Sanctity of Life

Go to earth.google.com download the free version of Google Earth. In the Layers folder there is a drag down labeled "Global Awareness." Open this icon and find the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM): Crisis in Darfur tab and enable it.

Once you've done this double click any of the icons in that drop down folder and it will take you to Darfur. Click on any of the destroyed or damaged villages and a pop-up box will appear. One of the options in there is a link that says "Download Additional Information" click on that and a lot of quote boxes will begin to appear over Darfur.

Take an hour and read these; they will break your heart and hopefully encourage you to take some form of action. Even if it is just spreading information and doing research.

NEVER AGAIN!

-Caleb Williams

Europe's Christian Comeback

The West is awash with fear of the Islamization of Europe. The rise of Islam, many warn, could transform the continent into “Eurabia,” a term popularized by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and other pundits. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize—the term is not too strong—a senescent Europe,” Ferguson has predicted. Such grim prophecies may sell books, but they ignore reality. For all we hear about Islam, Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize. What’s more, it is showing little sign of giving ground to Islam or any other faith for that matter.

To be fair, the trend is counterintuitive. Europe has long been a malarial swamp for any traditional or orthodox faith. Compared with the rest of the world, religious adherence in Europe is painfully weak. And it is easy to find evidence of the decay. Any traveler to the continent has seen Christianity’s abandoned and secularized churches, many now transformed into little more than museums. But this does not mean that European Christianity is nearing extinction. Rather, among the ruins of faith, European Christianity is adapting to a world in which its convinced adherents represent a small but vigorous minority.

In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.

Similar trends are at work within the Protestant churches of Northern and Western Europe. The most active sections of the Church of England today are the evangelical and charismatic parishes that have, in effect, become megachurches in their own right. These parishes have been incredibly successful at reaching out to a secular society that no longer knows much of anything about the Christian faith. Holy Trinity Brompton, a megaparish in Knightsbridge, London, that is now one of Britain’s largest churches, is home to the amazingly popular “Alpha Course,” a means of recruiting potential converts through systems of informal networking aimed chiefly at young adults and professionals. As with the Catholic movements, the course works because it makes no assumptions about any prior knowledge: Everyone is assumed to be a new recruit in need of basic teaching. Nor does the recruitment technique assume that people live or work in traditional settings of family or employment. The Alpha Course is successfully geared for postmodern believers in a postindustrial economy.

Alongside these older Christian communities are hugely energetic immigrant congregations. On a typical Sunday, half of all churchgoers in London are African or Afro-Caribbean. Of Britain’s 10 largest megachurches, four are pastored by Africans. Paris has 250 ethnic Protestant churches, most of them black African. Similar trends are found in Germany. Booming Christian churches in Africa and Asia now focus much of their evangelical attention on Europe. Nigerian and Congolese ministers have been especially successful, but none more so than the Ukraine-based ministry of Nigerian evangelist Sunday Adelaja. He has opened more than 300 churches in 30 countries in the last 12 years and now claims 30,000 (mainly white) followers.

Ironically, after centuries of rebelling against religious authority, the coming of Islam is also reviving political issues most thought extinct in Europe, including debates about the limits of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to proselytize. And in all these areas, controversies that originate in a Muslim context inexorably expand or limit the rights of Christians, too. If Muslim preachers who denounce gays must be silenced, then so must charismatic Christians. At the same time, any laws that limit blasphemous assaults on the image of Mohammed must take account of the sensibilities of those who venerate Jesus.

The result has been a rediscovery of the continent’s Christian roots, even among those who have long disregarded it, and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” Europe may be confronting the dilemmas of a truly multifaith society, but with Christianity poised for a comeback, it is hardly on the verge of becoming an Islamic colony.

