Ft. Hood Death Toll Is 14: Slain Soldier Was Mother -to-Be

This local NBC TV news story tonight in Chicago noted that Private Francheska Velez, a local 21-year-old who had just finished a tour in Iraq and had returned to Fort Hood, Texas, and was one of 13 soldiers shot and killed last Thursday--was three months pregnant. That would mean 14 people were killed, though the story did not say that, and I've heard no one else say it. But it's true.

Church and State in East Germany

Former East German theologian and politician Richard Schröder passes along his reflections on the attempts by the state in East Germany to control the activities of the Protestant churches (HT). The fundamental misunderstanding, Schröder argues, is that the communists approached the Protestant churches as if their ecclesiastical structure was the same as that of the Russian Orthodox Church.

“The Communists who took over in 1945 were trained in Russia,” said Schröder. “Their model was the Russian Orthodox Church, which focuses heavily on the liturgy. By contrast, Protestant churches have always been a wide field that included Bible study and other discussion groups. All the charity work of the Protestant churches, like their hospitals, were started by what you might call grass roots movements of congregation members. They were not started by the churches themselves. But the Communists always tried to handle us as if we were Russian Orthodox.”

By "liturgy" Schröder presumably means to emphasize a sharply hierarchical ecclesiology. I don't meant to argue that German Protestant churches were or are liturgical or sacramental in an Eastern Orthodox sense, but rather that the key contrast here is on the structure of church institution itself, not particularly on its mode of worship (narrowly construed as that which happens during the liturgical service itself).

The fact that Protestant churches in Germany were not particularly hierarchical, at least in any real institutional sense, was the case despite the attempts by Hitler to impose a national Reich bishop over the various regional church authorities.

It took the Communists over 40 years to come to terms with the characteristic influences of the German churches. It was a bit too late by that time, however. As Schröder concludes, "By 1988-89 they finally understood how the Protestant church ticks. The motto 'A church for others' played a big role in East Germany and it came from Bonhoeffer. They should have been able to see that Protestants had already debated during the Nazi period the question of how Christians should behave in a totalitarian state. We even had the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period printed in our hymnbooks.”

Many thanks to Tom Heneghan for giving us this valuable interview with Richard Schröder on this twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Irrelevant & Silent Green Patriarch: on Abortion & Marriage

The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew,  gave a lecture at Georgetown University in Washington on 3 November.

"The only side that we take is that of our faith, which today may seem to land us in one political camp, tomorrow another, but in truth we are always only in one camp, that of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."

The speech of the Istanbul-based patriarch was one of numerous appearances by the man known for his advocacy of interfaith relations and religious freedom, and often dubbed the "green patriarch" for working to combat environmental degradation, Religion News Service reports.

Our friend Kevin Offner, who is on Intervarsity staff for graduate students at Georgetown, noted that a friend sent him links to a transcript, the video, and coverage of the Patriarch's speech. Kevin wrote back to his friend:

Dear -----,

Thanks and I took the time to read the Patriarch's address.

Yes, yes, all he says is good and important.  But really now:  addressing the three issues of nonviolence, health care and environmentalism--these are all issues that just about everyone at Georgetown agrees on.  Or at least, they're very sexy, politically correct, cool things to talk about today.

And yet what Luther said remains ever true today:  "If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the solider is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point."

What is one of the huge elephants in the room, the huge culture battles that is going on right now all across our country, especially in the Roman Catholic world (which Georgetown represents)?  Sexuality and marriage!  Yet not a word here about homosexuality, abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage, gay marriage, etc.  Good grief, he could have at *least* thrown out a few choice lines when talking about caring for creation, like, "and let us care for all of God's creation, including the unborn," or something like this.  But nope, very safe and non-controversial.  (He does say, "Just as every human life is a gift from God, to be treated with love and respect," but does this include the unborn?  His listeners could interpret it either way.)

Please don't misunderstand me.  Yes, of course the issues of health care and the environment are important.  But this is the wide road, the easy road, the road that will win one lots of applause.  To bring the Gospel (that unchanging Gospel and Truth which the Patriarch so wisely discussed in his introduction) to bear on those issues that are currently dividing Christians from the world is to speak courageously and prophetically.

The Patriarch sadly missed a golden opportunity.

Kevin
PS.  I hope I'm wrong here, but I just haven't heard the Patriarch speak out forcefully and prophetically, with the strong foundation of the Tradition behind him, about matters of sexuality and marriage and abortion. I honestly do hope I'm wrong--no doubt you can send me several links of his speeches in the past few years where he's addressed strongly these pivotal cultural issues?  (I write this honestly and not sarcastically.)

