Abbottabad Christians

Don't forget--one of the things complicating Vatican responses to US actions in the GWOT is vulnerable Christian communities near the site of such actions.  Excerpts:

...The small Catholic parish in this northern city says it has limited its activities after the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks killed by US special forces here.

“I couldn’t conduct pastoral visits to homes yesterday after security increased,” Father Akram Javed Gill told ucanews.com. ”A healing prayer service scheduled today and upcoming Church feasts were cancelled. Also the four policemen posted guard for the church have been put on high alert.”

The priest has been in charge of the Saint Peter Canisius Catholic church since 2007 in Abbotabbad, the gateway city to the northern mountainous region. … Association of Churches of Hazara Division, a body of about five Churches including the Catholic Church, has called a meeting to formulate a future strategy in the area.

“It is crucial to maintain peace for the scattered minority communities in the area. We alter the venue at the last moment to avoid leaking the information about the gathering in a tense atmosphere,” said Father Javed...

So, on one level this is simply a story about human rights for minority faiths in Pakistan. Note, however, that this subject is already in the news due to a series of headline-making and, tragically, blood soaked events.

In other words, this is a real story that should be covered (if journalists are concerned about the safety and rights of religious minorities in Pakistan and elsewhere).

Oh, and what about the actual events linked to Osama?

The priest described the events as they unfolded during the raid...

A Service to Joy

...for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food. But in the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true. We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life.

It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.

The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world.--Pope Benedict XVI, Inaugural Homily

The Problem with Political Atheism

Laid out quite well.  Excerpt:

...Hitchens...say[s] -- with an entirely straight face, as far as I can tell -- that "totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist and, as we would now say, 'faith-based.'"

Really? What if I cleverly disowned all the wickedness done in the name of Christianity by saying that all the evil perpetrated by so-called religious people was actually done out of a spirit of rebellion against God, and therefore true Christians are entirely innocent of any crimes?

That would not only be disingenuous, but unmanly. If I am to be a Christian, I must swallow hard, and look with a clear and humble eye at the sins of Christians, my own first and foremost. If Hitchens really wants to be an atheist, he should have girded his loins before taking up his pen, and taken a good, long, hard, sobering, honest look at the blood and darkness of the 20th century, almost all of it done in the name of unbelief.

If he had, he would have to conclude that it is not religion that poisons everything, but human beings that poison everything, including religion and atheism. They also poison garden clubs, baseball teams, industrial corporations, moose lodges, academic departments, and charitable trusts. In short, wherever one finds humanity, one also finds inhumanity. But that is a point for Christianity -- indeed, a point of doctrine. The doctrine of original sin, noted Chesterton, "is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."

For both believers and unbelievers, it is a sobering thought that the same kind of hypocrisy, cruelty, sloth, cowardice, pride, short-sightedness, shallowness, injustice, and greed is found among believers and unbelievers. The error of Hitchens is to assume that because he finds all these vices among believers, it is belief that causes vice -- even among unbelievers...

Search Amazon.com for benjamin wiker

A Pro-Life Atheist

John Wright recounts his experience from days gone by.  Excerpts:

...At the time, I was a thoroughgoing fan of Ayn Rand and an avowed Libertarian, so, to me, it was a simple matter of logic: One is not supposed to blank-out reality, elude, escape, or play pretend on this or any topic. It is self defeating to use reason to elude reason.

Merely redefining words to pretend that the baby in the womb is not a member of the species of his parents is beneath contempt, or pretending not to know when life begins: all textbooks on biology before Roe v Wade were unambiguous on the point, nor was their any controversy (nor, among honest folk, is there now). By definition, if it is not alive, one needs no medical procedure such as aborticide to kill it: by definition, if it is not a baby, you are not pregnant. Reality says that oaks make acorns, ducks make ducklings, humans make babies.

