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Let me state right up front that, as a member of an Antiochian Orthodox parish, this post hits close to home. However, this is also a story that is linked to one of the most important news trends in our world today, which is the growing state of chaos in Syria and the plight of religious minorities in the wider Middle East.
GetReligion readers may recall the case of young Lennon Cihak, who — at the very least — told the Rev. Gary LaMoine (in photo) that he disagreed with the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual ethics and marriage. Thus, the priest — after long talks with the family — decided that the young man should not be confirmed as a grown-up, loyal Catholic believer.
So we have this very dedicated GetReligion reader who has been sending us URLs pointing to coverage of a skeptic’s battle to condemn Catholic leaders in India for having anything to do with legitimizing a statue of Jesus that may or may not be weeping. Before we get into a recent report in The Guardian about this controversy, let me stress two things right up front:
Yesterday I wrote a jeremiad against the mediaâs curiously inconsistent approach to science. The hook was the media outrage over Sen. Marco Rubio’s comments (in the middle of a fluffy GQ interview about rap music) equivocating on the age of the earth.
Let’s drop the media criticism for a moment and have a bit of fun (about a topic that is actually pretty serious).
First things first: I would like to stress that, while I am a member of an Orthodox Christian parish with historic ties to Arab Christianity, I do not speak Arabic.
It is touching to see that in spite of everything that has happened over the course of the Twentieth century, there is still a belief in the Whig theory of history — of the inevitable march of progress. One can see this philosophical framework of man’s “move forward into broad, sunlit uplands” in this story on gender violence from the AP’s New Hampshire reporter.
Before I left on a mission trip south of the U.S. border this past spring, a Facebook friend was so kind as to post a State Department warning for all of us “crazy enough to travel to Mexico.”
When I saw this story come in (clicking on a URL from a reader), I immediately thought, “Here we go again.”
