Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

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Just a friendly reminder in case you have not ordered our AD 2012 Calendar of the Christian Year! Click on the ad at the top of this page....and order. We'll do the rest.

Does God Care Who Wins in Sports?

And especially football? This is an interesting article by NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton, about faith inside football. It's a light topic, but interesting given all the write ups about Tim Tebow (which is why the WSJ ran this, of course). It's just a game.

Seriously? Disability Checks for Pedophiles?

According to the Greek Reporter, the Greek government is cutting back on welfare checks for the usual needy recipients while at the same time expanding qualified recipient categories to include pedophiles, theives, arsonsist, and masochists. (Pedophiles are now called "minor-attracted individualists" in the U.S.) Everyone's disabled in some sense, right? Government handouts for everyone?

On the Ministerial Exception SCOTUS Case

Here are some informative comments on the Supreme Court's decision on the ministerial exception case which would affect religious institutions and their hiring.

A summary from an earlier posting:

The third and final opinion for today was in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, which the Chief Justice announced for a unanimous Court. The Court reversed the decision of the Sixth Circuit.  It held that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bar suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches, claiming termination in violation of employment discrimi­nation laws. Moreover, because the respondent in this case was a minister within the meaning of the minis­terial exception, the First Amendment requires dismissal of her em­ployment discrimination suit against her religious employer. Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion. Justice Alito also filed a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Kagan.

Peretz & Religion & Politicians

This article by Martin Peretz of The New Republic has something to offend everyone, though it's title makes a good point: "Enough Hand-Wringing About the Republicans and Religion." Beyond that, it wanders far and wide and ends up in Israel. Mr. Peretz is not happy, and Israel is still "the problem." Iran was supposed to have been fairly easy to deal with by just sitting down and talking, but it's certainly more of a threat than it was a few years ago as they move toward nuclear weapons.

Redneck Math: Numerous Numbers

I do like this blog by Bobby Winters, Redneck Math. Maybe it's the science/math side of my brain. People just look at me weird when I say I like to study liturgical texts and quantum physics, science and Byzantine chant. I like his touches of humor as well:

The Psalmist asked the timeless question “What is man?” thousands of years ago. The answers have come back in many forms.  Darwin said man is an animal; Freud said man is a sick animal. Others would say that man is an animal sick enough to care about math.

A Theology of Bullying: From the Mouth of a Six Year Old

The public schools are going all out to stop bullying these days.  My children both attend a public elementary school, so I hear a lot about it.  

Yesterday, though, my six year old daughter put together what she is hearing in school with what she has learned about the Christian faith.  I was astonished and touched by the truth and clarity of it.

Sitting across the kitchen table while I read and she did her homework, she said, "You shouldn't be a bully because God didn't make you to be mean to people. He made you so people wouldn't be lonely."

In Israel, Christian population has lowest growth rate, report says

By Judith Sudilovsky

Jerusalem, 9 January (ENInews)--Christians have the lowest growth rate among the Israeli population, according to an Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics report released on 6 January.

According to the report, the Christian growth rate of 0.9 percent compares to the Jewish rate of 1.7 percent and the 2.7 percent growth rate among Muslims. Christian Arabs have a growth rate of one percent while the rate among non-Arab Christians is 0.7 percent.

About 154,000 Christians live in Israel, constituting 2 percent of the population, according to the bureau.

The percentage of Christians in Israel has remained relatively stable since the mid-1980's, noted Wadie Abunassar, director of the International Center for Consultations and a consultant for the Jerusalem Center for Christian-Jewish relations.

About 80 percent of Christians living in Israel are Arabs, with the remainder mainly Christians who immigrated to Israel with Jewish members of their families under the Law of Return, which allows any proven Jewish person to immigrate to Israel, and their children born in Israel.

The estimated birth rate for Christian women is also the lowest among the religious groups. The average number of children expected to be born to a Christian woman is 2.1, compared to a Muslim woman (3.8), a Jewish woman (3.0) and a Druze woman (2.5).

But though their relative numbers in Israeli society are low, Christian Arab students consistently have the highest success rates on matriculation examinations for certificates that meet the admission requirements for universities compared to other sectors of Israeli society, including Muslim, Druze and Jewish students.

According to the report, in the 2010 school year, 63 percent of Christian 12th grade students earned a matriculation certificate compared with 46 percent of Muslims, 55 percent of Druze, and 58 percent of Jewish students. [copyright ENI, reprinted by permission]

We Hit Our Goal!

