Four places I go over and over

• Work
• church
• Panera
• The Taphouse

Four people who encouraged my faith along the way

• Father Ignatius Smith, OFM
• Fr David Rucker
• Fr Joseph Gibson
• Clifford Davis

Four of my favorite foods

• steak
• potato soup
• cream of mushroom soup
• beef stroganoff

Four places I would rather be right now

• Home (that’s Nicholasville, y’all)
• Indianapolis
• Boston
• SVOTS

Four movies i would watch over and over

• Babette’s Feast
• Finding Nemo
• the director’s cuts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy
• The Hunt for Red October

Four things i like about the Orthodox Church

• At its center, it is about reality, not religion
• since it is about reality, it is thoroughly multivalent on matters of opinion and taste
• everything in it always comes around to Christ, crucified and risen from the dead
• The PASCH!

Four of my favorite hobbies

• reading a good book
• watching movies
• waiting for Godot
• endlessly browsing Facebook and comparing myself to all the successful people I have known who have kids and homes and cool jobs (with the freedom to go places and see things) and multiple degrees beyond college

DR. JOHNSON declared a tavern seat “the throne of human felicity.” The Frenchman Hilaire Belloc, who spent his life in England, said: “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves. For you will have lost the last of England.”

…

In Oxford, which has some pubs — like the Bear, on Blue Boar Lane, and the Mitre, on the High Street — that date back to the 1200’s, many of the names echo the Middle Ages. The White Hart (a stag, Richard II’s heraldic emblem), the Kings Arms (named for James I, during whose reign neighboring Wadham College was founded), The Bear, the Wheatsheaf: all are names that call up a past of knights, farms and forests.

A well-written article, which I want to keep for later. I may need it if I’m ever in England.

Read it all: Journeys: Oxford, England - A Pub Crawl Through the Centuries - Travel - New York Times

He begins with the most important point, that of our contingency — our complete dependence on God, without whom we would be nothing:

The concept of “nothingness” is impossible for us to grasp. “Nothingness” suggests a void, an emptiness, bounded by something. Yet nothing existed to circumscribe that void or provide contrast to that emptiness. Nothingness is not just the absence of being; it is its denial, its rejection. It is an absolute negation, immeasurable and incomprehensible. It is non-existence, non-being, a negative power that by its very nature is devoid of all meaning , purpose or hope. As such, nothingness finds its closest human analogy in despair.

Then suddenly, “in the beginning” there was something. In that timeless moment, from a locus that transcends every notion of space or dimension, God created ex nihilo. He fashioned being from non-being, space-time from non-existence. Out of that beginning, God – who is Himself the arche or ultimate beginning, principle and source of all that is – brought forth the heavens and the earth.

The idea of non-being as a “power” seems a little strong, as if something existed outside the holy Trinity which was negating being. If “nothingness is not just the absence of being; it is its denial, its rejection,” then an agent must be denying and rejecting.

The agent here, though, is not pre-existing but created along with the cosmos: It is I. I am the agent who rejects God’s life-giving existence and denies my own being. I fear death and so I choose death over life, because that is the ultimate meaning of our freedom. We are free to choose life, the life that is communion with God, or we are free to choose death, to embrace the nothingness from which we are created. This is the death that the first man chose first, passing on mortality to us all. We are born to die, and so we act in fear of that death.

That is why, in the Eastern tradition, death is the enemy that is overthrown. Satan? Sure, he’s a major player in the drama. But death is the power that kept us bound, the power that keeps us from hitting the mark (hamartia, miss the mark, usually translated as “sin”) and keeps persuading us to live in death’s dominion rather than die to ourselves and live in God’s resplendent new creation.

That is why the Christian faith can be summed up in these words: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and on those in the grave bestowing life.

It is as an aside that Fr. John mentions the “tedious” arguments between “‘creationists’ and ‘evolutionists’”:

These opening verses are not meant to describe historical process or provide a scientific explanation for the appearance and development of the world and human life. The passage says nothing that can be exploited one way or another in the tedious debate between “creationists” and “evolutionists.” Its concern is not with historiography or paleontology, and its curious chronology (water existed before heaven or earth, living things appeared on earth before creation of the sun and moon) should not trouble the minds of any but those who insist on reading the narrative as a description of cosmological or biological development. The Genesis creation story is not concerned with scientifically determinable events. A we shall stress in the next column, it is concerned with salvation history, the creating and redeeming work of God, from the first creation to the last.

As the polarization intensifies in our schools and legislatures between “believers” and “Darwinists,” it is important for us to remember this point. Increasingly, Christian scientists are coming to see that this is a false choice, that on the question of the origin and development of species there is no necessary conflict between the biblical witness on the one hand and the findings of geologists, paleontologists and molecular biologists on the other. [See in this regard Francis Collins’ recent work, The Language of God (Free Press, 2006).] “Young earth” theorists and fundamentalists of various stripes will reject this point, as will those who insist on the total “randomness” of mutations in the process of natural selection. Evolutionary process (if not Darwinian theory in all its details) has been confirmed by recent studies of DNA, the genetic code of living organisms. Yet this need not call into question the basic conviction that the Creator of all things is God, that God created ex nihilo, that He infuses all things with ultimate meaning and purpose, and that apparent randomness conforms wholly, if for us imperceptibly, to His divine will.

Read all of Fr. John’s article: OCA - “Life in Christ” Articles

Photo by Marc Nozzel, CC BY license

• Obama and the Islam factors, GetReligion.com
• Obama and the Bigots, NY Times op-ed
• Obama Urban Legends on Snopes

The videos and quoted material on Snopes is great. It may be my new best friend for debunking stupid stuff.

