Al Kresta's Blog, page 28

Home schooled? Oh you poor, deprived thing

People have the weirdest, dumbest, most illiberal ideas about home-educated students

Sep 10, 2013
The Christians

There are other ways of socialization than high schools This commentary by home schooled New York City high school student Veronica Andreades appeared in the Wall Street Journal Sep. 9, 2013

“You’re home-schooled? That’s bad, right?”

 Another teenager started off a conversation with me that way recently. We’re both actresses, and we were waiting for a theater rehearsal to begin.“Bad? Where did you get that idea?” I replied.“Well, you don’t have any friends, right?”

“I have lots of friends,” I said, laughing to hide my annoyance.

Welcome to the life of a Manhattan home-schooler surrounded by supposedly open-minded liberals. This was hardly the first time I’ve confronted unsolicited comments about going to school at home. Not long ago, after a ballet class (yes, home-schoolers sometimes sign up to study elsewhere), I mentioned in the locker room that I was being educated by my mother. One of the other dancers said: “No offense, but don’t your parents care about you being socialized?”When I asked my mom why she chose to teach me, she said: “I did not want to be at the mercy of my ZIP Code.”

When you’re from a middle-class family supported by a father who is a minister, chances are you aren’t going to live in a wealthy area and therefore in a good school district. I’ve gotten used to seeing pained or perplexed reactions when I talk about going to school in my apartment, as if I’m this nerdy, introverted alien. The truth is that my parents wanted to give me the freedom to pursue my passions so I’d be better prepared for college and career.



 - See more at: http://thechristians.com/?q=node/614&...

Syrian war makes sudden appearance at convent in historic Christian town

SANA/Via EPA - A undated handout picture shows a church in the Maaloula village, northeast of Damascus, Syria.
Fighters from Free Syrian Army units briefly gained control of ancient Christian Maaloula village,
accounting to reports.

By Liz Sly
Washington Post
BEIRUT — High in the mountains above Damascus lies a town so remote that Syria’s war had passed it by, so untouched by time that its inhabitants still speak the language of Jesus.
The violence ravaging the rest of Syria has finally caught up with Maaloula, renowned as the oldest Christian community in the world — and the last in which the same version of Aramaic that prevailed 2,000 years ago is the native tongue. On Sunday, Syrian rebels, including some affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through Maaloula for the second time in four days, after an assault a few days earlier in which the last of its few thousand residents fled and the specter of unchecked violence threatened to convulse the iconic town.
Only a couple of dozen nuns remained, cowering in fear as warplanes screeched overhead, shells exploded and al-Qaeda-linked fighters overran their convent, turning them into witnesses to what may be one of the more extraordinary encounters of the Syrian war.
The monks had fled from their nearby monastery months ago, and even the last two priests who oversaw the affairs of Maaloula’s ancient Mar Takla nunnery took buses out of town last week, leaving the nuns of Maaloula to fend for themselves as the fighters closed in.
With Congress poised to debate President Obama’s proposed military intervention in Syria, the arrival of war in Maaloula illuminates the complexity of a conflict that has defied all attempts at resolution for 21/2 years. The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is just one of the smaller issues at stake in the discussions expected to unfold.Read the rest at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/syrian-war-makes-sudden-appearance-at-convent-in-iconic-christian-town/2013/09/08/18e0a15a-18e0-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html

Today on "Kresta in the Afternoon" - September 11, 2013

Talking about the "things that matter most" on September 11

4:00 – 9/11: What Was Said About The “Clash of Civilations” In The Days After 9/11
In the days after the horror of Sept. 11, 2001 “Kresta in the Afternoon” has a number of guests on the air to analyze the events, Islam, Bin Laden, and what was known as the “clash of civilizations.” In this hour we talk about those very topics and hear clips of some of those interviews with Scott Hahn, Jehan Sadat (wife of the assassinated President of Egypt Anwar Sadat), Geoffrey Wawro (Professor of Military History), Norman Geisler (Islam Scholar), Dr. George Braswell (Professor of World Religions), and the now deceased Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

5:00 – Kresta Comments: President Obama’s Speech to the Nation on Syria and What Constitutes Just War Theory.

5:40 – National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Babies
In September of 1988, over 1,200 children, victims of legal abortion, were laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On September 14, twenty-five years after that burial, their memory—and the memory of all the 55 million children killed by abortion under Roe v. Wade—will be honored at more than 85 gravesites and memorial sites nationwide on the National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children. You can find a memorial service near you at AbortionMemorials.com. National Sponsors Monica Millerand Eric Scheidler join us.

