Entries from February 2008 ↓

The Anchoress gives us a remarkable Lenten meditation that explains the significance of circumcision in the Old Testament, relates it to virginity, and brings it all together with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I have been hanging in there with “American Idol,” even though it has failed to grab me this season.  The announcers keep hyping, breathlessly, that “this is the best talent ever!” but I have seen nothing to make me think so.  In fact, now that the show has winnowed the herd to the top 24, I was struck by how many I hadn’t even seen before!  (I think I missed one audition show, so maybe they were all on that. But I also should have seen them on subsequent shows, hearing them try out on “Hollywood Week.”  Or maybe I did see them, but they left absolutely no impression.)  If this is the case, that some of the top contestants were edited out of the auditions, presumably because the producers didn’t think them interesting, that is a serious production fault.  (I wonder how far ahead these shows are taped.  You would think that if a contestant made it through another level of elimination, the producers could edit his or her performance into the previous week’s episode.)  Of the ones I’ve heard, the Aussie guy should be hard to beat.

That huge statue of Christ overlooking Rio De Janeiro (where our fellow Cranacher Frank Sonnek lives) was struck by lightning, the moment captured in a remarkable photograph.   Getting struck by a bolt of lightning is the primeval conception of  God’s judgment. In this image, Christ takes that judgment into Himself.   This, my friends, is a photograph of the Gospel.

The government is set to try–finally!–the worst of the terrorists in Guantanamo and will seek the death penalty for six individuals, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. See
this.

I’d like to hear whether Senators Clinton and Obama will seek the death penalty against these guys.

Do you really think they will be executed? Or will these trials by military tribunal end up putting America on trial before the world for Guantanamo, the war in Iraq, waterboarding, etc., etc.?

Michelle Malkin  urges conservatives to get “fired up” for the election.  OK, there may not be a conservative-enough presidential candidate.  But she usefully reminds us that the presidency is not the only office at stake in this election.  In order to build up conservatism again, it will be necessary to elect a promising new generation of conservative congressmen, governors, and–perhaps most importantly in rebuilding the conservative infrastructure–local officials.She makes a good point.  We do tend to over-emphasize the presidency at the expense of all of the other offices.  The lesson is that conservatives should not retreat to our attics and not even vote on election day.  There will be plenty of other conservatives to vote for.

The president of the venerable William & Mary College, Gene Nichol, has been forced out of office. He represented, to me, everything that was bad about higher education today (to which my own institution, Patrick Henry College, is a laudable alternative). President Nichol was the one who yanked the cross out of the college chapel, an example of that politically-correct “tolerance” of other religions that is, in fact, intolerance of Christianity. He also allowed on campus the traveling “Sex Worker’s Art Show,” featuring prostitutes and porn stars touting their wares, an example of the academic culture’s current embrace of moral degradation.

The Board of the university is saying that those highly-public controversies were not the reasons they decided to get rid of the president, and that may be, since failure to notice what is wrong about such things is generally accompanied with other kinds of incompetence. Students are complaining about Nichol’s ouster, but alumni, to their great credit, felt ashamed of their school and doubtless exerted their influence.

A thousand thanks to Paul McCain, who has started a whole blog in honor of Lucas Cranach’s Weimar altarpiece!  It is called A Painting That Preaches Christ.The first post is an enormously enlightening summary, filled with priceless quotations, about Luther’s defense of using art in church.  The site promises more and more resources exploring this masterpiece of the Reformation. 

Back to the controversy over the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that England should accept at least a limited jurisdiction of Islamic law (sharia). . . . Some of you said that the Archbishop’s statement was misinterpreted and taken out of context, that it was more nuanced than the reports indicated and that it was not so bad.  We should read what he actually said.  Well,  Anne Applebaum did, and here is her conclusion:

Arguing that his remarks were misunderstood, misinterpreted and taken out of context, his office even took the trouble to publish them, in lecture form and the radio interview version, on his official Web site. I highly recommend a closer look. Reading them, it instantly becomes clear that every syllable of the harshest tabloid criticism is more than well deserved. The archbishop’s language is mild-mannered, legalistic, jargon-riddled; the sentiments behind them are profoundly dangerous.   

What one British writer called the ” jurisprudential kernel” of his thoughts is as follows: In the modern world, we must avoid the “inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law” and must be wary of our “universalist Enlightenment system,” which risks “ghettoizing” a minority. Instead, we must embrace the notion of “plural jurisdiction.” This, in other words, was no pleasant fluff about tolerance for foreigners: This was a call for the evisceration of the British legal system as we know it.

I understand, of course, that sharia courts vary from country to country, that not every Muslim country stones adulterers and that some British Muslims volunteer to let unofficial sharia courts monitor their domestic disputes, which is not much different from choosing to work things out with the help of a marriage counselor. But the archbishop’s speech actually touched on something far more fundamental: the question of whether all aspects of the British legal system necessarily apply to all the inhabitants of Britain.

