aisle.

Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.

Read the rest here.

The Beef Over Red Meat

 Just one more week (for most of us)

In case you haven’t consumed any health news recently, there is a big beef over research showing red meat is not bad for you. A huge study has contradicted decades of anti-red-meat advice, and the experts who gave that advice are red-faced and livid.

The new research was a systematic review of existing research, conducted by a team of interdisciplinary researchers with no conflict of interest. After eliminating many poorly done studies, and studies done on animals (which have unknown application to humans), the team concluded, “The panel suggests that adults continue current unprocessed red meat consumption (weak recommendation, low-certainty evidence). Similarly, the panel suggests adults continue current processed meat consumption (weak recommendation, low-certainty evidence).”

The problem is that this contradicts decades of research saying that meat, especially red and processed meat, is bad for health, allegedly causing heart disease and cancer. Virtually every medical organization has been telling people to stop eating meat for health reasons.

What are all these experts going to do now that the research studies they were relying on for their recommendations were flawed and biased? Experts hate to be told they are wrong. After all, they are the experts, so who can trump them?

This study did. And the response has been anger from the medical community, a very unscientific response.

In a story on the findings, and the reaction from the embarrassed and defensive medical community, the New York Times wrote, “Already [the study authors] have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published them.”

The Times explains, “While the new findings are likely to please proponents of popular high-protein diets, they seem certain to add to public consternation over dietary advice that seems to change every few years. The conclusions represent another in a series of jarring dietary reversals involving salt, fats, carbohydrates and more.”

Clearly, the Emperor never likes to be told he has no clothes. This is a major rebuke, not only of medicine, but of nutrition research and public policy. As the Times article continued, “Some [medical experts] called for the journal’s editors to delay publication altogether. In a statement, scientists at Harvard warned that the conclusions ‘harm the credibility of nutrition science and erode public trust in scientific research.’”

Harvard doesn’t want the public to realize that its public health recommendations are based on bad science. The public may lose trust. We can’t allow the public to realize that medical advice is sketchy, at best.

Some medical groups don’t like the implications of the study, since they philosophically oppose meat consumption. According to the Times, “Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group advocating a plant-based diet, on Wednesday filed a petition against the journal with the Federal Trade Commission.”

Realize that these groups are calling for censorship of scientific information that goes against policy.

Read the rest here.

SIGNOR MARCONI'S TRIUMPH

St. John's N.F. Dec 14.- Sengor Marconi announced tonight the most wonderful scientific discovery of modern times, in stating that he had received electric signals from across the Atlantic Ocean from his station in Cornwall, England. He explains that before leaving England he had made his plans for accomplishing the result, for, while his primary object was to communicate with ocean liners in mid ocean, he also hoped to succeed in attaining the wonderful achievement of wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic.
 
Sengor Marconi's station in Cornwall is most powerful. He possesses an electric force generated there a hundred times greater than at his ordinary stations. Before he left England he arranged with the electrician in charge of the station, which is located in Poldhu, to begin sending signals daily after a certain date, which Sengor Marconi would cable him upon perfecting his arrangements here. Sengor Marconi arrived here a week ago Friday, and selected Signal Hill, at the entrance of the harbor, as an experimenting station, and moved his equipment there. Last Monday he cabled the Poldhu station to begin sending signals at 3 p. m. daily, and to continue them until 6 p. m., these hours being respectively 11:30 a. m. to 2:30 p. m. St. John's time. During these hours Wednesday Sengor Marconi elevated a kite with an aerial wire, by means of which signals are sent or received. He remained at the recorder attached to the receiving apparatus, and, to his profound satisfaction, signals were received by him at intervals, according to the programme arranged previously with the operator at Poldhu. These signals consisted of repeating at intervals the letter "S," which, in Marconi's code, is made by three dots, or quick strokes. This signal was repeated so frequently, and according to the detailed plan arranged to provide safeguards against possibility of a mistake, that Sengor Marconi was satisfied that it was a genuine transmission from England. 