Today on "Kresta in the Afternoon" - September 10, 2013

Talking about the "things that matter most" on September 10
 
4:00 - “Mater Eucharistiae”
The Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist amazed the recording industry with their #1 debut album, Mater Eucharistiae, on both the Classical Overall and Classical Traditional Charts. Heads turned as many labels vied for the top spot and are scrambling to find out the secret behind these sisters' success. We talk about the album with Sr. Mary David and Sr. Maria Suso.
 
5:00 - The Global Public Square: Religious Freedom and the Making of a World Safe for Diversity
How do we live with our deepest differences? In a world torn by religious conflict, the threats to human dignity are terrifyingly real. Some societies face harsh government repression and brutal sectarian violence, while others are divided by bitter conflicts over religion's place in public life. Is there any hope for living together peacefully? Os Guinness argues that the way forward for the world lies in promoting freedom of religion and belief for people of all faiths and none. He sets out a vision of a civil and cosmopolitan global public square, and how it can be established by championing the freedom of the soul—the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience and religion. In particular he calls for leadership that has the courage to act on behalf of the common good. Far from utopian, this constructive vision charts a course for the future of the world. Soul freedom is not only a shining ideal but a dire necessity and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of our time. We can indeed maximize freedom and justice and learn to negotiate deep differences in public life. For a world desperate for hope at a critical juncture of human history, here is a way forward, for the good of all. Os joins us.

"Has Anyone Wept?": Pope Francis and the Cry for Peace

6th Sep 2013         
by Kathryn Jean Lopez
Catholic Pulse

Pope Francis has called on Catholics around the world and “other Christian brethren,” “brethren of other religions,” and “men and women of good will” to join him in fasting and prayer this weekend. As the United States debates military strikes against Syria, the Holy Father pleads for peace.

As he did when going to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in July, where refugees from the “Arab Spring” have been pouring in as they flee the violence and turmoil of their native lands, Pope Francis is speaking from the depths of his heart, expressing the pain of the Divine Heart, at what we are doing here. Those horrific images of children, women, and men suffering and dying from the effects of chemical weapons used in Syria have provoked a lively debate about what we can do to stop the horror. We can’t look away. And yet, what is the justice served by a military strike against Syria?

What are the lessons of that failed “Spring,” of interventions and non-interventions of the recent past? According to Church teaching on “just war,” military action must always be a last resort, not simply a “Hail Mary pass” hoping for a positive outcome.

In his appeal, Pope Francis said:

I appeal strongly for peace, an appeal which arises from the deep within me. How much suffering, how much devastation, how much pain has the use of arms carried in its wake in that martyred country, especially among civilians and the unarmed! I think of many children will not see the light of the future! With utmost firmness I condemn the use of chemical weapons: I tell you that those terrible images from recent days are burned into my mind and heart. There is a judgment of God and of history upon our actions which are inescapable! Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake. War begets war, violence begets violence.

The pope’s own “Hail Mary pass,” of course, is so much more than that, and involves actual Hail Marys — pleading prayers to our Blessed Mother, the Mother of God, who lived a mother’s worst pain and who walks with us in prayer as our immaculate model of doing God’s will in the midst of the world. The pope turns the world to focus on she who leads us straight to her Son, whose life, death, and Resurrection offer us the promise of eternal peace with Him. And the pope calls us to pray together this weekend as we remember the birth of Mary, Queen of Peace.
This weekend, in particular, Pope Francis asks:

Let us ask Mary to help us to respond to violence, to conflict and to war, with the power of dialogue, reconciliation and love. She is our mother: may she help us to find peace; all of us are her children! Help us, Mary, to overcome this most difficult moment and to dedicate ourselves each day to building in every situation an authentic culture of encounter and peace. Mary, Queen of Peace, pray for us!

We urge you to read the rest at:  http://www.catholicpulse.com/cp/en/columnists/lopez/090613.html

"Your Young Men Will See Visions"

   This is a YouTube copy of a CBN video from February 6, 2013 reporting how vast numbers in the Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, are seeing visions of Jesus and quietly converting to Christianity – in countries where for centuries the penalty for renouncing Islam has been death. More information on TheChristians.com April 9, 2013.  - See more at: http://thechristians.com/?q=node/612&...

Whither the Idea of God?

