Catholic Cardinal helps plant trees in memory of the Reformation

From a Nov. 2 Ecumenical News International article:

A top Vatican official has joined other global Christian leaders in the eastern German town where Martin Luther broke with the papacy, at a tree-planting ceremony that looks to closer ties on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017.

The ceremony took place in Wittenberg, the German town known as “Lutherstadt”, 492 years after Luther nailed his epoch-changing 95 theses to a church door there, leading to the breach with the 16th-century papacy

“It is possible for us today to together learn from Martin Luther,” said Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity as he planted the first of 500 trees on 1 November in a landscaped Luther Garden, forming part of the celebrations for 2017.

Churches worldwide are being encouraged to adopt one of the trees planned for the Luther Garden and also to plant a tree themselves, to denote a link with the birthplace of the Reformation. Kasper said a tree would be planted at the Vatican in Rome.

Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Orthodox and Reformed leaders gathered alongside Kasper in the Luther Garden in sunny autumn weather.

“This newly planted tree reminds us that Martin Luther’s call for reform in the Church was a call of penitence that also affects us today,” said Kasper at the ceremony, which followed the anniversary of Luther’s action on 31 October 1517 that led to often bitter quarrels between Protestants and Catholics.

Read the rest here. I found it on Kendall Harmon’s blog.

‘Small Kingdoms, Lost and Won’

Rebecca McClanahan was one of my professors in graduate school. It was a huge privilege to work with her and learn from her. For the Spring 2009 edition of Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature, she wrote a fantastic essay entitled “Small Kingdoms, Lost and Won.” Be sure to read it.

A fitting event for All Souls’ Day

NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 02: The mother of deceased New York City firefighter George Cain holds up a picture of him as the future USS New York passes lower Manhattan next to where the World Trade Center towers once stood November 2, 2009 in New York City The ship, which is built with 7.5 tons of steel from the World Trade Center in her bow, is an amphibious transport dock ship and will be commissioned during a ceremony on November 7. As the ship entered New York Harbor where dozens of firefighters, family members of September 11 victims and onlookers gathered to watch, a detail aboard the 684-foot vessel fired a 21-gun salute. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Content © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved.

Four Ways to Celebrate Reformation Day

As always, Reformation Day coincides with Halloween. But as our Catholic brothers and sisters know, Christian celebrations and leftover paganism work together quite well.

Here are some thoughts on how to wed Halloween and Reformation Day.

1. Instead of playing Ring-and-Run, try Nail-and-Run.

You remember the old ring-and-run trick: sneak up to someone’s doorstep, ring her doorbell, run, hide, and watch the hapless lady of the house come to the door and look around.

To celebrate Reformation Day, take a page from Martin Luther.

Instead of ringing the doorbell and running away, nail some profound thoughts to the door and then run away.

2. Give Reese’s Theses to trick-or-treaters.

Using your home printer and PhotoShop, recreate the Reese’s Pieces bag as Reese’s Theses.

Now open a few bags of Reese’s Pieces. Count out 95 candies and insert them in a Reese’s Theses bag. Seal and set by the front door.

Image how cool it will be if someone comes to the door dressed like the Pope.

3. This year, try the un-costume

As many Protestants believe today, robes and mantels and cassocks are all Romish trappings.

Roman Catholic priests wear these offensive costumes of robes as a statement against justification by faith.

There is only one fully adequate, completely satisfactory act of defiance in the face of these vestments.

You guessed it. You must dis-robe. You can’t be justified by boxers — or briefs.

4. Instead of handing out evangelistic tracts, preach sound theology.

When you hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, tell them, “This is an example of unmerited favor.”
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Happy Reformation Day! Happy Halloween!

Taylor Marshall’s short history lesson: Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Church of England

I admit I’ve been interested in Taylor Marshall. His journey seems unlikely — or does it?

He started out thoroughly Protestant. He received a masters degree in systematic theology from Westminster Theological Seminary (a rigorously Reformed institution) and later earned a Certificate of Anglican Studies from Nashotah Theological House. He served as an Episcopal priest before converting to Roman Catholicism in 2006. He is the author of The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity. He is currently a Doctoral Student and Instructor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas.

The following is an excerpt from this article published today at Catholic Online.

Those who remember their high school history might recall that Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries to England in the late sixth century to establish the Catholic Church in England. In A.D. 598, Pope Gregory the Great designated the township of Canterbury as the nation’s principal see. There were hiccups along the way (Norman conquest), but England remained under the pastoral oversight of the Pope until 1534 when King Henry VIII declared himself caput ecclesiae anglicanae “Head of the English Church.” Henry VIII never shook his devotion to the old rites. He demanded priestly celibacy, Latin Masses, and prayers for the dead. He did however have an appetite for the wealth of the monasteries. When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left his son Edward VI as king. As a Protestant, Edward approved a Protestantized English ritual which became known as the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.