The most egregious example of this phenomena, where anti-abortionists talk biology while pro-abortionists talk gibberish, was at a science fiction panel. I asked a pro-abort that if an organism were growing in Mommy’s womb and had XX but not XY chromosomes, what it a female, yes or no? How indeed could this organism be female but not be homo sapiens? It was like saying one could have a living room without a room, or a house attic without a house. One cannot have an existing property without the object in which that property exists. Mr. Doublethink assured me that the organism was only POTENTIALLY and organism, and that having XX chromosomes did not put you into the class of objects “female” but rather meant you were POTENTIALLY female, which is the same as having no sex at all, and no properties, and ergo no object in which those properties inhere, and ergo no right to live.

And by merely calling the Jew an ‘untermensch’ we find, voila, he is no longer protected by the ancient laws of the Koenig and Kaiser of the Germanic Reich, because he is no longer legally a ‘person.’ And if you write the word ‘petrol’ on a can of tomato soup, you can pour it in your automobile fuel tank, and all will run smoothly. This is what they tell themselves is scientific thinking: and we who say water is wet and fire burns, we are merely superstitious bumpkins to them (even if we have degrees and doctorates they lack).

I listened with the same open-mouthed goggle-eyed awe one would listen to Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky, if Jabberwocky were serious rather than in play: it sounded like words, but it was not words. Twas brillig, and rather slithy at that. To that degree he was willing to prostitute his brain, and utter absurd lies and elliptical paradoxes, merely to defend the central and brain-warping evil of aborticide.

I came up with what I thought was a novel argument, which was, namely, that whether the baby was “human” or not, a parent has a duty to rear and protect the child, and that this duty exists from the first moment any act can tend to harm or tend to protect the child: for exactly this reason maidens are under a duty not to take drugs that might cause birth defects even in children not yet conceived.

Likewise, anyone concerned for the environment acknowledges a duty running to generations yet unborn. In law, a person does not need to exist, or be competent, or be known, to have a duty running to him: a tenant with a life estate in land may not ruin nor despoil the land, even if the heir of the property when the estate reverts is not yet born.

So I proposed that anyone claiming that laws should protect a child from abuse or neglect at the hands of his parents was acknowledging a parental duty of care; and that reality merely made it the case that there were chains of events one could set in motion before the child was born that could wound the child. Therefore the duty obtained from the first moment any act can be done that affects the eventual child; therefore the duty was prenatal. If maiming or lobotomizing the child prenatally was a violation of this duty, maiming it to the point of death a fortiori was a violation. And this was so whether the child was human or subhuman, alive or pre-alive, or however one characterized the condition of the child at the time of the act. The duty was not triggered by the existence of some quality, call it humanity, in the child, but only by the nature of parenthood and the nature of cause and effect.

And I found that no one would address my argument.

All I encountered were either ad hominem attacks against my character (made by people who did not know me, and were not in a position to assess my character) or the opposition would argue against Theism — and their programming of these robots of rhetoric was so strong that even after I told them I was an avowed and devout atheist, THEY SIMPLY REPEATED THEMSELVES...

Christian Martyrs of the Middle East

A round-up.  Excerpts:

...Protesters and freedom fighters, however, are not the only victims of violence in the Middle East. There has been a significant rise in Christian bloodshed. Unfortunately, the leaders of Western powers, with little exception, have ignored those crimes.

In his annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, Pope Benedict XVI pointed to the “acts of discrimination against Christians, which are considered less grave and less worthy of attention on the part of governments and public opinion.” The Holy Father renewed his “heartfelt appeal” to Muslim religious leaders “that their Christians fellow-citizens be able to live in security, continuing to contribute to the society in which they are fully members.” Egypt’s Al-Azhar University suspended talks with the Vatican because they found the pope’s references to Muslim violence “insulting.”

Among other duties, I serve as Chairman of Aid to the Church in Need, U.S.A., a charity directly under the Holy Father that supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed, or in need. I receive regular updates and status reports on the plight of Christians in the Middle East. Here’s a roundup of what happened this past year...