September 6, 2013
by Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
 

The trouble with atheists, some wag once wrote, is that they are always talking about God. How endlessly they obsess about him! And what strikes one straightaway about the sheer mind-numbing attention they pay to God, including especially the problems posed by us benighted folk who persist in believing in him, is that it so oddly testifies to the fact that he really does exist.
 They are in very good company, by the way, since lots of non-atheists feel the same way. Of course, some of them are actually talking to God. It is, after all, the single most fateful human question we all face, taking us, as Pascal liked to say, by the throat. The esteemed Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, for example, in a seminal series of lectures delivered at Yale University in 1962 called The Problem of God, reminds us that nothing and no one can claim exemption from the God Question. “The whole man,” he tells us, “—as intelligent and free, as a body, a psychic apparatus, and a soul—is profoundly engaged both in the position of the problem and its solution. In fact, he is in a real sense a datum of the problem itself, and his solution of it has personal consequences that touch every aspect of his conduct, character, and consciousness.”

So there is no escaping the business, it being the net in which all of us are caught. Yet for all that the atheists lay claim to having seized the intellectual high ground in the debate, what finally drives them is not an argument about God at all. What is fundamentally determinative of their position, in other words, is not the result of an abstract intelligence in cool and clinical possession of its faculties, looking straight on at a problem solely in light of the evidence presented. It really hasn’t got anything to do with what’s under the hood. But rather an act of the will that is already and ferociously directed against God. Only after having decided to kill God, as it were, do they then set about finding reasons to justify his non-existence. “There are indeed philosophies that are atheist,” explains Fr. Murray, “in the sense that they are incompatible with faith in God. But they are reached only by a will to atheism. This will, and the affirmation into which it is translated (‘There is no God’), are the inspiration of these philosophies, not a conclusion from them.”

So one first decides that there is no God. Then one constructs the discourse needed in order to defend the decision. A bit like despising the neighbor next door whom you hadn’t even met, then going on to announce that, in addition to being despicable, he also doesn’t exist. People who steal a base like that, it seems to me, need to be called out on the matter.

Read the rest here: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/whither-the-idea-of-god?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

Reassessing Recent USCCB Statements on Public Policy

September 5, 2013
by Stephen M. Krason
Crisis Magazine
 

Many faithful Catholics know that for decades the U.S. bishops conference and its bureaucratic arm have often been criticized for their statements about public questions and issues. The statements have at times seemed to line up too readily with politically liberal positions, been overly specific, too focused on public policy solutions, and unduly restrictive of lay options. The problem was documented thirty years ago by J. Brian Benestad’s Pursuit of a Just Social Order: Policy Statements of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, 1966-80. To be sure, the bishops have taken a much more restrained stance since the 1980s, when the whole matter came to a head with the controversial statements on war and peace (The Challenge of Peace) and the economy (Economic Justice for All). It had been argued that the conference was too much influenced and deferential to its left-leaning staffers. There have in the last few years been encouraging changes in the USCCB’s staff, however.
 Still, the positions taken by the USCCB on some leading current public questions show a need to examine more the complexity of some issues and to give sufficient emphasis to all the leading principles of Catholic social teaching and not over-embellish just certain ones.

For example, during the health care debate of 2009-10, the conference seemed to focus most of its attention on the abortion coverage issue. On one hand, this is understandable since the human life issues remain the crucial moral question of our time and the bishops no doubt remembered the strong Clinton push to include abortion in his 1993 national health insurance proposal. In a statement early in 2011 after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), the USCCB clearly indicated that it supported the law in general but opposed its final passage because of its failure to prohibit the use of public funds for abortion and its providing of subsidies for health care plans that cover elective abortion. It also lamented the lack of conscience protections and the fact that immigrant families would not be able to purchase plans in the new health care exchanges. The bishops’ support for access to decent health care for everyone in the U.S. was commendable—after all, Pope John XXIII had listed medical care as one of the components of the right to life in his encyclical Pacem in Terris (#11)—but their readiness to embrace a federal government solution was problematical.

Their moral analysis needed to go further. What about subsidiarity, one of the central principles of Catholic social teaching? In his classic formulation of that principle in Quadragesimo Anno (#79), Pope Pius XI stated that, “to transfer to the larger and higher collectivity functions which can be performed and provided for by lesser and subordinate bodies” is “a grave evil and a disturbance of right order.” Adherence to subsidiarity, then, is a moral question. While there are certainly serious problems with American health care, especially concerning costs, it can hardly be said that our relatively decentralized health care arrangements have been a failure and vast numbers are denied needed medical care. John J. Schrems of Villanova University, a leading scholarly authority on subsidiarity, says that before taking on a task, the higher or more distant unit—in health care it’s the federal government—must prove that the lower levels cannot perform it satisfactorily and that it can do better. Clearly, such a showing has not been made, and absent that the morality of the entire matter of a larger federal health care role must be called into question. It would also have been helpful to emphasize the proper relationship between subsidiarity and the principle of solidarity. Left-of-center Catholics frequently mention solidarity to defend big welfare-statist initiatives. Solidarity involves brotherhood and insuring justice for all. It does not justify the subversion of subsidiarity; these principles must both be upheld and work together. Pope John Paul II specifically criticized the welfare state in Centesimus Annus (#48-49); the principle of solidarity cannot be used to justify it.