With a lot of help from our Friends--we hit our fundraising goal of $157,000, counting checks dated 2011 and gifts made online in 2011! Many thanks to all! Every gift DID make a difference!

Join Allan Carlson for Lunch, Wed. Jan. 11

Please join The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and the World Congress of Families in a Roundtable Lunch, our venue for discussion on important questions.

Wednesday, January 11, 12 noon at the Rockford University Club, 945 North Main Street.

Leading us at this Roundtable Lunch will be Dr. Allan C. Carlson, President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and Founder and International Secretary of the World Congress of Families. Dr. Carlson will speak about his newly published book, Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control 1873-1973.

Luncheon: $15 for Howard Center Members; $25 for Non-Members ($10 for students – free for students if they bring a written question for Dr. Carlson)

Payable in advance or at the door by cash, check or credit card.

The Howard Center  • 934 North Main Street • Rockford, IL 61103

A Q&A Discussion Session will follow the presentation.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, January 10, 2012 to Judy Hodge at The Howard Center. Phone: 815.964.5819 • Fax: 815.965.1826 • Email:  media@worldcongress.org

Donations above the cost of the lunch are always appreciated.

Jewish Take on Steve Jobs' Final Utterance

This is an interesting article at aish.com, short for Aish Ha-Torah, which means Fire of the Torah. Can anyone read numerous accounts of people dying and interview the witnesses, as well as those who have had near-death experiences, and still remain a materialist who believes in nothing after death?

Translating the Times on Abortion

From the Opinion pages of the New York Times:

"But voters should not be fooled. The assault on women’s reproductive health is a central part of the Republican agenda. It is not too early for Democrats to point that out."

Translation: "In case you missed it, the Republicans are committed to changing laws that place no restrictions whatsoever on any abortions ever, anywhere, at anytime."

Counterpoint: "Voters should realize that the continued assault [and its funding] on children in the womb without restriction is a central part of this newpaper's agenda. It is never too late to realize this and point it out."

Born Alive Infants Protection & Weirdness

It is disturbing, if not at all surprising, that its okay in the mainstream media to call really "weird" Rick Santorum (and his wife) for taking home from the hospital their baby who was supposed to die within a couple of hours after birth. As others have pointed out, it might strike an alien as "weird" that families "wake" the dead and have a corpse laid out in a coffin for a day or two in one's own home before burying the departed. How strange is that? Such a thing is increasingly strange to a society that no longer has a coherent way of dealing with life and death--some say you have the right to kill yourself, or kill a very sick relative, or kill your baby as long as the baby is still inside the womb, or to kill a baby after birth if he is in some sense deformed, or to kill a baby within a certain window after birth if the parents decide not to "keep it," to dispose of a body after death by incineration without having a "wake" with the body beforehand, to dispose of a body after death by chopping it up for various scientific purposes (with or without wake), to dispose of the mortal remains by cremation and scattering the ashes, to save the ashes in an urn, kept at home, to "inter" the urn in a mausoleum, or grave, or to bury the body in a grave, crypt, and so on. Just what view of human life, of infants who die soon after birth, of death and proper burial and customs, is operative for those who call what the Santorums did to say goodbye to their dead child "weird"? What would you have done, and please tell us, exactly, why? Do you have any principles on this topic that you'd care to share? Or is okay that different people have different customs and rituals? But some are okay to mock? Can we scrutinize your

And why isn't it considered disturbing that one would oppose care to an infant born alive from an abortion? On surviving of abortion, hear the story of Gianna Jessen.

And Mark Steyn writes in his column:

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

At some distant point in the future of the West, historians will note that at a certain point, Westerners started killing their own offspring by the MILLIONS, year in and year out, and lost any serious commitment to family and marriage as institutions upon which society rested. They were at the same time oblivious to the consequences of such a suicidal development, heedless of well-reasoned warnings, and even mocked people of good conscience who believed that every child conceived has a inalienable right to life, and that children are best raised within an intact family with their biological mothers and fathers. Such beliefs critical of the Sexual Revolution of Death were labeled as "fringe" and "extreme" by those bent on the path to societal extinction. 

Hansel & Gretel: No Angels, Food Instead

One of my favorite piano pieces when I took lessons in grade school was a simplified version of the Children's Prayer from Humperdinck's Hansel & Gretel. In the opera, if you will allow me to quote Wikipedia, Act Two concludes with these two scenes: 

Scene 2
The little Sandman, who has just walked out of the forest, tells the children that he loves them dearly, and that he has come to put them to sleep. He puts grains of sand into their eyes, and as he leaves they can barely keep their eyes open. Gretel reminds Hansel to say their evening prayer, and after they pray, they fall asleep on the forest floor.

