Recently in Religion Category

or you may cause goyim to think you've got a bomb in those small boxes. Pretty remarkable story, makes me think of the novels of Chaim Potok that had a lasting imprint on me in high school:

On Thursday, a flight from La Guardia was diverted after a bomb scare. One of the passengers, a Jewish teenager, was doing his morning prayers and it alarmed the flight attendant. Not because of the prayers, per se, but because of the tefillin he was using. Based on passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy, Orthodox Jews use two small square boxes with straps attached to them and place on on the head and tie the other to the arm. Inside the boxes are parchment with Scripture.

Like Cathy Grossman at USA Today, I think this is a good example of the need for religious literacy than this unfortunate incident.

I found the New York Times piece about this story fascinating. The article is incredibly sympathetic to the flight attendants and pilot who decided to ground the plane.

Hitchens, reviewing the brilliant book by Oriana Fallaci on Islam written when she was stricken with cancer, famously called it in his Atlantic review (look just past the large, drop case "H"), "a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam," just before he began writing a book that one could describe similarly--but about Christianity. Ggod Is Not Great? Sheez!

The arrogance and inconsistency, Mr. Hitchens! It's all right for you to spit at Christianity, but when a fellow atheist--a journalist who was even braver than you, and you are indeed brave (though my military training indicates I'd have lasted longer being waterboarded than you)--does the same to Islam in a manner you find disconcerting. Well, what of it?

I like Michael Medved's review of  Hitchens's book better than the well-known Michael Kinsley one in the NYT. Medved, a man of probity and wisdom, asks a devastating rhetorical question:

1. Some 24 years ago Hitchens abandoned his British homeland and chose to make his life in the United States. This April, he proudly took the oath as a naturalized American citizen at the Jefferson Memorial. He has written movingly and persuasively of his love for his adopted country--despite the fact that throughout its history the people of the United States have proven notably more committed to their predominantly Christian faith than their Western European counterparts. A previous visiting journalist named Alexis de Tocqueville described America as "a nation with the soul of a church" and Hitchens conceded that to this day more Americans engage in regular prayer and Bible study than do the citizens of any other advanced Western nation. If religion indeed "poisons everything" then why has it so pointedly failed to poison the United States - producing, instead, a nation that Hitchens himself openly prefers to any other? [emphasis min]

He summarizes the book, which I have read, as follows:

At least Catholicism in Ireland. Here's a remarkable Chicago Tribune article from 2006. Simply mesmerizing. I bet you never realized how fast the Roman Catholic Church tanked there in response to documented cases of the covering up of child sex abuses.

Here's the final nail in the coffin, if you were to ask me. How long can Ireland continue importing African priests to minister to empty pews? Secularism can occur with amazing swiftness. Wales, for example, went from being predominantly Christian with the majority attending weekly church to overwhelmingly secular in a remarkably short period of time. Something like twenty years. Just amazing. Without Christianity, though, the West stops being coherent, what it once was. Much of what's wrong with it results from this. Notice how ersatz religious crusades are made by the left. Global warming has been hysterically proclaimed with huge gaps in the purported scholarship, for example. The computer models can't even account for documented weather patterns of the past.

Too, if Ireland can't make it, what makes you think America will? I happen to work at an all-boys' boarding school for a Catholic religious order. It's been a wonderful experience for the past twelve years. But now it's up in the air because of the possibility of unspeakable abuse by the order's founder, now deceased, who was called "Our Father" in Spanish during his lifetime and considered a living saint. It turns out he may have preyed on young boys under his tutelage and then, at some point in his life, turned to young girls. It's all so vile that if contained in a novel I would reflexively accuse the author of an egregious bias. Simply put, one can't make this stuff up.

If one accepts the allegation that the West faces a civilizational conflict with Islam, then one needs to worry. How can secularism defeat a religion that apotheosizes death? Secularism is more of an interregnum. We suspect that it's the religious who are the ones who have a disproportionate number of the children. It may be too much d-mn work and expense without being of that frame of mind.

I think not; it's about time. Now when will John Brendan McCormick, the bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, do the same to ultra abortion rights Catholic Protestant Jeanne Shaheen?

Maybe a stronger moral stand like Bishop Tobin's will cause confused and imprudent Catholics to lean more heavily to Republicans in states where they have large numbers. Notwithstanding this, however, some have swung to the Democratic side. I'm thinking of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Massachusetts is a lost cause.

HT: Lucianne. Some of the comments, which will only be available for several days, are very interesting. Here's one that I particularly like:

Reply 33 - Posted by: muggy, 11/22/2009 8:26:29 AM    
I love this from the AP:

"The decision by the outspoken prelate..."

I guess it's "outspoken" these days for any institution to stick to its values and mores.

Respective founders of two communions. Ouch.

I tell you, I'm just chomping at the bit to attend a traditional Anglican service, which promises to have much more elevated language and decorum than my liberal local parish where on Respect Life Sunday my priest went off on an impassioned plea against the death penalty. Catholics can still debate that. Anyway, it hasn't been administered for decades and decades and decades in this diocese, but every year innocent unborn babies get...