Category: News and Events

A round up of news:

Statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation
October 29, 2011
Washington, DC

The Plight of Churches in the Middle East

The “Arab Spring” is unleashing forces that are having a devastating effect on the Christian communities of the Middle East. Our Churches in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine report disturbing developments such as destruction of churches and massacres of innocent civilians that cause us grave concern. Many of our church leaders are calling Christians and all people of good will to stand in solidarity with the members of these ancient indigenous communities. In unity with them and each other, we the members of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, gathered October 27-29, 2011, add our voice to their call.

We are concerned for our fellow Christians who, in the face of daunting challenges, struggle to maintain a necessary witness to Christ in their homelands. United with them in prayer and solidarity, we ask our fellow Christians living in the West to take time to develop a more realistic appreciation of their predicament. We ask our political leaders to exert more pressure where it can protect these Churches, many of which have survived centuries of hardship but now stand on the verge of disappearing completely.

When one part of the body suffers, all suffer (cf. 1 Cor. 12:26). As Christians in the West, we therefore have the vital responsibility to respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters who live in fear for their lives and communities at this moment. As Orthodox and Catholic Christians we share this responsibility and this concern together.

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More here on the work of the Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue. (HT: CatholicCulture.org)

Many Copts have crosses tattooed on their wrists

Copts are protesting government foot-dragging in the investigation of the Oct. 9 Maspero massacre that killed more than two dozen protesters. Al Ahram reports that Copts are still grieving and many “cannot get past the nightmare of 9 October’s carnage, or the fear of further attacks on churches.” Nadia, a Copt woman who was interviewed by the newspaper as she entered Mar Girgis Church in Heliopolis, fears for her family:

For me, the question is not one of opening closed churches or giving us license to build more churches; the question is rather that when I go to pray on Sundays I cannot but think would there be an attack on the church when I am there with my kids.

On The Hill newspaper, Dina Guirguis points to “mounting pressure in the last four decades” directed at the Coptic community, which represents 10 percent of Egypt’s population. This year the attacks have taken a terrible toll:

… in 2011 alone, before the Maspero massacre, Copts had been the target of 33 sectarian attacks, 12 of which involved an attack on a church, leaving a total of 49 dead. Counting the bombing of an Alexandria church on New Year’s Eve, which added an additional 23 casualties, the death toll rose to 72, with dozens injured and a number of Christian homes and properties burned down. After Maspero, the death toll of Egypt’s sectarian violence rises to 97, with over 400 injured–and immeasurable psychological damage.

For years, rights groups have decried the Egyptian state’s complicity in the growing sectarianism targeting Egypt’s vulnerable religious minorities, but had held hopes high after Egypt’s peaceful revolution that had toppled a brutal dictator of 30 years. Now, the self-proclaimed “guardians of that revolution,” Egypt’s military rulers—SCAF—have extinguished hopes for genuine equality for all of Egypt’s “children” by itself undertaking this heinous massacre in cold blood, and scheming a cover up that would make Mubarak proud, indicating that the repressive ways of the past are alive and well in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Here’s an interview with a UK-based Coptic bishop, recorded last month:

Links on the plight of the Copts from this week’s Acton News & Commentary:

Coptic Christian Student Murdered By Classmates for Wearing a Cross
Mary Abdelmassih, Assyrian International News Agency

Copt’s Murder a Test of Egypt’s New Anti-Discrimination Law
Kurt J. Werthmuller, NRO

Metropolitan Hilarion accuses West of leaving Egypt Christians in the lurch
Interfax

Who’s Really Persecuting the Copts?
John Rogove, First Things

Acton’s Kishore Jayabalan on Vatican Radio today. Summary:

The spectre of a hard Greek default and euro exit hung over a meeting of G20 leaders beginning in Cannes on Thursday. U.S. President Barack Obama said after talks with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy that Europe had made some important steps towards a comprehensive solution to its sovereign debt crisis but needed to put more flesh on the bones and implement the plan. The world is counting on the G20 to find a way out of the crisis, before it begins spreading to other parts of the globe.

“A lot of what is happening…at the G20 summit in France over the next couple days is really the inevitable consequences of a three or four year unwillingness of European politicians, and I would say American politicians as well, to deal with what’s obvious to most people is paying attention to this debt crisis,” said Kishore Jayabalan, the Director of the Rome office of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

“At some point government leaders are going to have to be frank and tell people they can’t rely on government benefits indefinitely,” he told Vatican Radio. “The entire scheme was based promises that can’t be kept.”

Jayabalan said in the future, people are going to be forced to be more self-reliant, and create their own opportunities.