Well said, Kevin.

Last Day to Sign Up for Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden

Our new subscriber files will be updated tomorrow so I repeat myself:

One month ago, a fan convention was wrapping up for Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster bestselling Twilight series. The books are hugely popular not only with teenagers but also 20 and 30-somethings. Sales are near Harry Potter scale. Many young Christians are reading the books, about vampires and werewolves, and the second film in the series, New Moon, is due out in November.

John Granger, who has written about Harry Potter for Touchstone, writes in our November issue about the underlying theology and context for the genesis of this series: Meyers is a practicing Mormon and was inspired by a vivid dream to write the books. There is Mormon history and views of sex and salvation packaged Twilight in a way that appeals to American spiritual aspirations (along with some brief anti-Catholicism), especially among the young. Readers, beware!

Subscribe to Touchstone today and don't miss Granger's take in "Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden." I know it's a bit out of the ordinary, but it's a fascinating read, along with our other features and columns in the November issue by James Hitchcock, Patrick Henry Reardon, Ken Myers, Barton Swaim, Robert Hart, Denyse O'Leary, and the debut of a young scientist-writer Martha Hutchens. Subscribe here.

You Can't Run & You Can't Hide: Gay Marriage Wants You (& Your Children)

At the site MassResistance you'll find this chilling story. I remember hearing in one news reports on the gay marriage referendum in Maine how a disappointed voter wondered why conservatives opposed gay marriage and what were they afraid of? They just couldn't understand the "opposition."

Ask Peter Vadala that question:

As Peter described the incident (see video above), he came to work on August 10 and began his day normally. A female manager from another store was in the store and began talking to Peter about her upcoming marriage.  When Peter asked “where is he taking you for the honeymoon,” she corrected him and said she was not getting married to "he" but to another woman.

Continue reading "You Can't Run & You Can't Hide: Gay Marriage Wants You (& Your Children)"

Score One for Nature

     Voters in Maine last night narrowly repealed a law granting to same-sex couples the recognition of being married.  I am choosing my words advisedly here.  A man can no more marry a man than he can marry a post.  A woman cannot marry a woman, any more than she can marry a hair dryer or a rainbow.  Yes, it is true, they can form eroticized friendships that mimic marriage, just as they can do things with their bodies (as can a man and woman together) that mimic sexual intercourse.  But they cannot form the one-flesh union of man and woman that is biologically designed, when the conditions are right, to bring about a new human being.  This is a plain fact.  Indeed, there are biological changes that occur in both man and woman in the marital embrace that suggest that their union functions as a single organism, literally the "one flesh" that Jesus says was the Father's will for them "in the beginning," meaning not only before the Fall, but at the foundation of all sexual reality here and now, and forevermore.

     One young lady interviewed yesterday said, with breathless naivete, that the issue was all about love, and love can hardly be a bad thing, can it?  But no, the issue is not all about love.  Christians and Orthodox Jews and others who care about preserving some freedoms apart from the state, and some vestiges of a natural life, should take heed.  It is not all about love.  It is about many things.  First, it is about whether we shall all become, as the Canadian political philosopher Douglas Farrow puts it, "chattels of the state."  That is because as long as the natural family is recognized as prior to the creation of the state, then we may still argue that it possesses its own legitimate sphere of authority, and indeed that the state is in some sense beholden to, and subordinate to, and the artificial construct of families, and not the other way around.  Simply put, once the state assumes the authority to rule that relationships outside the boundaries of the natural constitute married relationships, then the family becomes a mere ward of the state; for the power to define implies, a fortiori, the power to control.  That this is true in the tyrananny of Canada is evident from legislation and court decisions that intrude ever more intimately into the everyday workings of the family. 

     Second, it is about whether we should enshrine forever the fundamental tenet of the sexual revolution, that in matters pertaining to sex, or to the body more generally, individual wills are all that matter.  That is to sever sex from any notion of the common good.  It is, if you will pardon my French, a policy of laissez foutre, analogous to that unchristian notion, put forth by Benthamite atheists long ago, that what I do with my money is strictly my own business.  Not exactly; we are beings, as Aristotle said, who find their best chance to thrive only in the context of a polis.  That does not imply state oversight over everything we do.  It does mean that the virtuous use of my resources, like the virtuous use of my body, must take into account the good of the place where I live.  I am economic man most justly when, in more ways than one, my household is in order.  But the sexual revolution is predicated instead upon my supposed right to sexual pleasure, so long as my partner or partners consent, regardless of all considerations.  This leads, not surprisingly, to the chaos of our cities, wherein it is easy to find mothers who have had children by two or three fathers, none of whom now lives with his children; and to the chaos of a culture of divorce, with children's hearts sawn in half to please the whims of the parents.