Dear Mom and Dad: Love you lots. Call me when you read this!

The Ohio is the first of a new class of submarine created in a conversion of 1970s vessels by trading nuclear-tipped ICBMs for conventional cruise missiles and a contingent of commandos ready to be launched onto virtually any shore through rejiggered missile tubes - against conventional forces or terrorists.

The sub’s cruise across the Pacific comes as China builds its submarine fleet into the region’s largest as part of the bulking up of its military. The voyage is the Ohio’s first deployment since the makeover, and Hale is in the odd position of showing the ship off.

It’s odd because the sub is all about stealth.

Hale can’t talk about where the ship is going. The back of the ship, where the nuclear power plant is located, is off limits. The leader of the SEAL commando contingent aboard can’t be named and the commandos themselves can’t be photographed in any way that shows their faces.

Read it all: New US Subs Trade Nukes for SEALs

The article mentions that Tridents are larger than attack submarines, but “still cramped.” Harumpf. No one ever hot-racks on a Trident. Ever. And apparently, the main passageway on a Trident is wide enough to allow for the span of a man’s arms. Mind-boggling. I have intentionally avoided the opportunities to “see the other side” that have come my way.

After reading most of this article (asking myself, “Does it have decent information for family and friends, or is it degraded beyond usefulness?”), I went surfing and found this video of the famous Typhoon class submarine, featured most memorably as the Red October in the movie and novel by Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October. (The music in the video is Basil Poledouris’ “Hymn to Red October,” from the film score.) Although the fictional submarine is named after the relatively recent revolution, Russia’s actual ships bear names from far deeper in their history — names like Dmitri Donskoi and Yuri Dolgorukiy.

Submariners are the same the world over, it seems, wearing coveralls and “underway sweaters.”

As for the title of the AP article… If only we could “trade nukes for SEALs”! (Submariners and airedales will get the joke.)

There is little that we can do to stop the spread of hate that springs up like a prolific weed from the bloody soil of our planet. However, surely we can elect officials who will stop interfering in the affairs of others as if we were omniscient. We are not. In fact, we are often quite ignorant and belligerently so. If you wish to call the libertarian and classic American position isolationism, so be it. Perhaps it would be a welcome respite from nosy interference in the affairs of others.

Hat tip: tmatt @ GetReligion

“This is the golden age of television.”

This essay, extolling the virtue of free markets in broadcasting, with a case study in government stifling of the same, is a valuable lesson.

What does this word mean, really? When we sometimes find it thrown about as a synonym for “social conservative,” or even “fundamentalist,” “anti-progressive,” and essentially, “knuckle-dragging neanderthal,” perhaps it’s important to understand what the word really means. After all, Archbishop Paul, primate for many years of the Orthodox Church of Finland, boldly asserted, in a line famously quoted by many Orthodox parish brochures and bulletins: “The Orthodox Church is evangelical but not Protestant.” If you think if you think “evangelical” means any of the previous “synonyms,” this statement will catch you by surprise. By “surprise” I mean here, “It’ll be nonsense.” (Clever Orthodox evangelists should take note.)

“Evangelical” comes from the Greek word evangelos (ευάγγελος)…

I just lost you, eh? I said, “…comes from the Greek…” and you pretty much checked out. That’s cool. As it turns out, etymology does not determine the meaning of a word. Context does. So, several years from now, there may very well be a note beside “evangelical” in style guides like the one currently in the Associated Press Style Guide for “fundamentalist” indicating that it is largely pejorative and subjective and should only be used if part of a religion’s name, such as the “Fundamentalist Church of Christ (Abilene Synod).” (I just made that name up, by the way. No offense meant to any real members of a church that may have that name in reality.)

In this case, it actually happens that “evangelical” has not gone over this cliff quite yet, so etymology does make a difference. Why? (Or, really, as you are probably already asking, why should you care?) Because it’s good news! Evangelos means “good message” or “good news.” The good news in this case is just this: That of Matthew 1.21-23:

‘She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: Look! the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel, a name which means ‘God-is-with-us’.

It is the commitment to the fullness of this good news that marks the evangelical Christian and differentiates him from others. As it happens, this denotes a wide range of beliefs. Evangelical Protestants — which is what most people mean when they simply say, “evangelical” — are not by any means a mass of droids with singular, unified views on anything. Some think environmental harmony is as interesting as midnight infomercials, some eat only carrots and parsley to protect Pooh and Benji from evildoers, while others think that stewardship means to rape the earth and throw away the husk. In other words, there’s a spectrum of thought within evangelicalism that goes from white to black and spans every crimson, indigo, and cerulean color in the middle.

Just thought I’d share.

by Clark Carlton

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

The 2008 US presidential election is almost a year and a half away, and yet the various campaigns are in full swing. With states vying to move the primary season up into late 2007, it is time that we as citizens of the United States start to think about who we would like to see elected to the White House next year.

Before I express my own thoughts about the upcoming election, let me begin with a couple of obvious, but nonetheless vital, observations. First of all, reasonable people – and certainly the reason-endowed sheep of Christ’s flock – can disagree about political philosophies and the relative virtues and vices of particular candidates. I do not believe that there is one “Orthodox” answer to some of the questions that I will raise below. In other words, I will question neither the purity of your faith nor the sincerity of your commitment to Christ if you disagree with my thoughts.

Read the rest: An Open Letter to Orthodox Christians, on Behalf of Ron Paul by Clark Carlton

Congressman Paul probably will have my vote this year, even if he does not receive the Republican nomination.