Beholding the Beauty

Well, I was going to write a nice piece on Iran, but I don't think I need to. Lawrence Vance over at lewrockwell.com already did , and I'm not sure how much more I can add. I may still write one of my own, but I'm not sure. Read his piece in the meanwhile. :)

I recently read this article , in which the author vociferously whines about Ron Paul's takeover of her local Republican Party. In the comments, several Ron Paul supporters responded calmly, cogently, and intelligently. For the most part, they were met with ignorant, childish, ad hominem responses. However, I was intrigued by this comment , made in reply to a Dr. Paul supporter. It was one of the few non-Paul-supporter written posts that actually added to the conversation, both in content and form. In summary, he raises the question of Dr. Paul's competency to accomplish his vision, and also about the timeline that the good Congressman has set for doing so. Is he able to? and wouldn't that plunge the world into chaos? My answer to both of these questions is "Yes". However, my answer to the second is continued, "...and he knows it, but he also knows it won't happen on that timeline. But I'm OK with that, and so is he, and here's why....

People nowadays. Seriously! Apparently people have no clue how to actually think through things anymore, and understand subtleties. Everything is knee-jerk reaction to 5 second sound bites and inflaming headlines (the articles for which they obviously don't bother to read, and if they do, the content is so overshadowed by their emotion toward the misleading article they might as well not have read it, for all the rational thinking they do about it). Case in point: http://www.facebook.com/yahoonews/posts/10150646348471037 If you actually read the article and listen to what Dr. Paul says, you see that he is making a clear distinction between the Federal Government vs. the States and the People. He is not against helping your neighbor at all. He is against stealing from some people and borrowing from our enemies in order to inefficiently and stupidly muck things up worse, all in the name of "charity", not to mention upholding the Constitution! In this, he is well i...

After my "epiphany" earlier, it remained only to unpack the details of the simple concept. I started by bringing to mind one of my favorite saints: St. Nina, Equal to the Apostles and Enlightener of Georgia. Several things stick out about her life. First of all, would you look at that title! Is that big, or is that big? No Protestant missionary I know of would be considered on par with the Apostles, let a alone given an official title of equality. No Protestant missionary I know of would be considered "Enlightener" of an entire nation. But when you delve into the details of her work, you see that the title is not hubris, and it's not exaggeration either. St. Nina, by the grace of God, became truly worthy of it. More importantly, we begin to see the scale on which evangelism is carried out in the Orthodox Church. Other examples abound, such the work of St. Joseph of Aramathea in England, St. Patrick in Ireland, Sts. Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs...

I wondered for a long time what Orthodox Missiology "looks like". As I explore my Faith, I encounter more accounts of the work of great Orthodox missionaries in the past, and have had opportunity to hear from and interact with several missionaries whose work is in progress. I have, little by little, begun (by God's grace!) to understand what I am seeing. I am sure I have much more development to experience in this area, and I am by no means "the expert". If anything, this post is like the baby in the crib finally assigning the words "Mama" and "Dada" to the specific faces his parents, and attempting to reproduce the two words himself. On that note: I beg your forgiveness, in advance, for where I am either incomplete or incorrect in the following meditation. I have noted several things, all of which sort of "gelled" over this past weekend. This process began a couple of weeks ago, when I asked someone more advanced in the Fai...

Even when I was in college, but especially afterward, I started to see the obvious problems with the approaches mentioned in my last post. But I didn't really know what to do about it. Those techniques were all I knew. Over time, I stopped going to the church-sponsored door-knocking campaigns. By this time, I was the pianist of the church I was attending, which is a somewhat high-profile position, although not as high-profile as a paid staff position. One of the rules of the church was that any ministerial position, volunteer or otherwise, was supposed to be visibly (yes, they specified "visibly") involved with these weekly campaigns. I was able to "slack off" by claiming busyness, etc., but I still had to put in my token effort every couple of months, to keep anyone from getting suspicious. (Let me clarify something here: I wasn't actively trying to deceive or anything. I just couldn't bring myself to actively go do something that I no longer b...

The religious circle I grew up in is very "evangelical", in the door-knocking, bus-running, gospel-tract-passing sense.  They call it "soul-winning", and it's supposed to be "the heart of God." At Bible College, we were required to go "soul-winning" (i.e. knocking on doors and inviting people to church) for at least three hours each week.  We were also required to "witness", or "give the Gospel" (i.e. go through our salesman's pitch verbally with somebody we didn't know, off-campus, in an attempt to get them to convert say the prayer at the end of it) at least once a week. The rationale behind the requirements was that since we were training for ministerial positions, we should get used to doing this. It is seen as the primary work of any church staff member, the pastor included. Not only that, it is also supposed to be the primary work of any Christian, based on Matthew 28:18-20. We even had a whole semest...