Read the rest in the Sunday December 15, 1901 edition of the New York Tribune here.

Blue Wave Sweeps Britain (well... except Scotland)

Boris Johnson won a general election by one of the widest margins in recent history. In doing so the Conservatives inflicted a stunning defeat on the Labour Party, which suffered losses projected to rival those of the 1935 election. The Liberal Democrats also suffered heavy losses including their leader who lost her seat to the SNP, which alone among the opposition parties, did well. Though their gains were of course, entirely north of the border. Mr. Corbyn, the head of the Labour Party announced he will stand down as his party's leader after "a period of reflection."

The leader of the Scottish National Party has already begun trumpeting her demands for another independence referendum, which will likely be approved by the new Conservative government somewhere around noon on the day after the Second Coming.

News coverage here, here and here or pretty much anywhere you choose to look on Google.

Meanwhile in Germany

The German Catholic bishops have agreed that their church has been wrong about a few things.
Details.

But not to worry. There are no doctrinal differences between Orthodoxy and Rome.

Brazil's Imperial Heir Slams Amazon Synod

Brazil's Catholic royalty is condemning the Amazon Synod's final document as an "enormous conspiracy" of emergent pantheism against Catholic tradition, Western civilization and the conservative government of President Jair Bolsonaro.   

In a scathing attack, His Imperial Highness Prince Dom Bertrand said that the end product of the synod was not Catholicism, but pantheism seeking "a complete change of the Roman Catholic apostolic Church and the Christian civilization that had existed through the Church's history."
 
"They want to extinguish all the progress that happened in the last 2,000 years thanks to Christian civilization," Dom Bertrand of Orleans and Braganza asserted in a video statement released Friday.

The traditionalist Catholic royal singled out paragraph 10 for a blistering critique, arguing that it would threaten Brazil's borders and the "soul of the Brazilian people," since the document was calling for "the complete transformation of Brazil and everything related to the Brazilian population and the indigenous population."

Paragraph 10 claims that "the Amazon today is a wounded and deformed beauty, a place of pain and violence."

Prince Bertrand hits back in the video: "The Amazon is a forest. The forest doesn't suffer. But this is part of a pantheistic vision that claims the forest can suffer because nature is Mother Nature or Pachamama or whatever."

Read the rest here.

Germany's hard-Left 'Corbyn problem' is only just beginning

Germany has a giant "Corbyn problem" of its own. The Social Democrat base has been captured by hard-Left youth activists and has repudiated the core policy positions of the party leadership and Germany’s post-war consensus.

The difference is that the venerable SPD is not in opposition. It is for the time being the second pillar of Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition, with "co-determination" powers over economic policy and the strategic direction of Europe.

The weekend "revolution" of the SPD congress saw vows to reverse the free-market Hartz IV labour reforms of the Gerhard Schroder era and embrace a 2pc wealth tax, doubling down on a tax experiment abandoned in the 1990s as unworkable and economically destructive.

The SPD delegates voted for a rent freeze in the big cities, a stretch in unemployment benefits to 36 months, a 30pc rise in the minimum wage, and a much higher carbon tax.

They want to abandon the "black zero" straightjacket of a balanced budget and launch a fiscal blitz of 1.5 million units of social housing, with €45bn of extra infrastructure and investment spending (1.2pc of GDP) every year for the next decade.

Peter Ramsauer from the Bavarian Social Christians (CSU) called it a “fantasy socialist wishlist” that renders the coalition effectively impossible. “A wealth tax will drive productive capital out of the country. The SPD will ruin itself first, and then the German economy,” he said.

Read the rest here.

Investors are buying insurance against 2020 electoral chaos

Stock investors are hedging in a big way against something scary coming at them this time next year and it could be related to the outcome of the presidential election.

The price of buying downside puts, meaning a negative bet on the S&P 500 is at a historical level compared to the price for upside calls, or an opposite bet in the option markets for higher prices, according to Julian Emanuel, head of equity and derivatives strategy at BTIG.

