Here are several items accumulated over the last few days, which you may find useful or entertaining, or preferably both.
From the Italian site www.chiesa, The Invisible Christians of the Holy Land. In it Sandro Magister reports that:
15,000 is also the number of Christians who live in the holy city today. But these are not gaining in numbers; they are diminishing. In 1948, there were 30,000 Christians in Jerusalem. Normal demographic growth should have increased their numbers today to 120,000.
And the number of Christians has fallen sharply all over the Holy Land. A century ago, they were 10 percent of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea. Today they are less than 2 percent: about 130,000 in Israel, and 50,000 in the Palestinian territories and in Gaza.
But there are also Christians who are not counted – and if they were, they would revolutionize these statistics.
The rest of the article describes these hidden Christians. A similar article, Christianity's Empty Cradle?, recently appeared in the National Catholic Reporter.
A new and useful weblog I came across while looking for a quote: Galley Slaves. It's written by Jonathan V. Last and others I assume also write for The Weekly Standard.
Speaking of which, I'd recommend its editor William Kristol's Evolving Standards of Decency. It includes the pointed paragraph:
So our judges deserve some criticism. But we should not be too harsh. For example, it would be wrong to suggest, as some conservatives have, that our judicial elite is systematically biased against "life." After all, they have saved the life of Christopher Simmons. It would be wrong to argue, as some critics have, that our judges systematically give too much weight to the husband's wishes in situations like Terri Schiavo's. After all, our judges have for three decades given husbands (or fathers) no standing at all to participate in the decision whether to kill their unborn children. It would be wrong to claim that our judges don't take seriously legislation passed by the elected representatives of the people. After all, our judges are committed to upholding the "rule of law"--though not, perhaps, the rule of actual laws passed by actual lawmakers. And it would be wrong to accuse our judges of being heartless. After all, Judges Carnes and Hull of the 11th U.S. Circuit told us, "We all have our own family, our own loved ones, and our own children."
A story and weblog comments mostly of interest to Episcopalians is the story of their body's Presiding Bishop presiding at an Anglo-Catholic parish in Washington, D.C. from Maundy Thursday through Holy Saturday. Anglo-Catholic — the word describes the movement that began with the Oxford Movement of the 1830s — has been a synonym for "orthodox," but it should not be taken as such now.
From Forbes.com, Christina Hoff Sommers entertainingly explains the mythology -- the publicly destructive mythology -- of the self-esteem, emotional IQ, grief counseling crowd in I'm Okay, You're Okay.
Here you can find our own Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon on the The Loss of the Soul. (Western readers confused by the reference to Lent should know that the Orthodox Lent started a lot later than the Western this year.)
From The Daily Telegraph, a useful reflecton on the realities of age and population for Americans as well as Brits: The only way to avoid a pensions crisis is for all of us to die young.
Also from the DT, Hitler was madder than a bucketful of snakes — there's no mystique.
A third from the DT, the always worth reading Mark Steyn's Blair? Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, a not flattering analysis of the current prime minister. And his The Strange Death of the Liberal West is even better. He argues:
When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.
A cheering article form the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, also published in the DT: If God died for all of us, it is not ours to decide who is fit to live
And, again from the DT, a wise reflection on abortion by Charles Moore, The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley. After reviewing all the optimistic arguments MPs made when arguing for the legalization of abortion in England, arguments a Dr. Ian Gibson is now making to justify cloning chimeras (creatures produced by mixing human genes with those of other species), he notes:
The prescience, oddly enough, was on the other side of the Bill's debates - the side that was considered hopelessly out of touch with the spirit of the age. Kevin McNamara, still a Labour MP today, pointed out the gross inconsistency that a culture whose respect for human life led it increasingly to oppose capital punishment nevertheless wanted to end the lives of foetuses, who had committed no crime. He attacked the "facile assumption" that severe abnormality must "inevitably deprive a child of enjoyment of life".
Jill Knight predicted that a readiness to get rid of the unborn would encourage a mentality at "the other end of the scale", in which people would want to get rid of their elderly parents. This paper's own W. F. Deedes, then in the Commons, warned that "science and its little pill will enable so-called civilised countries to treat sex more and more as a sport and less and less as a sacrament in love". These things have come to pass.
And Norman St John Stevas, now Lord St John of Fawsley, feared the "lethal combination" of "a low level of thinking on matters of principle with a high degree of benevolence and good will". That is exactly how we are ruled in these matters today, and it is literally lethal, having killed about six million unborn babies. The phrase perfectly describes Dr Gibson and his happy, unmerited confidence in experimenting with human life so long as you do it for "the right reasons".
As Moore's examples show, and as the alert reader of human history will expect, the history of the last thirty years or so has proved that societies slide down slippery slopes. Those who want to take a few steps down but sincerely want to avoid winding up at the bottom — and most people who want to take a few steps down don't want to go any farther — should listen to those who keep pointing out the sharp degree of incline and the slick surface, the lack of tread on everyone's shoes and the average man's difficulty in staying upright on such a slope, especially when so many of them are drunk or careless or excited.
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