For more, the documentaries of Pierre Rehov can be quite illuminating.

A Brief Criticism of Modernity

by the eminent scientifiction author John C Wright.  Excerpts:

...The modern educated man, having never read Kant, perhaps having never heard of him, cannot even discuss the topic of Kantian metaphysics, nor say why Kant holds all prior metaphysics to be in error: nor can I clearly explain (unless my listener is very patient, and I have abundant free time) why I deem Kant to be in error.

Let me attempt in brief, and without being too technical. Kant’s error is a paradox. If you believe the metaphysical axiom that only Empirical knowledge is true knowledge, then all metaphyiscal axioms, including this one, are not true knowledge. And if it is not true knowledge, you cannot account for believing it.

This paradox can be resolved only two ways: either accept this (and all) metaphysical axioms as blind and arbitrary acts of the will (This is the Nietzsche solution, and that way leads madness); or accept that this (and all) metaphysical axioms are contingent assumptions like the rules of a chess game, merely inventions for the pleasure and convenience of man, but having nothing to do with reality (this is the logical positivist solution, and that way lies another type of madness).

Since a schoolboy can poke holes in the paradoxes and errors that either one of the two paths to madness maintain, I need not do so here. Just take a look at the post-modern and post-rational, post-ethical world around you.

The real solution to the paradox, of course, is to reason that if the axiom leads to an absurd conclusion, instead of assuming the absurdity is the truth, assume the axiom is wrong...

A Great Critique of Rand

Really, the essential problem with her philosophy, identified in this piece at First Things.  Excerpt:

...“The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks. The parasite copies. The creator produces. The parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” And so on.

There, of course, one has the essential oafishness of Rand’s view of reality. For her, the world really was starkly divided between creators and parasites, and the vast majority of humanity belonged to the ranks of the latter. “I came here to say I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life,” Roark continues, “nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine.” Rand really imagined that there could ever be a man whose best achievements were simply and solely the products of his own unfettered and unaided will. She had no concept of grace, even of the ordinary kind: the grace of an existence we do not give ourselves, of natural powers with which we could never have endowed ourselves, and of all those other persons on whom even the strongest among us are dependent. She lacked any ennobling sense that what lies most deeply within us also comes from impossibly far beyond us, as an unmerited gift. She liked to talk about “virtue” a great deal—meaning primarily strength of will and the value that one creates out of one’s own native resources—but for her the only important question regarding the relation between the individual and society was who has a right to what. That is, admittedly, a question that must be asked at various times, but it is never the question that true virtue—true strength—asks of itself...

Conversion, Communism, and Fulton Sheen

Very cool.  Excerpts:

...Communists in the United States (as elsewhere) were expected to put Party above all, including family. Although the Budenzes were model Communists in other ways, they never quite fit the Communist vision of family life. Neither Louis nor Margaret adopted the loose interpretation of marital fidelity espoused by many of their comrades. Margaret was expected to work for the Party outside the home, but she always put the welfare of her children first. When forced to choose between her obligations to her children and the demands of the Party, she chose her children, risking the ire of the Communist leadership. When Louis and Margaret's love came to fruition in their third child, their Communist friends were incredulous. One of the Party's top operatives urged Louis to abort the baby (which would have been illegal at the time). Another child would put too much financial and emotional strain on the couple, he said, and might result in Margaret's "becoming 'bourgeois.'"

The Budenzes spurned this advice, and Margaret delivered their third daughter, Justine, at a Catholic hospital in New York. She wrote "atheist" in the blank for "religion" on the hospital admission form. Margaret recounted that the sister on duty joked that "she would like to send me home with a religion as well as a new baby." Margaret wasn't amused.