By this time next year, the Nov. 3 election will have been over for a little over a month.

“To hedge out past the election, the price of downside puts relative to upside calls is literally pricing an election apocalypse,” said Emanuel. “We have said it forecasts either a less business friendly attitude or a civilizational conflict with China after the election.”

Emanuel said it’s unclear which way investors think the election would go. “The left, the right and the center are all worried about highly unstable electoral outcomes,” said Emanuel.

Read the rest here.

I don't blame them. In 2016, Trump repeatedly warned he might not recognize the legitimacy of an election where he lost.

RIP Paul Volcker

 Paul Volcker testifying before Congress

He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987 and is remembered chiefly as the man who took the heroic (and brutal) steps required to break the high inflation that had dogged the country through the 1970's and early 80's. He gained a reputation for being the guy who said what needed to be said and did what needed to be done even if it was deeply unpopular. And jacking short term interest rates deep into double digit territory, thereby all but wiping out credit markets and plunging the country into two recessions (that could probably be classified as a minor depression) in order to arrest inflation was hugely controversial. But it worked and history has generally been kind to Volcker.

A staunch advocate of fiscal conservatism; he had a personal aversion to debt and spending that was legendary. He was so frugal that he was still driving an old Nash Rambler when the driver's seat collapsed. Rather than break down and buy a new car (or even a newer used one), he jammed a small chair under the driver's seat to prop it up and continued to drive the Nash for years. His only extravagance was his love of cigars, though even there he stuck to the cheap generic brands commonly found behind the checkout counter in gas stations and convenience stores.

Mr. Volcker died at the age of 92.

Leaked report alleges widespread anti-Semitism in UK Labour Party

Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of leading an “institutionally anti-Semitic” party as a leaked dossier argued he had been involved in a “cover up” of the problem in Labour.

A devastating submission of evidence to the equality watchdog compares the Labour Party to the Metropolitan Police in the 1990s, when the Stephen Lawrence inquiry found it was riddled with racism.

Whistleblowers have claimed that allegations of anti-Semitism were made to “disappear” following interventions by Mr Corbyn and his senior staff.

They also claim they were told to bypass the supposedly independent complaints process by taking cases directly to Labour high command then “told to lie” about what they were doing...

In a 53-page submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Jewish Labour Movement, which has been affiliated to the party for almost a century, said Mr Corbyn has made Labour “a welcoming refuge for anti-Semites” by protecting those accused of racism against Jews.

The dossier was described as “utterly damning” by one of Labour’s most senior figures...

The dossier - which includes evidence from 70 serving and former Labour officials - describes a “relentless” level of racial hatred experienced by Jewish members of the Labour Party “on a daily basis”.

It describes one incident at last year’s Labour Party Conference at which a Jewish member allegedly shared a breakfast table with two other delegates who agreed that Jews were “subhuman” and  should “be grateful we don’t make them eat bacon for breakfast every day”.

It also gives details of insults allegedly hurled at Jewish members during local party meetings. One man listed 22 different verbal attacks on him including “Zio scum”, “child killer” and being told “Hitler was right”.

Read the rest here.

New York state government in three sentences

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie on the state's looming $6B budget deficit.

“When there is a concern about having enough money, the two options always are: Do you cut spending or do you raise revenue? And for us in the Assembly, we always believe in raising revenue.”

HT:Brian

The Democrats may be in trouble

First the inevitable caveat: We are eleven months out from the general election and that is close to eternity in politics. Polls this far out tend to pick the winning party about 50% of the time. So toss a coin, your odds are about the same. And of course, we all know that when you are dealing with the chaos president, anything can happen right up to election day.

With that out of the way, there are two warning signs for Democrats, that all is not well. The first is that the public hearings on impeachment have thus far fallen flat. To the extent that public opinion has moved, it may actually have done so in Trump's favor. I would note that the moves are within the margin of error. But still this cannot be encouraging when considering the prospect of a Senate trial. At the moment it's extremely doubtful that they will get a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. More worrying is that a large number of moderate Democrats may vote against impeachment. That would be a political disaster for Democrats going into a national election year.