The liturgies found in the Book of Common Prayer and subsequent editions reveal a careful blend of medieval Catholic piety mixed with subtle Protestantism. Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth fully realized this compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism—perhaps the cleverest grab for political power in history. As England colonized the world, she spread her national Anglican church. In America, she became the Episcopal Church. The new worldwide conglomerate of national churches became known as the Anglican Communion. Since those days, the Anglican Communion has been divided into roughly three camps: High Church (more Catholic), Low Church (more Protestant), and Broad Church (liberals who bless the political and cultural mores of society—something going all the way back to Henry’s desire for a second marriage, and then a third marriage, and then a fourth…you know the story).

In the last twenty years, the Broad Churchmen emerged as victors in the Anglican Communion …

Guess how many Church of England clergy could go to Rome; guess which U.S. parish could, too

The Right Rev. John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, has said about 1,000 Church of England clergy will seek to join the Roman Catholic Church. — The Associated Press, Oct. 25, 2009

That relates to “an announcement [made last week] by the Vatican, saying that Pope Benedict XVI had authorized an Apostolic Constitution. The constitution would allow Anglicans to move to the Catholic church, but keep their own liturgy and married priests,” The Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Rosemont (Penn.) Journal reported,

When the Vatican announced last week that it would welcome groups of traditionalist Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of one Episcopal parish celebrated as if a ship had arrived to rescue them from a drifting ice floe.

”We’d been praying for this daily for two years,” said Bishop David L. Moyer, who leads the Church of the Good Shepherd, a parish in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia that is battling to keep its historic property. ”When I heard the news I was speechless, then the joy came and the tears.”

This parish could be one of the first in the United States to convert en masse after the Vatican completes plans for a new structure to allow Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining many of their spiritual traditions, like the Book of Common Prayer and married priests.

Richard Dawkins: Nostalgic for Evensong

Remember the guy who brought us “The God Delusion”?

Though he’s not the sentimental type, Dawkins admits to “an English nostalgia for village life, including church. I never go, find it excruciatingly boring, but still, I have some nostalgia for evensong on a summer evening.”

From a L.A. Times profile here.

New book on Andy Warhol released Tuesday

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol by Tony Scherman and David Dalton is due this coming Tuesday (October 27).

Photographer David McCabe attends the ‘Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol’ book launch party at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery on October 20, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

Writer David Dalton and photo editor Julia Moore attend the ‘Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol’ book launch party at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery on October 20, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
Content © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved.

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

BERLIN – OCTOBER 21: A worker pulls out one of the approximately 1,000 giant, styrofoam ‘dominos’ that will be used to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and that are currently stored at a warhouse after a press conference there on October 21, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. In November, the dominos, which are decorated with motifs having to do with the end of the Cold War, will be lined up in front of the Brandenburg Gate towards Potsdamer Paltz and then will be tipped over to symbolize the domino-like fall of communism throughout central and eastern Europe in 1989. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) Content © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved. Accessed through PicApp.

Doug Bandow provides a quick book recommendation

Update: Be sure to read Eric Schansberg’s comment on this post!

I emailed Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, to ask him for book recommendations for those who want to develop a libertarian political perspective from a Christian standpoint.

On Friday, Bandow replied with this suggestion: Poor Policy: How Government Harms the Poor (1996) by D. Eric Schansberg.

Bandow is the author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology (1994), in which he outlines a Christian approach to politcal libertarianism.

So why consider libertarian politics and Christianity together? Doesn’t libertarianism provide an anything-goes attitude that opposes the Bible’s moral dictates?

Bandow explained in The Politics of Envy: 

“That is, liberty — the right to exercise choice, free from coercive state regulation — is a necessary precondition for virtue. And virtue is ultimately necessary for the survival of liberty.

“Virtue cannot exist without freedom, without the right to make moral choices. By virtue I mean the dictionary definition: moral excellence, goodness, righteousness. Coerced acts of conformity with some moral norm, however good, do not represent virtue; rather, the compliance with that moral norm must be voluntary” (emphasis added).

Furthermore, I have always loved the subtitle to that book. Statism as Theology explains so much about our era, in which many people really believe that the application of political will power to the machinery of the modern bureaucratic state can solve most of our problems.