Scene 3
Fourteen angels come out and arrange themselves around the children to protect them as they sleep. They are presented with a gift. The forest is filled with an intense light as the curtain falls.

Today, on FM radio's Live at the Met program, Humperdinck's Hansel & Gretel is being performed and apparently getting a makeover, which is common enough in restaging plays, operas, etc. But there is one makeover that is particularly disappointing: instead of fourteen angels coming to the aid of the children, in the Met's version today 14 chefs arrive to serve the children food--in their dreams, of course. The quiet substitution of angels for chefs? Oh, it doesn't warrant an article or a book, but since blogs are for comments, here's one, or at least a question: What went through the minds of those who decided to ditch the angels and bring on the food? Anything? Just a inspiration, an idea, an attempt to liven things up a bit? For a culture in which one can't really believe in angels publicly, some consumerist substitution will do. But, really--14 chefs for 2 children? That's a lot of food. What kind of "message" is that? Where are the obesity activists when you need them? Oh, yeah, I need to lighten up.

"Satan is Real"

I read this review this morning at WSJ--it's a whole different world to me, that gospel and "country music" and, in the case of the Louvin brothers, its "washed in the blood sound." It's something I've never been able to understand, why some men routinely beat their children and/or their wives. I've read that beaters usually grew up seeing their mothers beaten, or were themselves beaten. Ira Louvin was a case. "Died in an automobile accident" is one of those phrases that doesn't tell half the story, which I suspect is the case in his story as well.

St. Cedd's Chapel at Bradwell-on-Sea, A.D. 654

Today is an old traditional date for commemoration of St. Cedd, an English saint (brother of St. Chad), who was educated under the care of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne. In reading about him today in the Orthodox Synaxawrion, I discovered that a church that he built in 654 still stands, called Chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex. Cedd was at the Synod of Whitby in 664 as a translator for the Irish. He was given land at Lastingham (Yorkshire) and built a monastery there. He is also commemorated on October 26, the date of his death. He is erroneously described in some sources as bishop of London.

Video Now Available for Conference on Science & Faith

Talks given last fall at Stuebenville on Science & Faith: Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?, are now available for viewing here. Speakers include Michael Behe, Stephen Barr, Jay Richards, Edward Feser, William E. Carroll, Benjamin Wiker, and Alvin Plantiga.

Christian Persecution: Worst Countries

Open Doors posted this on January 2, listing the countries where Christians face the most persecution. North Korea tops the list, again. An excerpt:

While many thought the Arab Spring would bring increased freedom, including religious freedom for minorities, that certainly has not been the case so far.

In July 2011 southern Sudan, which is mostly Christian, seceded to become an independent country, called South Sudan, leaving the Christians of North Sudan much more isolated under President Omar al-Bashir. In response to the loss of the south, al-Bashir vowed to make constitutional changes to make his country even more Islamic. On the ground the military has attacked Christian communities in battles over resources with many being killed.

What DOES Iowa Say About the Religious Right?

Richard Land has this to say about what the results in Iowa say, at WSJ. Further, he notes for future reference about the course of the election this year:

Will Mr. Romney's Mormonism be a negative factor for evangelicals? It will for some, but remember that in Iowa the 60% of voters who identified themselves as evangelicals gave 42% of their votes to a Mormon (Mr. Romney) or a Catholic (Messrs. Santorum and Gingrich), while giving only 38% of their vote to fellow Protestants (Messrs. Perry and Paul and Mrs. Bachmann). So much for narrow denominational prejudices.

I agree with the assessment that few Christians nowadays will base their vote on the religious affiliation of the candidate. The VIEWS are what matter most, and there has been a major, albeit decades-long realignment taking place across denominational lines. If someone says they are a Catholic, an Orthodox, a Lutheran, a Baptist, you have to ask, even if you aren't thinking politics (which should most of the time....): Yes, but what sort of Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Baptist are you? "Christian" doesn't mean what it used to, and the churches (and the nation) are no longer what they were. We are in the midst of continue social and political upheavel, and there are no prophets to tell us where the road is taking us. Commonsense is all we have left as far as that goes.

Santorum "the Weirdo"....

Peter Wehner writes at Commentary about a sick attack on the Rick Santorum family for the way they handled the death of their child, who was stillborn.