But the news may be even worse.

Two recent polls, one by Emerson College and one from Rasmussen, put black support for Trump above 30 percent. This produced shock waves discernible in every state in the Union and caused some political pundits to issue tsunami warnings. Assuming those polls are even remotely accurate, their significance cannot be overstated.

African Americans have been the Democratic Party's most reliable constituency since the 1960's. And it is one that they have come to rely on more and more as the party has alienated working class whites. Let me spell this out in very blunt language.

I don't care which candidate you are talking about. There is no realistic path for any Democrat to the White House that does not require around 90 percent of a heavy black voter turn out. If Donald Trump carries anything much over 15 percent of the black vote, it's game over.

Predictably, these polls have precipitated a variety of responses within the political left, ranging from denial ("fake news" was heard more than once) to despondency to some sober analysis of what may be going wrong.

On the latter point here are few thoughts. First, blacks are benefiting from the best economy since the 1920's. African American unemployment is at it's lowest level since reliable records have been kept. At slightly over five percent it's still higher than the national average, but by historical standards, it's not just good. It's really really good. Just who should get credit for the economy is a perfectly fair subject for debate. But Trump has been in office for three years and most Americans are giving him that credit, fairly or not.

Another factor may be that Democrats in their mad rush to the extreme left may have inadvertently alienated some of their supporters. The black community is nowhere near as liberal as some of the Democrats running for president. Polls have consistently shown that most blacks are uncomfortable with abortion on demand, and there is serious resistance to the left's victim group du jour. Namely those whom Dave Chappelle refers to as "the alphabet people."

It may surprise some to read this, but African Americans have one of the highest rates of religiosity of any demographic in the United States. (And at 87% self identifying with a religious church or denomination it is by far the highest among groups who traditionally vote Democratic.) I have long wondered how blacks can keep voting for a party that repeatedly and in so many ways disparages people of faith.

In any event, Democrats still have some time. But when a man like Robert Johnson (BET founder and the first black billionaire), a lifelong Democrat, warns they are on the path to defeat because they are abandoning the political center, you know things are not going according to plan.

Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing you and yours a blessed feast.

Rumors from Philly

The Jesuit Fr. James Martin (yes, that one) is said to be on the short list of possible replacements for Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia.

Lord have mercy.

Report: Patriarch Bartholomew tells Athonites reunion with Catholics is inevitable

On November 12, Patriarch Bartholomew participated in the Vespers service at the Catholic Abbey of Our Lady of St. Rémy in Rochefort, Belgium, together with Archimandrite Alexios, the abbot of Xenophontos Monastery, and Hieromonk Theophilos of Pantocrator Monastery, both on Mt. Athos. 

According to a new report from the Union of Orthodox Journalists, during his trip to Mt. Athos the previous month, Pat. Bartholomew attempted to convince several Athonite abbots and monks that there are no dogmatic differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and that reunion with the Catholic church is inevitable. 

Pat. Bartholomew expressed his personal convictions during a private talk at Pantocrator Monastery with the brethren and guests of the monastery, including other Athonite abbots. Eyewitnesses report that Pat. Bartholomew’s security did not allow anyone to record the conversation. 

In his opinion, the division that now exists between Orthodoxy and Catholicism is merely a matter of historical events, not dogmatic differences. 

Catholics “are just as Christian as we are,” Pat. Bartholomew emphasized, adding that the recent gift of the relics of St. Peter from Pope Francis is proof of the Catholic church’s nearness to Orthodoxy. 

According to the UOJ’s sources, Pantocrator abbot Archimandrite Gabriel, Xenophontos abbot Archimandrite Alexios, Vatopedia abbot Archimandrite Ephraim, the brethren of several monasteries, and other guests were all present for the talk. 

