Russian tanks move into Ukraine; Surrogacy and Christian Compassion; Jesus of the Housetops ...more

Ukraine crisis: Tanks 'cross border' from Russia
An armoured column including 32 tanks and 30 trucks has crossed into eastern Ukraine from Russia, Kiev says.

The trucks were carrying ammunition and fighters, said a military spokesman, but the BBC cannot confirm his report.

A fragile ceasefire has been in place since 5 September, although hundreds of people have been killed since then....BBC

Federal court rules ‘secular humanism’ a religion, extends equal protection rights to atheists ...In a landmark decision last week, a federal judge in Oregon declared ‘secular humanism’ to be a religion, opining that those who profess to be atheists and secular humanists should be afforded equal protection rights under the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and be allowed to enjoy the same liberties to practice religion that religious groups are able to enjoy...

No Constitutional Right to Same-Sex Marriage, Circuit Court Rules  Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit overruled lower court decisions that had struck down state laws defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The 6th Circuit Court ruled that constitutional amendments passed by popular vote in Michigan (2.7 million votes), Kentucky (1.2 million), Ohio (3.3 million) and Tennessee (1.4 million) do not violate the U.S. Constitution. Citizens remain free to define marriage as a male-female institution.

Today’s decision helpfully explained why these laws are constitutional, why it is reasonable for citizens to support such laws, and why arguments for court-imposed redefinition of marriage do not succeed. It also sets the stage for marriage to return to the U.S. Supreme Court...

Surrogacy and Christian Compassion ...Despite appearing to be “pro-life,” surrogacy commodifies human life by using a woman’s body to create and carry a child that she is legally obligated to give away. In these arrangements, the child is a product protected by a lengthy contract between his birth mother and the intended parents. Modern surrogacy itself is a symptom of our culture’s mentality that all persons have an equal right to a perfect, healthy child if they want one.

Surrogacy arrangements have predictably and tragically gone wrong. Last year, intended parents demanded their gestational surrogate abort a child that was found to have severe disabilities in utero. When she refused, they offered her $10,000 to have an abortion, and she eventually fled to a state that would legally recognize her as the child’s mother. Another couple recently abandoned one twin with his young impoverished birth mother because he had Down Syndrome, while they took his healthy sister home...

Anti-Catholic protesters with bullhorns appear at several D.C.-area parishes Roman Catholic leaders have sent e-mails of warning to dozens of Washington and Maryland priests after protesters with bullhorns yelling anti-Catholic slogans appeared at several parishes and in a couple of cases “stormed the inside of the church just before Mass,” a bishop-administrator wrote in the e-mail...

Jesus of the Housetops
If we reflected on it more closely, perhaps we would observe something curious, even surprising, in the Gospel stories about Jesus after his Resurrection; namely, what I venture to call a quality of restraint. Except for the wounds in his flesh (Luke; John), the risen Savior appears to his disciples rather much as they remembered him from before. He is alive, of course, but he does not display—visibly—the signs Saint Paul seems to suggest as characteristic of the resurrected body...

Technocracy Versus The Great Books
...Everyone knows that any life consumed by the enjoyments of the screen is marked by emotionally crippling abstraction and distraction, and that true teachers of philosophy, literature, and theology do what they can to get students to leave those screens alone enough to know what it’s like to take pleasure in being alone with yourself with others or in love in the present with another person with a body...