Category: Religion

Another Voice on Bush at Calvin

From Sara — it’s a little harder to stand up and say “yeah, the Calvin I know really doesn’t stand for all that conservative stuff!” when you know you still, to this day, would not be accepted for who you are there, for fear of offending conservative parents and donors.

For all the support and encouragement I recieved from individuals at Calvin, my closeted time there was almost more than I could handle. From what I hear, it’s only getting worse due to an increase in conservative donors and parents. I would not be welcome as an employee of Calvin in any capacity. A marriage/union announcement of mine would never be printed in the magazine. Queer alumni groups must organize on their own. I couldn’t be a member of any contributing church.

Episcopa Vagans

Huh. Just found out that a friend of mine is now a bishop.

For reasons I’m not even going to begin to explain, she sought ordination as a priest and bishop in the Apostolic Succession from nontraditional sources, and the presiding bishop of the Universal Anglican Church saw fit to grant her request. I’m not sure of the precise line of their apostolic succession but it’s ultimately through one of those Episcopi Vagantes type sources where everybody’s obsessively reconsecrating each other so in order for the consecrations to be invalid three dozen different lines of succession would have to all be invalid.

I saw a copy of the rite of consecration they wrote. It was quite beautiful.

I am told that one of the clergy who came to town to do the rite of consecration was wandering around a local Border’s in vestments and was mistaken for a Sith Lord. :)

Calvin College ad to protest Bush visit

UPDATE: Everyone I know who has blogged about this has received a highly focused comment spam from someone who signs himself “John Calvin” and comes from the IP address 68.77.152.22 (at least he was coming from there when he spammed me). He cut and pastes some large articles about Bush at Calvin and rants things like: “SADDAM and his henchmen inflicted the death and destruction. Bush and the troops liberated 25 million people. Your moral equivalence is disgusting.” He never shows any sign of having read the posts he is “replying” to. The built in spam filter in WordPress 1.5.1 correctly tagged his rants as spam and put them in moderation. He apparently does searches with things like “bush” “calvin” “leave comments.” I wonder if he does this by hand or has a script to do it for him? Anyone know anything more about this dude?

ORIGINAL POST:

College ad to protest Bush visit – The Washington Times: Nation/Politics – May 17, 2005:

One-third of the professors at an evangelical Christian college in Grand Rapids, Mich., are taking out a large ad in a local newspaper Saturday to protest President Bush’s commencement speech.

“As Christians, we are called to be peacemakers and to initiate war only as a last resort,” the ad will say. “We believe your administration has launched an unjust and unjustified war in Iraq.”

The 130 signatories, which include 20 staff members, work at Calvin College. Founded in 1876 as a school for pastors of the Christian Reformed Church, it now is one of the nation’s flagship schools for a Christian liberal-arts education.

I’m so proud of my Alma Mater. :)

BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country

BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country.

Via Fr. Jake.

Can this possibly be serious?

I mean, it pretty much sums up Republicanism and Fundamentalism and much of Evangelicalism today in an easy to parse message. But I didn’t realize it was a message anybody would be willing to spell out so clearly…

Fr. Jake doesn’t think it’s a joke, but I’m thinking it must be parody.

New Pope A Strong Critic of War

I had been afraid that Ratzinger would be continue all the bad things about JPII and none of the good things. I need not have feared that he would continue none of the good things — his anti-war stance has been, and is, at least as strong as JPII’s. Via James in IMs…

New Pope A Strong Critic of War:

The election of Benedict XVI as pope brings hope for the continuation of peacemaking as central to the papacy. Just as John Paul II cried out again and again to the world, “War never again!” the new pope has taken the name of the one who first made that cry, Benedict XV, commonly known as “the peace pope.”

The name is no coincidence. In fact, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia said Tuesday that the new pope told the cardinals he was selecting Benedict because “he is desirous to continue the efforts of Benedict XV on behalf of peace … throughout the world.”

As a Cardinal, the new pope was a staunch critic of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. On one occasion before the war, he was asked whether it would be just. “Certainly not,” he said, and explained that the situation led him to conclude that “the damage would be greater than the values one hopes to save.”

“All I can do is invite you to read the Catechism, and the conclusion seems obvious to me…” The conclusion is one he gave many times: “the concept of preventive war does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

Even after the war, Ratzinger did not cease criticism of U.S. violence and imperialism: “it was right to resist the war and its threats of destruction…It should never be the responsibility of just one nation to make decisions for the world.”

Yet perhaps the most important insight of Ratzinger came during a press conference on May 2, 2003. After suggesting that perhaps it would be necessary to revise the Catechism section on just war (perhaps because it had been used by George Weigel and others to endorse a war the Church opposed), Ratzinger offered a deep insight that included but went beyond the issue of war Iraq:

“There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.”