Most of the brethren were at a loss, hearing Pat. Bartholomew’s ecumenistic arguments, though none present objected. Some of those present reportedly began to weep when Pat. Bartholomew said that reunion with the Catholic church is inevitable. 

Recall that Xenophontos and Pantocrator Monasteries have been the most receptive to the Ukrainian schismatics. Abbot Alexios of Xenophontos concelebrated in the enthronement of Epiphany Dumenko as primate of the OCU, and Pantocrator was the first monastery where schismatics served Liturgy on Mt. Athos.

At a recent meeting in Constantinople with representatives of Tbilisi University, Pat. Bartholomew said that dialogue with other Christians, especially Catholics, is one of the priorities of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. 

Source. 

Caveat... The Union of Orthodox Journalists is editorially closely aligned with the Moscow Patriarchate. I'm not dismissing such a shocking report as untrue. But I would bear the source in mind.

Alice C. Linsley: Ten Objections to Women Priests

As a woman who served as a priest in the Episcopal Church for 16 years, I have some experience of the nature of the priesthood. In 1982, with the encouragement of my parish clergy, friends and family, it seemed the right course for my life. Over the years, I began to question the rationale for women priests. I remember feeling that I was standing in another's shoes, not appropriately mine. I wanted to explain this to my bishop, but he clearly did not want to hear it.

Galatian 3:28 has been used to justify the innovation of women priests: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." In the fourth century, St. Epiphanius remarked that the heretical Cataphyrgians (Montanists) employed Galatians 3:28 to elevate women as "bishops and priests and they say nothing makes a difference 'For in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.'''

Reading Galatians 3:28 in context, it is apparent that Paul is speaking of the unity of the body of Christ. He is not promoting gender equality as it is framed today. As the Supper was intended to unite the participants to the Head, Jesus Christ, the idea of a woman presiding at the Feast would have been unthinkable.

My doubts made the priestly ministry increasingly burdensome and problematic. As a heterosexual, Bible-believing, Anglican Traditionalist, I found no affirmation in the Episcopal Church as it moved toward a radical revision of the Gospel, setting aside the Apostolic Tradition for its social justice agenda.

Eventually, I renounced orders in the Episcopal Church and left that body. This initiated a decade of reflection on the role of women in the Church and the historic priesthood. During that time, I was in conversation with three former women priests who were seeking clarity also. One entered the Roman Catholic Church and the others entered the Orthodox Church of America. I explored both traditions, but I am thoroughly Anglican and have been for forty-three years.

I have written on the question of women priests, exploring it through Biblical studies, Church history, and cultural anthropology. As with many Anglicans, I believe that the Episcopal Church erred in 1976 when it departed from the all-male priesthood. On a single day the General Convention of the Episcopal Church overthrew catholic orders, rejected the teaching of the Fathers, and denied the authority of Holy Scripture.

Read the rest here.

Why it matters that Canadian Anglicans are having a near-death experience

Years ago, while I was still an Episcopalian, I tried to get a circle of clergy and journalists to collaborate on what I thought would be a classic work of religion-marketplace humor.

The basic idea: The creation of the definitive collection of jokes about Episcopalians and their unique approach to Christian life and culture. As one priest put it, the Episcopal Church is “NPR at prayer.”

The book never happened, but I learned lots of jokes that I didn’t know in all of the basic categories, from “how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb” quips to jokes featuring “Episcopalians at the gates of heaven and/or hell.” But here was my favorite joke, as I heard it in 1993 (but with a few updates):

The year is 2030 … and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing wife, an archdeacon, process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth.

"You know," one traditionalist whispers, "ONE more thing and I'm out the door."

The whole point was that it’s hard for religious communions to die. In the end, there are always reasons for true insiders to hang on and hope the pendulum swings back their way.

But I remember that someone else had a joke — I don’t remember how it went — that centered on the idea that, after a few more decades of declining statistics, Anglican churches would be empty, except for elderly clergy at the altars whose salaries would be paid with endowment funds.

