Meanderings at Mid-Pentecost

Today marks the half way point on our journey from Pascha to Pentecost. So, let us cry:

Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by Death … and upon those in the tombs bestowing Life!

Now, here’s the news …

KIEV (The Birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy) – As “Pastor Sunday” prepared to make a grand entrance, the choirgirls shook their pompoms, the disco lights started to flash and a fanfare sounded. The lights cut out, and Mr Adelaja emerged from a shroud of dry ice. Children holding flags of the world wafted round him and the choir bellowed “Sanctus!”

The congregation responded enthusiastically. Many danced in the aisles. With his eyes closed and brows furrowed in concentration, he raised his arms aloft. A hush fell over the audience.

“A man who is having problems functioning in his manly area, God is healing you,” he intoned. “Those who are having skin problems, God is healing you.”

On and on he droned, curing everything from buttock problems to bankruptcy. Some in the congregation wept, others bellowed hallelujahs. Ushers discreetly passed around collection boxes.

Read more at Directions to Orthodoxy.

Bill O’Reilly … on Judas?

Has someone ever stuck up for you, but that defense came up short or even raised its own problems?

That’s the case for Christians with Bill O’Reilly, the pugnacious, populist television talker on Fox News, who wrote a newspaper column recently addressing the much-hyped Gospel of Judas.

“My third-grade teacher at St. Brigid’s School, Sister Mary Lurana, would not be having any of this.” So far, so good. But then O’Reilly strays: “The good sister understood that the Gospels were teaching tools, not history…”

Read it all.

HT: Anglican TK

Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity
(A book by Dave Shiflett)

Imagine a 1950s American mother waking up in 2005 and turning on the television or the radio, or picking up a popular magazine. She would probably suffer a fainting spell, if not cardiac arrest, from the assault of deeply immoral attitudes toward marriage, family, and sexuality.

The reason this can happen in a nominally Christian country is that the definition of “Christianity” in America has changed, and this is the story that Shiflett’s book tells. The great culture clashes that divide our country presently are at their root theological: They pit those who acknowledge religious authority (either biblical or exercised by a divinely guided inspired church) against those who ground their principles on the unencumbered moral right of each person to create his own personal religion, regardless of objective morality and doctrinal belief.

SHIFLETT TURNS FIRST to the Episcopal Church, which was once the prototype for a traditional denomination. Many former Episcopalians have fled to more conservative Protestant denominations, or to the more liturgically minded and doctrinally based Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Read the rest of C.J. McCloskey’s review H E R E.

Thanks to FWD from Fr Miguel Grave de Peralta.

Finally …

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos on Frank Schaeffer on American Society.

HT: Ancient Church