Shhhhhhh....the Senators are sleeping

Check out who fell asleep at the State of the Union Address

Judging Religions- Dennis Prager

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We judge secular ideologies all the time; why not religious ideologies? Why is it permissible to say that conservatism is selfish and mean-spirited or to say that liberalism is naive and foolish, but one cannot say anything negative about a religion? I believe that the Judeo-Christian value system as devised largely by American Christians rooted in the Jewish Scriptures is the finest value system ever made -- and many people label this view "bigoted" and "intolerant." Yet, many of these same people have no problem asserting that secular liberal values constitute the finest value system ever made. Why can one say that without any fear of being labeled "intolerant" or "bigoted"? <> The problem with assessing religions is that many who do so are in fact prejudiced; they are often outsiders out to prove another religion false. Or they may have grown up in a religion and for whatever reasons come to hate the religion in which they were raised -- some ex-Catholics, for example; or were merely born into that religion -- such as some anti-religious Jews.
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-Dennis Prager

Enemy at Home- Dinesh Dsouza

For those of you who don't know, Dinesh D'souza is perhaps one of my top 5 favorite authors. I own and/or have read the bulk of his published books. His new book, The Enemy at Home, is coming out soon. He has been doing the rounds in order to promote it, and tonight will appear on Glenn Beck on CNN Headline News. He appeared on The Colbert Report Tuesday night; funny but essentially pointless. Here's an interview discussing the book posted on Townhall.com.

"TH: In The Enemy At Home, you deny the now-familiar claim that radical Islamists hate us because of our freedom and you argue that their hatred is “not a product of ignorance but of familiarity.” How do these conclusions change the way we fight this war of two fronts?

DSOUZA: My concern is not so much with the radical Muslims as with the traditional Muslims. The radical Muslims we have to fight. There is no alternative. But we have to persuade traditional Muslims. Why? Because traditional Islam is the recruiting pool for radical Islam. It’s not good if we kill a hundred Islamic radicals and 200 traditional Muslims sign up the next day. So we have to address traditional Muslim concerns about America. The radicals are telling them that America is a fount of global atheism, that America fosters family breakdown, that American values corrupt the innocence of children. I think it is foolish to dismiss these concerns entirely, because there is a grain of truth to them. Not all of America is like this, but it is the America that has been promoted by the cultural left, and it is the America that most Muslims see through the images of our popular culture. I think America could improve its image among people in traditional cultures, including Muslim cultures, if we showed them “the other America”: the people who go to work every day and look after their families and abide by traditional values and go to church on Sunday. Many foreigners have no idea that this America even exists."

complete interview

Here's to the Nation-State!- Roger Kimball

article
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Every human child needs to learn to walk by itself; so, it seems, every generation needs to wean itself from the blandishments of various utopian schemes. In 2005, the political philosopher Jeremy Rabkin published a fine book called Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States. Rabkin ably fleshes out the promise of his subtitle, but it would be folly to think this labor will not have to be repeated. As the essays in this special section demonstrate, the temptation to exchange hard-won democratic freedom for the swaddling comfort of one or another central planning body is as inextinguishable as it is dangerous. As the English philosopher Roger Scruton argues in “Conserving Nations,” “Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition.” Confusing national loyalty with nationalism, many utopians argue that the former is a threat to peace. After all, wasn’t it national loyalty that sparked two world wars? No, it was that perverted offspring, nationalism, which was defeated at great cost only by the successful mobilization of national loyalty. Scruton quotes Chesterton on this point: to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons, he said, is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.
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-Roger Kimball

Epiphany 2007

I had the opportunity to give the Epiphany sermon at my home parish in Tampa. Enjoy!

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In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit- Amen

Beloved Achen, my brothers and sisters in Christ…

Today we commemorate one of the most hallowed feasts of the Church calendar, the Feast of Epiphany. On this day, we recall the Baptism of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The burning question this Feast poses to us gathered here today, is why Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom John the Baptist refers to as the “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world;” why this very same Jesus Christ who we believe is without sin; why does He need Baptism. Our traditional explanations for Baptism fail to explain this. If Baptism is for the washing away of our sins, what sins does our Lord Jesus Christ need washed away? Does Jesus, God Incarnate, need to be born again? We know that Christ has no need for any sort of renewal. Indeed, He was born as the perfection of all Humanity. However, Christ willingly submits Himself to be baptized in the waters of the River Jordan.

In St. Matthew’s parallel description of Christ’s Baptism, John the Baptist refuses to baptize Christ.

“I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?”

and Christ answers him:

“Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness”

You see Christ, in His unfailing Love for man, is baptized in accordance with the great and righteous plan for man’s salvation. In being immersed in the waters of the River Jordan, Christ consecrates the sacrament of Baptism for all humanity, by being Himself the first to undergo the fulfilled Baptism given to the Church. Whereas before, John the Baptist would baptize men as a means of purification in anticipation of the Christ; now, Christ consummates Baptism as a means of being bound to Him.