That joke cuts to the heart of the news story discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

As background, here is the top of the Religion News Service story I critiqued in an post with this headline: “Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why.”

Story here.
HT:T-19

Opiate of the Theologians (Universalism)

Not until the nineteenth century did any Christian body make universal salvation its official teaching. The first to do so, the Universalist Church, later merged with another to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Within the mainstream churches, medieval and early-modern universalists led a subterranean, catacomb existence—isolated figures, often concealing their views—while Christendom in all its major branches preached hell no less than heaven. Following Origen’s lead, universalists preserved a covert gospel, withheld from the masses, who needed hellfire to scare them straight, while a tiny cadre of religious intellectuals saw themselves as the only ones fit to know the truth. Dogmatic universalism—the notion that God must save all human beings—was for centuries not a public tradition but an esoteric one.

During the first half of the twentieth century, overt expressions of universalism were rare among acknowledged church teachers, with the exception of certain Russian thinkers such as Sergius Bulgakov. In the 1940s, Jacques Maritain confided to a notebook his private thoughts regarding a larger hope of salvation, and Emil Brunner affirmed without fear of contradiction that apokatastasis (universal restoration) is “a doctrine which the Church as a whole has recognized as a heresy.” At mid-century, Catholic theology showed no sign of changing. Yet something shifted during the 1950s and 1960s: Karl Barth’s affirmation of universal election in Church Dogmatics allowed universalism to come out of the shadows. Hans Urs von Balthasar acknowledged Origen’s influence and that of “Barth’s doctrine of election, that brilliant overcoming of ­Calvin.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Catholics discussed “anonymous Christians” and “the unchurched,” while Evangelicals pondered “the ­unevangelized.” Yet the Catholic-Evangelical pivot to inclusivism would prove to be merely a stepping-stone. By century’s end, the earlier debates over inclusivism had become passé, and the new arena of controversy was universalism, either in a hopeful, Balthasarian vein, which seeks to affirm the possibility of universal salvation, or in an assertive, Moltmannian version, which makes it a divine imperative. Among today’s young Christian theologians, Balthasarian tentativeness is fast yielding to ever more strident affirmations of the necessity of salvation for all—as in David ­Bentley Hart’s recent book, That All Shall Be Saved.

Hart charges those who believe in an eternal hell with “moral imbecility.” The language of rude dismissal was something of a guilty pleasure when he deployed it against the “New Atheists” more than a decade ago. Now he is denouncing Dante and every­one else who sustains the age-old tradition of the Church. By his reckoning, their view of God should evoke in us “only a kind of remote, vacuous loathing.” So much for Augustine, Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Aquinas, Pascal, Newman, Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Pope Benedict XVI—not to mention innumerable canonized saints of the Church, the great majority of ancient Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac writers, and such Protestant luminaries as Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Calvin, Hooker, and Edwards. Oddly, Hart now sounds very much like Richard Dawkins. No less than the aging atheist, Hart finds the two-thousand-year Christian tradition not just unbelievable but repugnant and inhuman.

Read the rest here.

Former Director of the Greek Archdiocese Accused of Theft

The onetime executive director of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has been busted for pocketing more than $500,000 in church funds, according to prosecutors.

Jerome Dimitriou, 55, allegedly ran two separate schemes dating back to 2011, according to a Manhattan federal court complaint unsealed Monday.

Prosecutors claim he charged tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses to the diocese-issued credit card, while also instructing subordinates to cut him around $500,000 in bonus checks without proper authorization.

Read the rest here.

Concentration Camps

It's time to call China's vast network of ethnic/religious detention facilities by their proper name.

It's time to boycott China and Chinese goods.

Good news... and bad.

Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem has issued an open invitation to the primates of the Orthodox Church to meet in Jordan in an effort to resolve the Ukrainian crisis and preserve the Eucharistic Communion within the Church.

Axios!

And...

His Eminence Metropolitan Nathanael forcefully instructed his priests that they were no longer permitted to announce the parameters for receiving Holy Communion prior to its distribution at any time, even on festal celebrations such as Pascha and Nativity, when there are multitude of unknown persons in the Church.