Click on the player below to listen in:

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John J. Miller has an interesting article about Ronald Reagan and his relationship with Eureka College. Those that have studied the 40th president have long known that Eureka, a Disciples of Christ school, has not always embraced its most notable graduate. This from Craig Shirley’s masterpiece Rendezvous with Destiny, a chronicle of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign:

Even Reagan’s alma mater, Eureka College in downstate Illinois, seemed ambivalent about him. Reagan was clearly Eureka’s most famous alumnus, and if he became president it would rain attention and much-needed endowments onto the sleepy, perpetually cash-strapped school. Still, there were no outward signs of support for Reagan at Eureka. The tiny school did not even bother to display the rare items and documents he had donated over the years. The material instead was stored in the basement of one of the institution’s six red brick buildings.

Reagan, who adored Eureka for his entire life, certainly received considerable spiritual formation there. Eureka, more recently, has embraced the former president, and he is an essential aspect of fundraising at the school. Here is an interesting tidbit from Miller’s piece concerning the spiritual:

Among the displays in Eureka’s Reagan Museum is a copy of the college’s 1932 yearbook, propped open to page 43. Pictures of six students are on the page, including Willie Sue Smith. Reagan’s photo is at the top. There’s a quote beside it: “The time never lies heavily upon him; it is impossible for him to be alone.” When I asked Morris what this meant, he wasn’t sure. A Google search revealed it to be a line from The Spectator, an 18th-century British periodical. The author is Joseph Addison, a prominent moralist, who wrote it in 1711. In the section of the essay that contains this line, Addison urges his readers to develop a habit of prayerfulness because then they’ll always be in the presence of God. His broader theme is time and how to make the most of it.

For the Reagan Centennial, I published “Deeper Truths Magnify Reagan Centennial” and hosted an Acton on Tap on “Faith and Public Life in Reagan’s America.” I will also briefly address Reagan and his relationship with evangelicals and his outreach to Catholics on the upcoming Acton on Tap on “Religion and Presidential Campaigns” on November 10.

A couple weeks ago I engaged CPJ senior fellow Gideon Strauss in a debate at the Christian Legal Society, “Justice, Poverty, Politics & the State: Is There a Christian Perspective?”

One of the questioners afterward proposed that the large scale of the poverty problem required an institution equally as large, i.e. the government. There are lots of problems with that kind of analysis, not least of which is that the “poor” are not some homogeneous blob of humanity, but individual persons created in the image of God facing unique situations with their own unique gifts and talents. So the scale of the problem, perhaps counter-intuitively, calls not for some behemoth- or leviathan-size institution, but a variety of smaller individuals and institutions that can work with people individually and in communal settings. Think here of a variation on Burke’s concept of “little platoons” in the war on poverty.

Because of the nature of big society/government solutions, what we often end up with, unfortunately, when we seek a large institutional answer to the problem of poverty are safety nets that function not so much as trampolines as foam pits.

Perhaps not so funny when you think about it.

In an editorial in a previous issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, “Printed Source and Digital Resource in Economics and Theology” (PDF), I examined developments in research methodology, particularly with an eye toward digital research tools. One of the tools I highlighted was a project that I had some involvement with, the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL). The PRDL has launched a new version today at it’s own website, and includes a substantive move from bibliography to database, as well as expansive coverage of over 1,900 authors.

I participated in a roundtable discussion yesterday at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, where we talked about some of the trends and challenges involved with digital tools. The PRDL was very useful to me recently as I was working on editing a new publication of a translation of a text by Juan de Mariana (1536-1624), A Treatise on the Alteration of Money. The original translation was undertaken some years ago by Fr. Brannan, and I did not have a copy of the treatise by Mariana easily at hand to do some comparison. So naturally I went over to PRDL to see if the original was listed among the site’s contents.

Mariana’s treatise, De Monetae mutatione, was one of seven treatises (treatise #4, actually) published together in 1609 in Cologne. Via the PRDL I quickly found a version available from Google Books and downloaded it. As I opened the document, however, I found that the pages of the fourth treatise seemed to be missing from the PDF. When I looked at the title page, I found that the contents listing for De Monetae mutatione was crossed out, and there was in fact a signature affixed to the document noting that the treatise had been expurgated.

As Stephen Grabill observes in his annotations to the new translation, Murray Rothbard recounts the “fascinating saga surrounding Mariana’s De monetae mutatione” in his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. As Grabill writes,

Mariana’s tract, which attacks King Philip II’s debasement of the currency, led the monarch to haul the aged (seventy-three-year-old) scholar-priest into prison, charging him with the high crime of treason against the king. He was convicted of the crime, but the pope refused to punish him. He was released from prison after four months on the condition that he would remove the offensive passages in the work, and would promise to be more careful in the future.