Being a former Catholic, one of Louis's assigned tasks was to infiltrate the Catholic Church in the United States so as to soften its anti-Communist stance. Among his targets was the well-known radio personality and eloquent anti-Communist, Msgr. Fulton Sheen. Budenz got nowhere. At a dinner meeting in 1936, Monsignor Sheen refused to engage Louis on the issue of Communism's merits. Instead, the monsignor invited Louis to "kneel down and let me hear your confession." The two parted on less than amicable terms...

The day of their reception into the Church and the blessing of their marriage was hectic. Because of the potentially violent consequences of severing ties with the Communist Party, the Budenzes could not let on to their comrades what they were in the process of doing. Monsignor Sheen announced it to the press on the day they professed Catholicism and publicly renounced Communism. Their residence in suburban New York would become a dangerous and inhospitable place after their conversion became known, so after the ceremony in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they hid in a hotel until they could catch a train out of the state. Their destination was South Bend, where Monsignor Sheen had arranged a teaching position for Louis at the University of Notre Dame...

Read the whole thing for an awesome ending.

What He Said

Exactly.  Excerpts:

...To repeat: The close of the bin Laden era is cause for great satisfaction and rejoicing; the mission itself appears to have been a marvel of planning, and to have been restrained in its use of force and in the blood that was shed. It is a proud moment for the United States and for all the world.

But we should nonetheless see bin Laden as just a man, and our triumph as something more than just the accomplishment of his death: We have brought to justice a man who was the face of justice flouted, of humanity foresworn, of peace destroyed. These ideals must remain ours, and we must not be co-opted by the allure of a motto bin Laden clearly lived: “by any means necessary.”

Would You Like Some Gibbets With That?

So I had occasion to remember the exchange between Theoden and Saruman at the foot of Orthanc recently, which led to Google and the following awesomeness.  Excerpts:

...Memorable invective is a joy forever, whether it be that exchange or Moira’s scornful rejection of Thorfel’s offer to make her his lawfully wedded wife in “The Dark Man.” Churls will complain, as they always do, that words like “elsewhither,” “dotard,” or even “gibbet” itself discriminate against the 21st century reader, render Tolkien’s meaning inaccessible to the great unwashed or the borderline unlettered. Too bad. Howard and Tolkien were master dramatists when they wanted to be (which is why any REH adaptation that doesn’t revel in his dialogue is foredoomed, which is why no Germanic bodybuilder will ever pass muster as Conan), and their kings and malign beings regularly scale rhetorical Himalayas.

Like Mark Finn, I’ve devoured J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, but one place where she falls down hard without any cushioning is Voldemort’s dialogue. His each and every utterance is from a broken-spined, jaundiced-with-yellow-highlightings copy of The Supervillain’s Phrasebook. In a steelcage deathmatch or Thunderdome showdown to determine Most Hackneyed, I might bet on Voldmember even against the de Camp/Carter Thoth-Amon, who couldn’t verbally intimidate Scooby-Doo. When the worst of the worst achieve true immortality despite being killed deader-than-dead, (not just Dark Lords, a “human” character like Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop works as an example) it’s often because a language-kindled nimbus of hellfire blackens the edges of every page on which they appear...

Bin Laden killed...on Divine Mercy Sunday

and, you know, I just couldn't help but remember this guy.  Excerpts:

His first exploit as Hetman was in Podhajce, where, besieged by an army of Cossacks and Tatars, he at his own expense raised 8000 men and stored the place with wheat, baffling the foe so completely that they retired with great loss. When, in 1672, under Michael Wisniowiecki's reign, the Turks seized Kamieniec, Sobieski beat them again and again, till at the crowning victory of Chocim they lost 20,000 men and a great many guns. This gave Poland breathing space, and Sobieski became a national hero, so that, King Michael dying at that time, he was unanimously elected king in 1674. Before his coronation he was forced to drive back the Turkish hordes, that had once more invaded the country; he beat them at Lemberg in 1675, arriving in time to raise siege of Trembowla, and to save Chrzanowski and his heroic wife, its defenders. Scarcely crowned, he hastened to fight in the Ruthenian provinces. Having too few soldiers (20,000) to attack the Turks, who were ten to one, he wore them out, entrenching himself at Zurawno, letting the enemy hem him in for a fortnight, extricating himself with marvellous skill and courage, and finally regaining by treaty a good part of the Ukraine. For some time there was peace: the Turks had learned to dread the "Unvanquished Northern Lion", and Poland, too was exhausted. But soon the Sultan turned his arms against Austria...