Details.

This is alarming and completely contrary to the historic discipline of the Church. Frankly, it smacks of the kind of open communion practiced by liberal Protestants (sadly gaining traction in the Roman Church as well). For a variety of reasons I made the decision a while ago, that barring an emergency I will refrain from communing in the parishes of the Greek Archdiocese. This has not moved me to reconsider that decision.

Symposium before oral argument in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York

Well worth the reading.

Pat. Bartholomew and Athonite abbot and hieromonk attend Vespers with Catholics in Belgium

Bart has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. But the presence of an Athonite abbot may raise some eyebrows.

Details.

Ukrainian schismatics discuss adopting New Calendar Christmas to differentiate from Russia

 “Metropolitan” Mikhail Zinkevich of Lutsk and Volyn of the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” has expressed his support for a group of Lutsk activists who asked a blessing to celebrate the Nativity of Christ according to the New Calendar on December 25 in order to differentiate themselves from Russia.

The request came from Provincial and Lutsk City Council Deputies, members of the “Prosvita” society, and other activists, reports the site of schismatic diocese. According to pershyj.com, it came from more than 300 activists altogether.

Although Ukrainian Orthodox Christians have always celebrated feasts according to the Old Calendar, with Nativity falling on January 7, the petitioners argue that this tradition keeps Ukraine too much like Russia and the Soviet Union, and so it should be changed.

“December 25 is not only the Catholic Christmas, but the general Christian Christmas. The pan-Orthodox Council in Constantinople decided in 1923 that Orthodox Christians, according to the more accurate Gregorian calendar, should celebrate Christmas on December 25. All countries except those that were under the influence of the Soviet Union agreed to it,” the petition reads.

“Most Local Orthodox Churches celebrate Christmas on December 25. However, Ukraine still remains in the Soviet (now—Russian) paradigm, celebrating Christmas on January 7 in the company of the aggressor Russia,” it continues.

Accordingly, the activists asked to begin the Nativity Fast on November 15 rather than November 28. 

Read the rest here.

It's worth noting that the Greek Rite Catholics in Ukraine are still mostly on the old calendar.

UMC Next Plan: Liberalize Church, Protect Abusive Clergy, Crush Out Traditionalists

The ultra-liberal UMC Next caucus has released its “Next Generation UMC” proposal for the 2020 General Conference, consisting of 23 petitions across 33 pages.

UMC Next’s Convening Team includes celebrity pastor Adam Hamilton, Tom Berlin (lead submitter of the misleadingly named “One Church Plan” to the 2019 General Conference), Jasmine Smothers (another Commission on a Way Forward member and “One Church Plan” sponsor), Jan Lawrence (CEO of the LGBTQ liberationist Reconciling Ministries Network), Randall Miller (former head of RMN), Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson of North Georgia, Bishop Mike McKee of North Texas, Junius Dotson (CEO of our denomination’s official “Discipleship Ministries” agency), and key deputies of Chicago Bishop Sally Dyck and Florida Bishop Ken Carter.

This group largely consists of some of the most prominent advocates of the so-called “One Church Plan” (OCP). There seemed to be a lot of hubris among many liberals of being confident that their OCP would pass, because they evidently had not bothered to listen much to its traditionalist and genuine-centrist critics.

In response to our denomination’s highest representative body making clear that the OCP was a bridge too far, the UMC Next proposal represents leading OCP supporters refusing to make any compromises, but instead asking for something even more radical.

Here are key component of UMC Next’s “Next Generation UMC” proposal:

• Dramatically liberalize church standards on sexual morality while stifling any room for dissent.
• Dramatically erode accountability for clergy misconduct on all other standards.
• Have traditionalist believers leave.
• Repeat the “Way Forward” process.
• Potentially dramatically change core doctrine.
• Dramatically liberalize church standards on sexual morality while stifling any room for dissent.

Read the rest here.