STAND, the Student Anti Genocide Coalition, is discussing Kaylin Wainwright’s Acton commentary about Darfur and campus activism on its blog.
STAND, which says it has founded 700 chapters, answers Kaylin’s criticisms about campus “slacktivism” by pointing to its effective engagement on the Darfur issue. The PowerBlog takes no stand on STAND. We’re just glad that considerations about effectiveness are being discussed by activist groups.
For your reading pleasure, I present you with a partial list of defendants from the case of Riches v. Bush et al:
George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton, James Hoffa, www.google.com, Pope Benedict XVI, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, John Deere, www.accuweather.com, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, Roc-A-Fella Records, Shawn Carter (doing business at Jay-Z), Japan’s Nikkei Stock Exchange, Gambino (crime family), Three Mile Island, Tony Danza, Islamic Republic of Iran, University of Miami, GEICO Insurance, Jewish State of Israel, Soledad O’Brien, Tsunami victims, The American Red Cross, Jessica Alba, Charles Moose, al-Qaida Islamic Arm,Fruit of A-Loom [sic], Outback Steakhouse, Donald J. Trump, Chris Berman, Shawn John Combs (doing business as Puff Daddy, doing business as Mr. Ditty [sic]), Vincent K. McMahon, Meals on Wheels, Saddam Hussein, Jewish workers at NBC/Universal, Elizabeth Smart, The Panama Canal Commission, Kelly Clarkston [sic], 13 tribes of Israel, Plato, Lincoln Memorial, Boris Becker, Various Buddhist monks, Christina Applegate, Jewish Mossad, National Vanguard Books, Mein Kampf, Venus Williams, Medieval Times, Denny’s, Brotherhood of the Snake, Larry King, Larry King Live 9 p.m., Rastafarian natives, National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Ulluminati [sic], Wu-Tang Clan, Wu Wear Inc., Nordic gods, The Da Vinci Code, Sears Tower, Mike Tyson, Native American Fish Society, Green Bay’s Lambeau Field, Pizza Hut, Ming Dynasty, Barry Bonds, Gangs in Hong Kong, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, National Hockey League Players’ Association, Philadelphia Eagles (2005 roster, including Donovan McNabb), The Waffle House …
…and it goes on. And on. And ON. Be sure to download the whole pdf document, grab a cup of coffee, and prepare for 57 pages of the most amazing defendant list ever compiled in human history.
Many students who identify as Evangelical Christians and attend a state or public university are reporting severe bias against their beliefs in the classroom. “Tenured Bigots,” is the title of Mark Bergin’s article in World Magazine which highlights statistical proof of enormous prejudice by faculty members against evangelicals.
As one might infer from Lord Acton’s maxim, the question has been raised: Did proximity to political power corrupt Billy Graham’s chaplaincy to the presidency?
GetReligion’s Douglas LeBlanc surveys the recent attention paid by the mainstream media to this part of Graham’s pastoral mission, and concludes in concord with Randall Balmer, “The gospel is better served when religious leaders keep a healthy distance from political power. The challenge for future presidents will be to find spiritual guidance and solace from someone else — preferably from ministers who have no national profile, and do not seek one.”
“Martyrdom means a great deal to Orthodox people,” writes historian James Billington in “The Orthodox Frontier of Faith,” an essay collected in “Orthodoxy and Western Culture,” a volume of essays published in honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005).
The 20th Century’s first genocide, the Armenian genocide, began with terror and massacres in the late 19th century and culminated in the great destruction of Christian minorities at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915-1918. Some 1.5 million Armenian Christians perished, according to Armenian sources. With the Russian Revolution and the rise of totalitarian communism, the martrydom of Christians took on unprecedented proportions in the gulags, killing fields and the famines that resulted from forced collectivization of farming.
Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a historian who has written several books on Russian culture, cites figures showing that “something like 70 percent of all Christian martyrs were created in the twentieth century, and the largest number of those were in Russia. Religious persecution was quite ecumenical; all religions suffered. However, since Orthodoxy was the main religion of the USSR, it suffered specially. The same Russian expanses that saw amazing frontier missionary activity in the early modern period suffered enormous devastation in the twentieth century when millions of people disappeared in the frozen wastes of the North and the East. The concentration camps were spread across almost exactly the same places – often using the monasteries for prisons.”
The world will never know all of the names of the millions of New Martyrs, as they are known to the Church, who perished under Communism, an oppression that lasted for most of the 20th Century. But their martyria, their witness, will be forever known to God.
In Russia this week, according to AP, “Russian Orthodox priests consecrated a wooden cross Wednesday at a site south of Moscow where firing squads executed thousands of people 70 years ago at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges. Created at a monastery that housed one of the first Soviet labor camps and brought by barge to Moscow along a canal built on the bones of gulag inmates, the 40-foot cross has been embraced as memorial to the mass suffering under Stalin.”
Noticeably absent, the article said, were representatives of President Vladimir Putin’s government. “This is in keeping with efforts by … Putin, a former KGB officer, to restore Russians’ pride in their Soviet-era history by softening the public perception of Stalin’s rule,” wrote reporter Bagila Bukharbayeva. Nostalgia for the Soviet era? Read remarks on the subject by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his recent Der Spiegel interview.
The site consecrated to the Russian martyrs this week marked the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s Great Purge, when millions were labeled “enemies of the state” and executed without trial or sent to labor camps. The Butovo range was used for executions in the 1930s and until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Some 20,000 people, including priests and artists, were killed there in 1937-38 alone. “We have been ordered to be proud of our past,” said Yan Rachinsky from Memorial, a non-governmental group dedicated to investigating Stalin’s repression. “I know no other example in history when 700,000 people were killed within 1 1/2 years only for political reasons.”
Follow the link below to read the entire report on the memorial to victims of Stalin’s Purge. Read more on The New Martyrs…
The Washington Times reviews Acton’s Call of the Entrepreneur today in an article titled “Capitalist Calling”:
The Acton Institute hopes the documentary will crush the popular myth of business as a “zero-sum game.”
A new film titled “Things of the Spirit,” takes a fresh look at the life and presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge, understandably, received renewed interest during the Reagan era of American politics. Coolidge is perhaps best known for his laissez-faire economic policies and the famed moniker, “Silent Cal.” What makes “Things of the Spirit” different is that it’s produced by a self avowed “liberal filmmaker,” John Karol.
Der Spiegel has published a far ranging interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in which the great writer “discusses Russia’s turbulent history, Putin’s version of democracy and his attitude to life and death.” It is very much worth the read. Once again, you come away from an encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s thought and marvel at his courage, his dedication to his art, and the almost indestructible quality of this man, now 88.
Michael Gerson’s “What Matters About Romney’s Religion” in today’s Washington Post:
There is a long tradition of American leaders who believe that religion is so personal it shouldn’t even affect their private lives. But this rigid separation between religious conviction and public policy lies outside the main current of American history. Abraham Lincoln’s theology, while hardly orthodox, was not his “own private affair.” “Nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness,” he asserted, “was sent into the world to be trodden on.” Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that to find the source of our rights, “it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given.”
And this:
The speaker for the Seventeenth Acton Institute Annual Dinner is former Estonian Prime Minister, Dr. Mart Laar. One of the economic reforms Laar implemented in Estonia was a flat tax. After what was described as a brilliant economic turnaround, other countries have followed Estonia’s lead on flat tax policies and free market policies in general. Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania, and Macedonia also have flat taxes for income.