How awe-inspiring is it then that in the midst of Jesus’ Baptism that the Holy Spirit descends upon Him like a dove? How amazing is it that we hear the voice of God the Father say, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” We refer to this day as the Epiphany, literally the appearance from above, but it may also be referred to as the Theophany, the appearance of God. And God, Who exists from all eternity as the Holy Trinity is explicitly seen as hallowing the baptismal waters for all men, and in so doing, makes manifest the Holy Trinity to the people of Israel.

We must remember how fundamental Baptism is in the ministry of Christ and His Disciples, and consequently, in the Church today. Both of the lectionary readings for today from the book of Acts describe the baptism of newly converted people. We see how the disciples of John the Baptist, who had received the baptism of repentance from John the Baptist, were given the baptism of rebirth at the hands of St. Paul. We see how the Ethiopian Eunuch, found water in the desert, and asked Philip the Deacon to baptize him upon his being convinced that Jesus was indeed the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy.

If baptism were merely symbolic, merely a ritual undertaken by those who had already chosen Christ in their minds, then all of this labor Christ and the Apostles put into baptizing all the believers would have been meaningless. However, Christianity is not merely a mental exercise. Christ does indeed wish for us to change our hearts and our minds; but he also commands the disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Therefore, there must be something so important about baptism, so necessary that we cannot merely discard it as a formality.

I had previously mentioned that Christ consecrated baptism for the Church, His believing people, by Himself being the first subject of the new baptism. I cannot emphasize enough how real this Sacrament is. We all have been taught how the elements of bread and wine become the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in a very real albeit mystical sense. In the same way, in the waters of Baptism, we experience a very real and mysterious death and rebirth. St. Paul writes to the Romans:

“…Do you not know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we shall walk in the newness of Life”

We may die to the power of sin and resurrect to the newness of Life, precisely because through Christ’s Baptism, and our subsequent individual Baptisms in our lives, we become bound to Christ in a very real sense. As Christ died on the cross, and resurrected on the third day, so we too, in the waters of Baptism, die with Christ and rise with Him.

On this day that we recall the Epiphany, we venerate that most basic element which the Lord chose from the very beginning, to accomplish this task of granting us regeneration and rebirth into the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have our Salvation. From the very beginning, the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters in the book of Genesis. Recall how God saved Noah and renewed humanity through the great flood, and how God led Moses and his chosen people through the parted waters of the Red Sea. These were all a type, a foreshadowing of the sacrament given to us in the Church.

In today’s Gospel reading, during the Blessing of the Water Service, Christ tells the Samaritan woman that whoever drinks of the water that He shall give will never thirst, but have in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life. The Holy Spirit, sanctifies the material of water, and through water, that most precious constituent of life, we attain to Salvation through Christ Jesus. What was once simple and morally neutral, devoid of any particular meaning, has now, by the glorious work of the manifested Holy Trinity, been consecrated to the Divine Purpose of Salvation for all men.

Having said all of this, let us remember that our baptism brings us into the newness of life in Christ, but requires from each and every one of us, a commitment to a life worthy of God’s such wondrous mercies. Let us honor our Baptismal covenant, and commit ourselves and one another unto Christ our God, to Him belongs glory, honor, praise, and thanksgiving. Amen.

-Steve K
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Christian Foundation of America-Dennis Prager

"This country was founded overwhelmingly by men and women steeped in the Bible. Their moral values emanated from the Bible, and they regarded liberty as possible only if understood as given by God. That is why the Liberty Bell's inscription is from the Old Testament, and why Thomas Jefferson, the allegedly non-religious deist, wrote (as carved into the Jefferson Memorial): "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"

The evidence is overwhelming that the Founders were religious people who wanted a religious country that enshrined liberty for all its citizens, including those of different religions and those of no faith. But our educational institutions, especially the universities, are populated almost exclusively by secular individuals and books who seek to cast America's past and present in their image.

Are we a Judeo-Christian country with liberty for people of every, and of no, faith? Or are we a secular country that happens to have within it a large number of individuals who hold Judeo-Christian values"
-Dennis Prager

Continued...

Sex, Religion, and Conformity in India- Terry Mattingly

Article here

"So, are we to assume that the core of the story — the foundation of this “highly conservative and conformist society” — is essentially a British hang-up? It’s strictly a Christian thing?

Last time I checked, India was still a pretty religious nation, one of the most faith-drenched lands in the world. Yet, last time I checked, Christianity was a pretty small player on the religion scene in modern India.

This raises a very basic question for me: Wouldn’t it have been good thing to include some material — a paragraph or two, perhaps — that told us something about where Hinduism and Islam stand on issues linked to homosexuality? Perhaps the teachings of the major faiths are linked to this issue in modern India, perhaps just as much, or even more, than that old-time religion from Britain?

I have heard that there are pretty strong social customs in India linked to class, family, marriage and sex. Do these have anything to do with the religious beliefs and customs of the actual people in modern India?

Just curious. It would be nice to know."