Bloggy round-up

  • Well, that’s what I get for being too busy to be out in the blo­gos­phere. There are inter­est­ing tid­bits every­where. Some quick points you might find worth a mouse-click:

    • Stem cells don’t have to come from embryos — Thanks be to God! It may be that a sci­en­tific break­through will make the bit­ter debate over the use of stem cells a thing of the past. Accord­ing to this arti­cle, sci­en­tists in the US and Japan have cre­ated an equiv­a­lent to embry­onic stem cells from ordi­nary skin cells. Inter­est­ingly enough, two ini­di­vid­u­als who are already ready to move away from stem cells are two of the sci­en­tists who had been hailed as pio­neers of cloning — “Dolly” cre­ator Ian Wilmut (HERE) and James A. Thom­son (HERE). As Thomp­son said, “If human embry­onic stem cell research does not make you at least a lit­tle bit uncom­fort­able, you have not thought about it enough. I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”
    • Your favorite Nar­nia book — Darn! Too late to get a word in on Touch­stone‘s sur­vey of the favorite one of the Nar­nia series. I would’ve put in my vote for “A Horse and His Boy.” It was the first one I picked up, and so it’s always had a spe­cial place in my heart. “Voy­age of the Dawn Treader” is prob­a­bly a close sec­ond (and judg­ing from the Touch­stone arti­cle com­ment list, it looks like it’s the win­ner), if only because the descrip­tion of what was involved to change Eustace from a dragon to a boy still seems incred­i­bly pow­er­ful to me. And least favorite Nar­nia book? Prob­a­bly “The Sil­ver Chair.” It’s not just that Pud­dleglum is a wet blan­ket. That whole book seems to be more about fail­ure than suc­cess. Just color me shal­low, but I’d rather read about peo­ple get­ting things right. I’d be inter­ested to hear other people’s faves and least-faves.
    • The Russ­ian Church may leave the World Coun­cil of Churches (WCC) (HERE) — Remem­ber back HERE when the Anti­ochi­ans got out of the NCC and I won­dered why the other Ortho­dox arch­dio­ce­ses couldn’t do the same? Am I right in think­ing the NCC is con­nected to the WCC? Or is it con­nected to the knee­bone? Well, in any case — hooray! It’s obvi­ous that these “world­wide church orga­ni­za­tions” have just become polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions that preach a secular-progressive ethos from the pul­pit. If we can’t turn that around, we need to make it obvi­ous that we don’t agree with poli­cies that “turn the WCC into a ros­trum for pro­mot­ing fem­i­nism, the rights of sex­ual minori­ties, ideas which erode the prin­ci­ple of national sov­er­eignty, and cer­tain polit­i­cal pro­grams,” in the words of Moscow Patri­ar­chate spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin.
    • The impor­tance of Being There — John Mark Reynolds has THIS on the prob­lem with hav­ing a vir­tual net­work of friends.

      Vir­tual con­tact (phones and Face­book) can sus­tain me only so long. God made us to want to be with each other. He takes this so seri­ously that though God sent a per­fect Story, He loved us enough to come and live that Story out in front of us.

    • The Mys­tery of the Miss­ing Romanovs — solved! (HERE) As all the watch­ers of the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel know, there were two bod­ies miss­ing from the remains of Czar Nicholas II’s fam­ily, which was unearthed in 1991. One of the younger daugh­ters and the son, Alexei — who would have been the heir — weren’t present. That led to a lit­tle spec­u­la­tion that they might have made it out, but a cou­ple of ama­teur sleuths have laid that to rest. Hope­fully the remains of all of these 11 mar­tyrs of the Com­mu­nist Rev­o­lu­tion can be laid to rest now as well. The arti­cle points out that the Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church has not par­tic­i­pated in any of the buri­als, because the miss­ing two bod­ies had made them skep­ti­cal that the bod­ies found were actu­ally the Romanovs.

      The nine sets of remains were interred in a lav­ish cer­e­mony in 1998 at the Cathe­dral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Peters­burg, which con­tains the crypts of ear­lier Russ­ian roy­als. But the Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church would not for­mally take part in that cer­e­mony because of its con­cerns about authenticity.For now, the church has declined to say whether it con­sid­ers the newly found remains gen­uine, pend­ing fur­ther tests. But peo­ple who have long sought the remains say they are hope­ful that once the results are in, the church will for­mally con­duct a ser­vice at the cathe­dral in St. Peters­burg to lay to rest the final remains of the Romanovs.

      “This brings clo­sure to a very sad chap­ter in Russ­ian his­tory,” said Peter Saran­d­i­naki, an Amer­i­can of Russ­ian descent who started an orga­ni­za­tion to help find the remains and had con­ducted sev­eral searches here. “It is because their mur­der sym­bol­izes the start of a dia­bolic era in world his­tory. And now that has all come to an end.”

    Here’s hopin’.


    Related posts:

    1. VERY quick round-up
    2. Begin­ning to Pray by Anthony Bloom
    3. Blog round-up
    4. N-C-C ya later!
    5. No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.

    November 25th, 2007 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 11.25.2007

    I was fas­ci­nated by the story of the Saintly Romanov remains. Thanks be to God.

    And, I’m glee­ful about the stem cells

  • Molly

    Grace,

    I feel much more enlight­ened than I did just moments ear­lier. Thanks for keep­ing up with these fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­er­ies and then shar­ing them with the rest of us! I recently read, “An Eng­lish­man in the Court of the Czar” and I have not been able to get the Romanovs off my mind ever since then. I will def­i­nitely look for that spe­cial on the Dis­cov­ery channel.

  • Grace

    Hooray for enlightenment!

    But I ought to be clear that I was being a lit­tle face­tious about the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. What I meant to say is that spec­u­la­tion has been ram­pant about whether any of the czar’s fam­ily escaped exe­cu­tion, and that those kinds of juicy mys­ter­ies are a sta­ple of the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. They might’ve done some­thing specif­i­cally on the woman who claimed to be Anas­ta­sia (I know that PBS did), but I’m not sure.

    Another point of inter­est from the arti­cle: The rea­son that the sol­diers buried two chil­dren some­place apart was because they fig­ured that if 11 bod­ies were exhumed, every­one would know it was the fam­ily (plus the cou­ple other peo­ple who were killed with them). If they only came across nine bod­ies, they wouldn’t be sure. So I hate to say it, but in doubt­ing that the bod­ies belonged to the czar & c., the Russ­ian Church was behav­ing just as the Soviet sol­diers expected them to.

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