An odd set of coincidences--the renowned Polish Pope beatified, the feast of Divine Mercy and of St. Joseph the Worker, protector of the universal Church, the first day of the month of May, the month of Mary (who has played a role in such things in the past)...

Pray for his soul.  Pray the chaplet for the conversion of hearts, and the end of jihad.

Happy Divine Mercy Sunday!

This seemed only appropriate for today:

...Aidan Hart was approached by someone who wished to commission a Sacred Heart image. As an Orthodox Christian he explained that he would be happier to paint an icon of Christ that communicated the themes of mercy and compassion but without making the heart visible. As he put it: 'My solution was to relate it to Christ's appearance to Thomas (hence the doors in the icon and Christ showing his wounded side). The wound summarizes Christ's compassion (sacred heart) for us in suffering and dying for us. The rays of light come from his whole person, although radiating from the direction of his heart...'

For more on the Divine Mercy devotion and feast, see here.

A World Without God

would, in fact, be hell.

...Macbeth's sins have left him so despised and dishonored, so utterly bereft of a single saving grace, that by play's end he will have become like the baited bear, cornered and hacked to pieces by enemies wholly bent on his extermination—but not before he gives utterance to his rage and despair in words that, more than anything yet inscribed in the language, express the heart of a world shorn from God. Shakespeare may have given us a villain of singular viciousness; he has nevertheless endowed this excrescence with lines of the purest poetry. It is the final hour of his life. His enemies draw near, their purpose deadly; his wife, the woman he has loved, lies freshly dead, the victim of her own hand. And so from an abyss of bitterest, blackest despair, he finds the words exactly to express the predicament of man without grace, without God. It is a condition of nihilism that, when extrapolated onto the stage of society, reveals a world stripped of every supernatural reference. "The very fabric", as Luigi Giussani so memorably put it, "of an atheistic society has never been defined better."

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(5.5.17-28)

How to Run the World (for Humans, Not Machines)

Mark Shea, Dale Ahlquist, Chesterton, and Catholic social teaching, all in one interesting place.

I Enjoy Ayn Rand's Novels

but her philosophy, while getting right the absolute importance of the truth, doesn't actually know what is truth.  Or human nature.  Or charity.  Or, it would seem, the consequences of a world where her philosophy wins.  But anyway--Mark Shea does some lovely commentary on her, Rush Limbaugh, and the ways of much of the modern right.  Excerpts:

... Rush Limbaugh is a big fan of Ayn Rand. That would be the Ayn Rand who says:

There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism -- the inviolate sanctity of man's soul, and the salvation of one's soul as one's first concern and highest goal; this means -- one's ego and the integrity of one's ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one's soul -- (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one's soul?) -- Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one's soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one's soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one's soul to the souls of others.

This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men's natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work. That is why the history of Christianity has been a continuous civil war -- both literally (between sects and nations), and spiritually (within each man's soul).

It's that Ayn Rand who saw abortion as an absolute right more fanatically than Obama does.

It's that Ayn Rand who said, "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”...

A Tribute to Polish Catholics

and their manifold contributions to Western Civilization in this week leading up to John Paul II's beatification (and there was much rejoicing!).  Excerpts:

...One thinks naturally and recently of Papa Wojtyła, prevailing against the obvious inhumanity of the Marxist-Russian Empire and taking a more Quixotic stand against the less-noticeable dehumanizing forces loose within the West itself. There is also the figure of King Jan Sobieski, whose Polish cavalry undertook the largest mounted charge in human history at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, thereby relieving the besieged Austrian capital and routing the Turkish besiegers, who left behind several hundred tons of coffee beans in their hasty retreat. Thus in a single day King Jan stopped the Islamic crescent from penetrating to the heart of Christendom AND paved the way for the invention of cappuccino. Dżękuje, Jan.