Read the rest here: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/reassessing-recent-usccb-statements-on-public-policy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

Iran Aggressively Recruiting ‘Invisible Army’ of Latin American Converts to Infiltrate U.S. Through ‘Soft Belly’ of the Southern Border

Sep. 3, 2013 2:51pmSara CarterThe Blaze Iran is recruiting an “invisible army” of revolutionary sympathizers in Latin America to infiltrate the U.S. through the “soft belly” of the southern border, U.S. officials and national security experts told TheBlaze. And they’re using one website in particular to do it. The Iranian regime’s conversion efforts are becoming increasingly aggressive, especially over the Internet, with the goal of conducting operations against United States interests in the Western Hemisphere, according to U.S. government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the nature of their work in the region. Iranian President Hassan Rowhani, middle, attends a session of the Assembly of Experts in Tehran on Sept. 3, 2013. Iran’s Assembly of Experts is a body that selects the supreme leader and supervises his activities. (Getty Images)Islamoriente.com, which focuses on religion and politics, is one of Iran’s main recruitment and conversion websites for Latin America on the Internet, TheBlaze has learned. The site, which launched in 2008, includes links to Iranian television for Spanish speakers, anti-American news stories, essays on reasons to convert to Islam, chat rooms and a personal message from the Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. Even as President Barack Obama waits for Congress to make a decision on Syria, the Iranian website wastes no time and has no shortage of stories ridiculing the U.S. administration for threatening to strike President Bashar Assad’s regime, a staunch ally of Iran. Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and expert in Iranian affairs, said Iran’s focus on Hispanic converts is a new evolution in Iranian operations in Latin America. Phillips said Khamanei’s message titled “The Importance of Work and the Nobility of the Worker” in Islam, is significant because the Ayatollah is “normally a background player in these sorts of efforts and doesn’t usually play such a public role.”

Read the rest at: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/03/iran-aggressively-recruiting-invisible-army-of-latin-american-converts-to-infiltrate-u-s-through-southern-border/

‘Vegetative’ patients can hear those bedside discussions about them

A shocking experiment reveals that they not only hear but understand and respond

Sep 6, 2013
The Christians
             
Functional MRI scans show people in ‘vegetative’ states can answer questions and even play tennis in their mind. There is something disturbing about medical terminology that associates humans with vegetables. Now, according to new research, some patients that doctors have long described as being in a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) – inert but living victims of major brain injury – may actually be acutely aware of their circumstances. Using imaging technology they can even answer questions about who and where they are.

Researchers at Western University in Ontario, Canada scanned the brains of three brain-injured patients using functional MRI technology, and reported their startling findings in JAMA Nature in August. One has been classified PVS for 12 years, and the other two were classified as in a “minimally conscious state” (MCS).

Yet the MRI scans showed that all three could focus and follow instructions in the same way as healthy controls. Two of the patients could respond accurately to yes/no questions such as “Is your name Steven?” and “Are you in a supermarket?” and “Are you in a hospital?” (One patient was not questioned.)

“The patient’s brain activity in the communication scans not only further corroborated that he was, indeed, consciously aware but also revealed that he had far richer cognitive resources than could be assumed based on his clinical diagnosis,” the study says.

Is that why they scream?

The researchers believe it is the first study of its kind to “communicate” with mentally non-responsive patients. Indeed, the findings horrifyingly suggest that a large number – thousands – of the hundreds of thousands of PVS and MCS patients that hospital staff have treated over time could hear and comprehend discussions it was assumed they could not. It also explains why some of them cry, smile, and scream without apparent reason.

Some have even survived to describe the horror. Kate Adamson’s book recounts the agony of being nearly starved to death, and operated on without adequate anaesthesia, because doctors misdiagnosed her unresponsiveness after a stroke as unawareness and decided to end her life by starvation – a common enough decision in hospitals.

- See more at: http://thechristians.com/?q=node/607&...