Blog-o-matic

  • Hal­lelu­jah! The worst of the tidal wave of work that came my way has been bailed out or swum through, so I can do a lit­tle catch­ing up with the blo­gos­phere:

    • Greg-the-Husband sent me a link to a lib­eral Chris­t­ian Web-site just because … well because he likes see­ing what col­ors I can turn. But I don’t know — here’s the rather slick Chris­t­ian Alliance site. Doesn’t seem like some­thing to get in a com­plete tizzy over. I had won­dered shortly after the elec­tion if there was any way to re-Christianize the left. These guys would have you believe that left is already Chris­t­ian, it’s those nas­ties on the right that are in trou­ble, boy. But they’re hav­ing to look for way too many dips and dives around the gospel to try and arrive at their desired notion that the Lord is a good Demo­c­rat at heart, includ­ing being soft on abor­tion and homo­sex­u­al­ity. Um, right.
    • Back amongst friends, Huw has this Code Orange Apoc­a­lypse alert: Micro chips embed­ded under your skin to pre­vent iden­tity theft. I really think the hand­writ­ing is on the wall on this one. I don’t even know if peo­ple will wait one gen­er­a­tion before this is tried, then accepted, then manda­tory. Hav­ing dis­missed reli­gion as baloney and done every­thing they can to under­mine the cul­tural impact of reli­gious insti­tu­tions, sec­u­lar soci­eties are begin­ning to find out some­thing that totally shocks them — peo­ple sin. Worse, that capac­ity to sin isn’t amenable to rea­son, invec­tive or attempts at social engi­neer­ing. I believe it will become more and more clear what that means, even as we become less and less capa­ble as a soci­ety to deal with the least of its effects. And so — micro chips under the skin? Sure, sounds good. Increas­ingly tight stric­tures on chil­dren (and even­tu­ally every­one)? Yes! We’ll keep them safe even if we have to lock them in a closet till they’re 35. And so on and so on. I know that’s a downer. I just think it’s com­ing. But not for ten years or so, so … on with the countdown.
    • Speak­ing of secu­rity mania, there’s a Hugh Hewitt sum-up of thoughts about the new tougher poli­cies being insti­tuted in Great Britain H E R E. British press is freakin’ big-time, of course, but then they never saw a foot-high head­line they couldn’t love. The bot­tom line is Blair is look­ing to kick out those that preach jihad against Eng­land. Sound extrem­ist? Kind of. Will it work? Who knows. Some­thing to watch, I sup­pose, but I think Eng­land will run out of resolve long before their night­mare is over. They had been ignor­ing the grow­ing ter­ror­ist cells tak­ing shape around them. What­ever they do now is going to seem a bit ludi­crous, and there’s a chance it may not work.
    • And speak­ing of Euro­pean del­i­cacy, this from Direc­tions to Ortho­doxy: the Euro­pean Union is going to give those Turks a jolly good talk­ing to con­cern­ing their per­sis­tent efforts to thwart the Ortho­dox in Turkey. Good idea, folks. That ought to take care of it — the Turks seem like a rea­son­able bunch to me.
    • Inter­est­ing piece in GetRe­li­gion about Peter Jen­nings. I hadn’t known that he went to bat for some kind of bal­anced report­ing of reli­gious peo­ple in the news. Sounds like his per­sonal faith was a bit shaky (“not sure about the res­ur­rec­tion’??), but at least he real­ized that like the Whos, we are here, we are here, we are here, we are HEEERE:

      Dur­ing a 1995 speech at Har­vard Divin­ity School, Jen­nings quoted his­to­rian Garry Wills mak­ing this point.

      “It is care­less,” Jen­nings read aloud, “to keep mis­plac­ing such a large body of peo­ple.… Reli­gion does not shift or waver. The atten­tion of its observers does. Pub­lic notice, like a rest­less spot­light, returns at inter­vals to believ­ers’ goings on, finds them still going on, and with expres­sions of aston­ish­ment or dread, declares that reli­gion is under­go­ing some boom or revival.”

    • Accord­ing to this from Ortho­doxy­To­day, other Ortho­dox arch­dio­cese (arch­dio­ce­ses? I’ve never been sure of the plural.) may pull out of the NCC, as the Anti­ochi­ans did a few weeks ago. Makes sense to me. But this quote in the Direc­tions story from a spokesman for an ecu­meni­cal orga­ni­za­tion seems odd to me:

      “East­ern Ortho­dox churches are still very tra­di­tional the­o­log­i­cally and on moral issues,” the IRD spokesman points out. “And, inter­est­ingly, although they tend to be fairly wealthy churches, they give no money to the National Coun­cil of Churches.”

      What huh? Ortho­dox churches tend to be fairly wealthy? This sounds a lot like the silly con­ven­tional wis­dom I ref­er­enced in my com­ments to the Anti­ochian pull-out story. If we’re so darned rich, why is it that the Bap­tist church across the street from my home­church could swal­low us in one bite (though I like to think the cross on the roof would scratch them some­thing awful)? And even if we were, is that com­ment about not giv­ing to NCC meant as a shot? Not impor­tant points, prob­a­bly. I just like to know if I’m being insulted. And I like even more to know if I’m rich.

    • A Greek Ortho­dox bishop is impli­cated in a major, major scan­dal???? I can’t believe I haven’t heard more about this. Sounds like more will come to light, but it’s fairly alarm­ing already.

    Related posts:

    1. N-C-C ya later!

    August 10th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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