Religion

Reviving the Right

Left Behind is the title of this piece over at The American Spectator:

Ever since James Dobson threw down the gauntlet against the Republican Party nominating a pro-choice presidential candidate, the focus has been on the intransigence of the religious right. Obdurate evangelical zealots are said to be tearing down GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani and paving the way for Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

The real story is how feeble and ineffectual conservative Christian opposition to Giuliani has actually been.

[…]

Dobson argues that their movement will be set back if the GOP nominates a candidate with Giuliani’s social views. Gary Bauer, by contrast, has said he cannot imagine “a bigger disaster” than Hillary Clinton in the White House.

They could both be right. But if social conservatives don’t get their act together, they will be complicit in their own marginalization.

It crossed my mind that a political defeat for the religious right may open their hearts (and mine) to revival.

If that were true and if I’m praying for revival in the USA . . . .

Mennonites in Vietnam

Hanoi officially recognises Baptists and Mennonites

Baptists and Mennonites received yesterday a certificate authorising them to practice their religion in a ceremony in which the Deputy Chief of the Committee for Religious Affairs, Nguyen Thanh Xuan, praised the government’s religious policy, the unofficial Vietnam News reported.

As a Mennonite, that’s interesting news to me.

But please pardon my suspicions: What compromises did they have to make with the Communists to get this certificate?

Two Politicians and the Bible

From New York Times Blog:

In the final moments of the Democratic presidential debate here last night, after nearly two hours of wading through their differences on Iraq, health care, tax policy and a variety of other weighty matters, the candidates were asked a crisp question: What is your favorite Bible verse?

Two answers intrigue me . . . .

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton:

“The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think that’s a good rule for politics, too.”

I wonder how many Clinton targets from over the years are looking a little bug-eyed at that one.

Representative Dennis Kucinich:

“Prayer from St. Francis, which says, ‘Lord make me an instrument of your peace.’ ”

That’s a Bible verse?!

HT: WorldMagBlog

Infidel Footbaths

Here’s the story:

School to provide Muslim students with foot baths

Plans to construct two foot-washing stations continue at the University of Michigan at Dearborn amid concerns that such action would constitute an establishment of religion by the public university.

The 8,700-student school near Detroit, which begins fall classes Tuesday, came under criticism in June when it announced that it would spend about $25,000 on the two foot-washing areas that were requested as an accommodation by a Muslim Student Association’s task force.

[…]

Data from a study of entering freshmen suggest that about 10 percent of students at the university are Muslim, and many have in the past used bathroom sinks for the foot washing, called an ablution, which Islam requires as a purity ritual before its five-times-daily prayers.

[…]

The foot baths, while benefiting Muslim students, are open for use by all students and will be located in two new unisex bathrooms that will be renovated on campus.

My question: Won’t the Muslims refuse to use those footbaths on the basis that they would be ineffective “purifiers” if infidels use them?

And my next question: Won’t Islamic code bar them from unisex bathrooms?

I’d say the university tried to kill too many birds with one stone on this one.

Never Mind the Amish?

I read this over at WizBangBlog: Papers Pull Opus Comic Strip To Avoid Offending Muslims:

Berkely Breathed, the comic genius behind Bloom County and now Opus has notified readers of his Sunday comic that newspapers around the country (including The Washington Post) are pulling his next two strips.

Check out one of the strips here.

This wasn’t pulled to avoid offending the Amish??!!??

Well, perhaps there will yet be a newspaper or two that will rise to the occasion.

(Is that last word spelled correctly?)

Mother Teresa: Behind Her Smile

Time is reporting about Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith:

Mother Teresa: Come Be My LightA new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.”

The poor woman.

I wonder what she learned after she died.

By the way, her name at birth (in what is now Macedonia) was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. According to Wikipedia, “She took her first vows as a nun on 24 May 1931. At that time she chose the name Teresa after the patron saint of missionaries.”

Mennonites and Government Schools

Mennonites may flee Quebec town:

Members of Quebec’s only Mennonite community say they may move to Ontario or New Brunswick so they can keep their children in a private school that suits their religious beliefs.

Fifteen English-speaking Mennonite families in this small community in the Monteregie region say they won’t send their children to government-approved schools, balking at the teaching of evolution, the acceptance of gays and lesbians and low “morality standards.”

They say they are considering relocation out of fear that child-protection officials will seize their children.

Other townspeople here — mostly francophone Catholics — support the primarily English school, deemed illegal by Quebec’s Education Department.

The story continues:

He said about 30 members of the community — young couples and their school-aged children — will have to move before school starts. The others will follow.

News reports last year about unsanctioned schools led to a complaint to the Education Department about the Mennonite school.

Parents were warned they would face legal proceedings if their children aren’t enrolled in sanctioned schools this fall. That could lead to children being taken from families

And this:

In Roxton Falls, the vast majority of non-Mennonites strongly support the school, said the town’s Mayor, Jean-Marie Laplante. This week, he wrote letters to the education department and Education Minister Michelle Courchesne in an effort to save the school.

We’ll see how it all shakes out.

I empathize (or at least sympathize) with my fellow-Mennonites and fellow-parents, but I wonder if Mr. Goosen didn’t overstate his case with this comment:

“It boils down to intolerance to our religion” by education officials, said Ronald Goossen, who in the early 1990s was among the first Mennonites from Manitoba to move to Roxton Falls, a sleepy town on the Riviere Noire, about 100 kilometres east of Montreal.

If they truly fail to meet whatever standards the state has, then change or move or appeal, but please don’t play the intolerance card.

Thanks.

🙂

Above all, love God!
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