Author: John W Gillis

Critical Issues

Tiller Meets the Reaper

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So, “Tiller the Baby Killer” has met his demise – assassinated this morning during church services. I can only groan over the anticipated avalanche of righteous indignation cascading from the heights of the pro-abortion ranks. Like the proverbial mandatory pinch of incense for Caesar, everyone who is publicly pro-life will be required to preface any and all remarks on the matter by condemning the assassination. I am not an advocate of violence – assassination or otherwise – so I have no personal  problem with condemning the act, but I do have a prob...

Media & Culture

Ziegler’s Death of Free Speech

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I had the radio on in the car one day, a couple months ago, when I caught part of an interview with a filmmaker named John Ziegler, who was promoting a film on the 2008 U.S. Presidential election called “Media Malpractice,” which he purported would demonstrate decisively just how in the tank the popular media was for Obama. I’m not sure a documentary is really necessary to make such a point, but the guy sounded funny, so I figured I’d check the local library system to see if there was a copy available I could request. They didn’t have a copy of the docum...

Religion & Society

The Green Weapon

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Contributing to my continually growing suspicion that I am an alien who ended up on this planet by mistake, I observed the world observing Earth Day yesterday. This seems like a harmless enough celebration, and at one time I probably thought it sounded like a good way to recognize the importance of acknowledging humanity’s responsibility as steward of creation, but somewhere along the line (and quite possibly right from the start), the notion of earth-stewardship was co-opted by hucksters of an astounding variety of stripes. Everywhere I turned yesterday...

Bible Study Tools

WORDSearch Releases HCSB Reverse-Interlinear

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WORDSearch released a reverse-interlinear based on the HCSB last week, further extending their original language capabilities with this translation. I wish I liked the HCSB better as a translation, because I really like WORDSearch as a study environment, and this looks like a very useful tool. As far as I know, this is only the 3rd interlinear commercially released in a “reversed” format, which orders the text according to the translation rather than the manuscript, making it easier for novices, in particular, to work with the interlinear tex...

Church

Part of the Difference Between Mission and Agenda

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While Pope Benedict XVI is busy bracing the winds of ill-will to find a way to heal rifts of schism within the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion continues to rush breathlessly toward implosion. Harvard’s Episcopal Divinity School announced today the appointment of the Reverend Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale as the new president and dean of the seminary, a woman with apparently no academic credentials whatsoever, but who luckily happens to be an ordained lesbian Episcopalian priestess. Not only that, but she is a stalwart supporter of the lega...

Religion & Society

Religious Coping Superstitions

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A couple weeks ago, I came across an article on Boston.com that really struck me as being foreign to the world I live in. "Patients with strong faith more likely to get aggressive end-of-life care" looked at a Journal of the American Medical Association article that explored the influence of religious faith on end-of-life medical decisions by terminal patients. What startles me in the writing is the apparent assumption that religiosity among these men and women was not something constitutive of them as persons, but a selected process of "c...

Politics & Economics

What’s the Going Price for the Rule of Law?

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Bostonians were entertained this past week by a bizarre news story about a prominent, wealthy  – and married – businessman in his sixties out for a “last hurrah” (his words), who had spent a year and a half engaging the services of a young prostitute, and who had then begun paying hush money to the woman when she threatened to go public with the details of their relationship. This charming fellow had had quite enough by the time the woman made her third demand for cash, and so he hired a high-powered lawyer to secure the assistance of th...

Politics & Economics

Shaping the Legal Meanings of Elemental Concepts

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"Where do the legal meanings of such elemental concepts as ‘birth,’ ‘death,’ and ‘family’ take shape?" she asked. "Largely in state courts.” SJC chief justice says state courts are in crisis – The Boston Globe Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, opining on the criticality of the state courts to the orderly functioning of society. This is the woman primarily responsible for fabricating the legal right for homosexual couples in Massachusetts to call their par...

Scripture

Leprosy: 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

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One of the themes that emerge from this week’s readings is the importance of communion, that is: the role of the Church in not only embracing all people in brotherhood, but doing so by means of bringing all people to a place of graced renewal, for the end, as Paul says in the second reading, “that they may be saved.” The device that is used to characterize this is the ancient scourge of leprosy. The first reading, from Leviticus, skips over an extensive middle section of the Biblical text on the details of the disease, including regulations on distinguis...

Media & Culture

Y.M.C.A.

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Rebecca invited me to a Father/Daughter Valentines Dance last weekend, put on by her Girl Scout group. It was nice to get out with her, even if she wasn’t feeling very well, but I have to say that I found the event disturbing in some ways. Like a lot of recent experiences, I found in it more signs of our civilization’s erosion. Not a news flash, I suppose, and open to accusations of overzealous alarmism, but I just can’t shake the sense that things are unraveling quickly. Part of it is the economic meltdown, but the pieces have been in place for qu...