King Philip, however, was not satisfied with the pope’s punishment. So the king ordered his officials to buy up every copy they could find and to destroy them. After Mariana’s death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleting many sentences and smearing entire pages with ink. All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish Index, and these in turn were expurgated during the course of the seventeenth century. As a result of Philip’s censorship, the existence of the Latin text remained unknown for 250 years, and was rediscovered only because the Spanish edition, which Mariana himself had translated into Spanish, was incorporated into a nineteenth-century collection of classical Spanish essays.

Unfortunately for me, the censorship would have lasting effects, as the copy first available to me from Google Books was one of those that had been expurgated. I was relieved when PRDL alerted me to another copy digitized by Google. I went to the site and found the listing on the table of contents intact. So again I downloaded the file, assured that my efforts had met with success. But as I examined the file, I found the same set of pages to be missing again. As I looked back at the front matter, I found that a similar note was appended on the verso side of the contents page, noting that the treatise De Monetae mutatione had been expurgated in 1632. The text was expurgated and I was exasperated.

But fortunately I did know that Google Books has some quirks, and so I went to the book’s “About” page and located yet another digitized copy under “other editions.” While the other two originals were from Spanish libraries, this third file was held by the Austrian National Library. Lo and behold, this third time was the charm, as the Austrian library’s copy had not been mutilated.

This is just one instance of the promise that digital research tools and methods allows us, in many cases recovering long-lost texts, or undoing the machinations of long-defunct political regimes. The fruits of this labor can be found in the current and future generations of scholarship, which have the task to make full and responsible use of these possibilities. To do your part to make sure that Philip II doesn’t get the last say in mutilating both money and Mariana’s text, purchase a copy of A Treatise on the Alteration of Money, the first installment of our new Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law series, today.

If you were lucky enough to be at our Houston luncheon last Thurday, you enjoyed Rev. Robert A. Siciro’s very well-received talk on The Moral Adventure of a Free Society, and the company of more than 200 other friends of the Acton Institute. We are grateful to the Honorable George W. Strake, Jr., who served as emcee, and Dr. Robert B. Sloan, Jr., president of Houston Baptist University, who gave the invocation.

The table of young men from Western Academy

A great big thank you to the host committee is in order:

Jeremy S. Davis
Maureen and James Hackett
Shanna and Andrew Linbeck
Bette and Leo Linbeck
Paige and Craig Moore
Wiley L. Mossy, Jr.
Annette and George Strake
Barbara and Robert Zorich

The luncheon’s sponsors were:

Bridges to Life
Alice and Philip Burguieres
The Center for Peace
Anthony and Coleen Madden Ethridge
Donna and Richard Hanus
Mossy Nissan
Marianne and Joe Quoyeser
Spence Media
Western Academy

We look forward to coming back to Texas soon!

Dr. Robert Sloan, president of Houston Baptist University, gives the invocation

Lunch is served

Wang Yue

On The American Spectator, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at the death of Wang Yue, a Chinese toddler run over — twice — in a public market while passersby continued on their way.

Gregg:

Accidents happen. But what made little Wang Yue’s death a matter for intense public discussion was the fact that nearly 20 people simply walked by and ignored her plight as she lay bleeding in the gutter.

What, hundreds of Chinese websites, newspapers and even state media outlets are asking, does this say about Chinese society? Have Chinese people lost all sense of concern for others in the midst of the scramble for wealth unleashed by China’s long march away from economic collectivism? One local official summarized the collective angst by stating: “We should look into the ugliness in ourselves with a dagger of conscience and bite the soul-searching bullet.”

Gregg points to widespread business-government corruption as a major contributor to China’s moral crisis:

The problem, from the perspective of China’s party-government-military elites, is such soul-searching may lead increasing numbers of Chinese to conclude that the circumstances surrounding Wang Yue’s death are symptomatic of deeper public morality problems confronting China, some of which could significantly impede its economic development.

One such challenge is widespread corruption. By definition, corruption doesn’t easily lend itself to close study. Its perpetrators are rarely interested in anyone studying their activities. Few question, however, that there’s a high correlation between corruption and widespread and direct government involvement in the economy. The more regulations and “state-business” partnerships you have (and China has millions of the former and thousands of the latter), the greater the opportunities for government cadres to extract their personal pound of flesh as the price of doing business.

Read “China’s Morally Hollow Economy” on the website of The American Spectator.