This is no merely theoretical issue, since conflicts between sharia law and British law arise ever more frequently. . . .Police in Wales are dealing with an epidemic of forced marriages, honor killings remain a perennial problem, and British law has already been altered to accommodate “sharia” mortgages. The archbishop is absolutely right in his belief that a universalist Enlightenment system — one in which the legitimacy of the law derives from democratic procedures, not divine edicts, and in which the same rules apply to everyone living in the same society — cannot easily accommodate all of these different practices.

I enjoy seeing liberal folk get hoisted on their own petard (virtual contest:  explain that figure of speech), so I especially appreciated Applebaum’s accusing the politically-correct archbishop of racial intolerance: 

His beliefs are merely an elaborate, intellectualized version of a commonly held, and deeply offensive, Western prejudice: Alone among all of the world’s many religious groups, Muslims living in Western countries cannot be expected to conform to Western law — or perhaps do not deserve to be treated as legal equals of their non-Muslim neighbors.  

Every time police shrug their shoulders when a Muslim woman complains that she has been forced to marry against her will, every time a Western doctor tries not to notice the female circumcisions being carried out in his hospital, they are acting in the spirit of the archbishop of Canterbury. So is the social worker who dismisses the plight of an illiterate, house-bound woman, removed from her village and sent across the world to marry a man she has never met, on the grounds that her religion prohibits interference. That’s why — if there is to be war between the British tabloids [calling for his resignation] and the archbishop — I’m on the side of the Sun.

The Washington Post early morning edition yesterday hardly said anything about Mike Huckabee’s victories in Kansas and Louisiana.  I can’t help but think that the press would hype victories like that for another candidate, talking about new momentum, surges, and the like.  But finally the paper  takes notice.These victories came right after Romney dropped out, McCain made nice with the conservatives at their big convention, and the press anointed him as the nominee. Certainly, he has three times the number of delegates as Mike Huckabee. But could it be that rank and file Republicans, no matter what their leaders say, ARE seeing him as the alternative to McCain?  After all, the first voters after the call for party unity do not seem to be obeying.  Now I know that purist conservatives don’t like Huckabee either. But, I ask those of that company who read this blog (you know who you are) if you consider Huckabee to be better than McCain. (I asked this before, under different circumstances, but I didn’t really get a clear answer.)

UPDATE:   Here is evidence of the phenomenon I’m referring to.

Here is a fascinating article on how some poor black families inCairo, IL, have converted to Judaism. Strangely missing, though, are interviews from the converts about why they did so. This is an example too of the clash between two views of religion: is it a matter of identity or belief? Most of these new Jews were formerly Baptists, who seem to be bringing that conversion mentality to a religion that is normally understood by its adherents as an ethnic identity. (The reporters don’t delve into that either, with no interviews of the rabbis who brought them into the religion. Nor is there much on HOW one converts to Judaism–a membership class? subscription to a set of beliefs? how about circumcision?–beyond a ritual bath, which probably has historic ties, unremarked on, to Christian baptism.)

At church yesterday the Old Testament reading was about the Temptation of Adam (what Milton wrote about in “Paradise Lost”) and our New Testament reading was about the Temptation of Christ (what Milton wrote about in “Paradise Regain,” a great work hardly anyone reads).   Our pastor pointed out that Satan’s most serious temptations are not to encourage us to commit individual sins but, as he does in both of these pivotal Biblical events, to attack our faith: to lead us to distrust God, to disbelieve His Word, to stop looking to Him for our needs, to put our faith in ourselves instead of in Him.  For Pastor Douthwaite’s profound sermon on these temptations and how our sins reveal our underlying unbelief, go here. 

Speaking of our old evil foe, a Catholic priest, in co-operation with the church of Rome is opening an
exorcism center in Poland to deal with the upsurge in demonic afflictions in Europe. The article quotes an exorcist:

“People don’t pray anymore, they don’t go to church, they don’t go to confession. The devil has an easy time of it,” Amorth said in an interview. “There’s a lot more devil worship, people interested in satanic things and seances, and less in Jesus.”

What do you think about this?

One of John McCain’s lapses, according to us pro-lifers and as commenter Organshoes reminds us, is his support of embryonic stem cell research. He has indeed, like other ostensible pro-lifers in Congress, voted to use “discarded” embryos from fertility clinics for their stem cells. But here is his position now, from his  official website:

 Stem cell research offers tremendous hope for those suffering from a variety of deadly diseases - hope for both cures and life-extending treatments. However, the compassion to relieve suffering and to cure deadly disease cannot erode moral and ethical principles.For this reason, John McCain opposes the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes.To that end, Senator McCain voted to ban the practice of “fetal farming,” making it a federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes. Furthermore, he voted to ban attempts to use or obtain human cells gestated in animals. Finally, John McCain strongly opposes human cloning and voted to ban the practice, and any related experimentation, under federal law.As president, John McCain will strongly support funding for promising research programs, including amniotic fluid and adult stem cell research and other types of scientific study that do not involve the use of human embryos.Where federal funds are used for stem cell research, Senator McCain believes clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress, and that any such research should be subject to strict federal guidelines.

Does this position have holes? Probably. But how does it compare to what the Democrats are calling for?