It is in gratitude for Poland’s great contributions to Christian civilization that we here at Catholic Phoenix are observing Easter Monday in the Polish fashion: by celebrating Dyngus Day, also known as Lany poniedzialek, or “Wet Monday” for reasons that will become clear shortly.

Yes, it’s pronounced like “dingus,” except spelled with a Y. We are not making this up...

How To Treat the Poor

According to a few experts.  Excerpts follow:

...Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

and

...Perhaps Vernon [the beggar] is an angel in disguise. St. Francis of Assisi, even before his conversion, handled beggars like this,

He was not one of those typical society men who hardly have a penny to give a beggar, but willingly spend their hundreds on a champagne feast. His way of thinking was the following: "If I am generous, yes, even extravagant with my friends who at the best only say 'thanks' to me for them, or repay me with another invitation, how much greater grounds have I for alms giving which God himself has promised to repay a hundredfold?" 

This was the inspiring life thought of the Middle Ages, which here carried out the genially literal and genially naive translation of the words of the gospel: "As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me." Francis knew — as the whole Middle Ages knew it — that not even a glass of cold water, given by the disciples, would remain unpaid and unrewarded by the Master.

Therefore a pang went through his heart when, one day as there was a crowd in the shop, and he was in a hurry to get through, he had sent a beggar away. "If this man had come from one of my friends," said he to himself, "from Count this or Baron that, he would have got what he asked for. Now he comes from the King of kings and from the Lord of lords, and I let him go away empty-handed. I even gave him a repelling word." And he determined from that day on to give to every one who asked him in God's name — per amor di Dio, as the Italian beggars still are wont to say...

Persecuted, Indigenous Minority Blocked From Celebrating Holiday

That is, the Christians of the Middle East had one heck of a time with Easter.  Why?  Democratic revolutions almost never bode well for minorities--I know, counterintuitive, right?  Majority rule can really suck for minorities--whoda thunk it?  Excerpts follow:

Something very sobering and terrible is sinking in for Western journalists who are covering the uprising in the Middle East. They are beginning to wonder if the outcomes of these revolutions will automatically be good or, at least, “good” as defined in terms of civil liberties and human rights as they are promoted at, let’s say, the United Nations. In other words, sadly, there may be isolated situations on this earth in which totalitarian governments do a better job of protecting the rights of religious and ethnic minorities (or sexual minorities, for that matter) than governments that represent unfettered majority rule.

This has, of course, been a minor theme running through the mainstream press coverage of the flight of Eastern Christians from Iraq and other nations in that region. Every now and then, the mainstream press also notes the plight of the Bahai’s in Iran. Gays in Iran? Every now and then.

In other words, could there be a dark side to the Twitter and Facebook revolutions in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere?...

This year, I know, we will also pray for the safety of believers there. We will be praying for those that march in the streets once again, as they have marched for centuries, in the darkness that comes before dawn.

UPDATED: It appears that the government has, in effect, canceled Pascha, or a crucial part of it. Click here for the Washington Post story on this development.

He's Alive!

Happy Easter!  A video for y'all:

That's All For Now, Folks!

For the rest of Lent, I'm going to let the blog be.  A few more posts will pop up automatically, but then we'll be in the Lenten desert of quiet and peace.  Please explore what's already up--most posts have a value transcending the immediate news cycle (or at least, I like to think so).  I'll be back to this after Easter.  Until then, prayers and fasting on my behalf (or, heck, anyone's behalf) are always welcome.  If you feel like almsgiving, buy your books and movies by clicking through to Amazon via this blog's links--I then get a percentage of whatever you pay them.  :-)

In the meantime, God bless!