Written by Philip Jenkins for foreignpolicy.com

The article can be found at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3881

Dreams of America

Baseball caps and cigarettes and hypocrites on stage,
This is my America, and this is where I stay.
Wanton schemes, soda machines, so the story goes…
No regrets; men, place you bets, dig yourself a hole.
Lobbyists in the capitol fight their fights and take their toll
From leaders send to represent those citizens from whom they’re sent.
Good ol’ boys with guitars, getting gritty on the waves
“This is our home, you don’t belong, you do not have a place.”
The silver eye on the silver spoon, prime time in the afternoon;
No one knows what no ones sees, West Coast dramas: the American Dream…
Sex and drugs and booze and guns yet we think we are the chosen ones.
Houses standing in the hills, medicine cabinets filled with pills;
While across town a baby cries, for want of mother’s lullabies.
She had to take a second shift, work twice as hard to stay adrift
In this sea so tempest tossed, no chart or compass leaves her lost.
While bombs, missiles, planes and, tanks from Kabul to the West Bank
Fight the fight of “democracy” all in the name of peace and liberty.
Money keeps rolling down the drain while our neighbors feel the pang
Of AIDS, hunger and, poverty; sure we know but we refuse to see.

-Caleb Williams

Freedom of Ignorance (A Rant on American Priorities)

Some might say that the recent trend of Americans, especially the teen and college aged, to get their news from late-night comedians such as John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jay Leno is a serious problem. These people would argue that such sources offer little bearing on what is actually important in the world today. While generally I agree with the basic statements--and I must say that I love the Stewart/Colbert hour and Leno's monologue--I have to wonder what the alternatives are.

Today, a relatively popular and well respected 24-hour news network, MSNBC, reported at length on the developing Paris Hilton scandal; namely. that after being sentenced to three weeks (on a reduced sentence) in prison Hilton was told she could go back to her home for house arrest because she refused to eat the prison food (one wonders how this would have worked for Ghandi). Today, Hilton was forced to go back to prison by a California judge--now my hero.

During this time MSNBC had live helicopter footage for two solid hours of Hilton's house, waiting for the heiress to emerge to be taken back to the prison. A reporter, the editor I believe, then broke in for a 30 second spot detailing that Marine Gen. Peter Pace had been succeeded by Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a decision that has far-reaching implications on the war in Iraq which is appearing to become even more of a Vietnam-esque quagmire everyday.

Nevermind that most young Americans don't know whom the Joint Chiefs of Staff are. Nevermind the situation in Iraq, or in the Middle East, or the growing concern over Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez; nevermind that former aid to Vice President Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby was just recently sentenced to 30 months in prison for his involvement in the leak of a CIA operative's identity. Nevermind the AIDS pandemic in Africa or the G8 conference and its possible impact on global poverty and forget the conflict on troop withdrawal deadlines, immigration and the rumors and accusations of the Council of Europe against alleged secret prisons run by the CIA in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Instead the "news" is Paris Hilton--a woman whom I dare say has offered nothing to society except a couple dirty videos--is going back to jail.

Where is the justice?

We decry the decline of voter turnout and political apathy while we celebrate and publicly scorn, condemn, and praise the sordid lives of people like Paris Hilton! The news media is to blame! Hilton is not news, she is a spoiled rich trust fund baby who squanders her familys' [relatively] good name and vast fortunes on a shallow and trite life of partying, sex, drugs and name-calling. At least some people are looking for news from the likes of the late-night talk show gods because often far more intelligent and relevant information and social commentary (albeit largely biased) comes from show like these, whereas news about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and, Sanjaya Malakar come from sources like MSNBC. As a future journalist I am personally outraged and as a citizen I am disgusted.

-Caleb Williams

The Great Debate, Ending?

The New York Times reported today a group of biologists in Kyoto, Japan may have found a way to produce human stem cells without harming an embryo. As of today, June 7, 2007, the procedure is only applicable to mice but biologists worldwide are optimistic it can be applied to humans too.

The procedure involves injecting skin cells from the mouse with a virus that has been injected with four genes so as to induce pluripotency, that is the regenerative nature or stem cells. The study's results have been confirmed by several other groups.


If the technique can be reproduced in human cells it could potentially end all debate regarding the moral issues regarding stem cell research. No embryos would have to be destroyed in this method of producing stem cells.

The full New York Times article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/science/07cell.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

-Caleb Williams