     And there is worse chaos to come.  In his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln argued that the matter of so-called popular sovereignty was not simply about whether the voters of a state had the right to approve or disapprove of slavery.  That is all Douglas said it was about; he insisted that popular sovereignty had no wider implications.  But Lincoln looked at the Dred Scott decision, and the Fugitive Slave act, and popular sovereignty, and said that all the pieces were in place to make slavery the law of the land everywhere.  The logic of the decisions, he argued, made it inevitable.  Now I understand that history does not always proceed by logic.  Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the power of a bad premise.  If the state can recognize pseudogamous relationships and declare them to be marriages, on the grounds that the people in them desire one another sexually and demand that their desires be legitimized in law, how on earth can it deny recognition to other arrangements, for instance, to a man with two wives?  He can at least have sexual intercourse with them.  Or what about people who insist that they cannot be sexually fulfilled unless they lie with two people, one of each sex?  Or what about a brother and a sister, so long as one of them has been sterilized?  The retort that these arrangements would never be recognized rings hollow; already in Nanada there is a movement pressing for "polyamory."  It would be, I think, a civilization-breaker -- the ultimate in making marriage porous, turning everyone at once into an eligible bachelor or bachelorette; or infecting the family with the notion that incest, so long as it is engaged in consensually, could ever be anything other than an abomination and a corruption of the relationships that should subsist between brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son.

     Third, it is about whether we will retain any sense of "manhood" and "womanhood," or "father" and "mother" -- and whether we will acknowledge that children deserve both a father and a mother.  It used to be considered a tragedy when a child grew up without a father; now we cheer those tragedies on; and turn our heads demurely from the millions of men in our prisons, a majority of whom grew up without the manhood-developing influence of a father in the home.  That is a cruelty of our time that unites sexual libertarians of both parties -- we pretend that fatherlessness is of no concern.  But children need mothers and fathers.  They need those models of what the sexes are in themselves, and what they are to one another; and they need them in ways that social scientists themselves, with their blunt instruments of research and their severely narrow range of questions, have begun to see.

     Finally, it is about whether we will begin to undo the stupid mistakes of the past few decades.  I am thinking in particular about no-fault divorce, palimony, treating single parents as if they were married, and so forth -- all the chaos which the all-competent state has helped to produce, and upon which it feeds in turn to grow great.  If Christians would only take to the streets to demand that the state take their marriage vows seriously -- seriously enough to punish an adulterous husband or wife with loss of custody, for example -- then we would not now be talking about same-sex pseudogamy. 

Calendar Starts Soon

Yes, our 2010 Calendar, available here on-line, is a 13-month calendar that actually begins on December 1, 2009, less than a month away. So if you order soon, you can begin using it from the very first day. It is full of saints from the Old Testament, New Testament, the early church and beyond, focusing (for its post-biblical saints) on those shared by East and West on the same date each year. It's a unique carefully researched and annotated calendar, reminding users of the great cloud of witnesses--who have names and lived among us at various times and places throughout the world. Buy extra ones for gifts for your friends. Order here today.

Free Marriage Paper from Mount Nebo

Yes, this is free, the equivalent of a small book, a downloadable PDF, 48-pages, on Is Marriage Worth Defending? by Alan F. H. Wisdom of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, with many informative sidebars, charts, and facts. It is one of IRD's "Mount Nebo Papers" available here for free (scroll down).

By many measures, marriage has weakened in our society over the past two generations. Fewer people marry. More people divorce. Increasing numbers of people follow a pattern of “serial monogamy,” moving along a string of sexual relationships (often including childbearing) without ever forming a lasting marriage.

Not only the practice but also the understanding of marriage has shifted. Our society’s view of marriage, centered on mutual emotional satisfaction, is increasingly distant from classic Christian teaching. Now pro-homosexuality advocates are seeking to use judicial fiat to radically redefine the institution, reducing it to a relationship between any “two people who love each other.”

With all this conflict around marriage, is it worth the cost for Christians to continue to defend and promote this embattled institution? Should they insist that their churches commend and bless the lifelong union of one man and one woman as God’s design for human sexual relationship? Should they insist that the state also recognize and favor this same relationship as of unique social value?

The paper addresses these questions and is available here.