29 November 2021

A Dominionist-Evangelical Distortion of Haiti's Sad History

https://www.breakpoint.org/helping-haiti-with-our-heads-and-hearts/

Haiti has been in the news more than once in 2021. Unrest, assassination, an earthquake, and now the kidnapping of US-based missionaries, Haiti is all but associated with chaos, turmoil, grinding poverty, and corruption. The cultural commentators want to weigh in and John Stonestreet of BreakPoint and The Colson Center recently offered his own Evangelical assessment, his own take on the Haitian situation.

25 November 2021

The Christian-Right and the Rittenhouse Acquittal

Kyle Rittenhouse is the product of a generation brought up in the midst of social turmoil, economic decline, and endless war. It's evident that to Rittenhouse life is cheap and he speaks casually (in almost video game terms) of shooting people. They're not human beings, they're objects. He's the classic 'angry young man' and while he's a murderer, he does deserve a degree of sympathy.

15 November 2021

The Unity of the Brethren and the Magisterial Reformation (Part 2)

For the Bohemian Brethren, the contacts with the Magisterial Reformation produced mostly negative results. Swept up into the political struggle, the theology and ethics of the Reformation produced worldliness and compromise in their lives. The net sum was that their movement was forced to pay a vicious price in the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War. Though attempting to keep their distance at times, they were now part of the larger Protestant movement and (willingly or not) they were caught up in the catastrophe and bloodletting known as The Thirty Years War.

The Unity of the Brethren and the Magisterial Reformation (Part 1)

A good resource regarding the formative years of the Moravian Church is The History of the Unity of Brethren (A Protestant Hussite Church in Bohemia and Moravia) by Rudolf Rican. First published in the 1950's, the available English translation (by C. Daniel Crews) came out in the 1990's. It's published by The Moravian Church in America.

The book begins with the martyr Jan Hus (1372-1415) and other dissident movements in Bohemia such as the Waldensians. Petr Chelčický (c.1380-1460) also receives significant treatment as he came to exert a great deal of influence on the early Brethren movement – itself a derivative of the larger Hussite wave.

02 November 2021

The Establishment's Suppression of the January 6 Investigation (III)

Nancy Pelosi is the Right's greatest and most powerful enemy within Congress and at this point she's the one figure that could really lead the charge, the one person that has the power to pursue the January 6th coup attempt and to take down the collaborators in congress – wounding the party in the process.

And yet she's not. Why isn't she? Why isn't the Establishment media aggressively reporting on this? Why aren't they coming after her and challenging her tepid response and her lacklustre investigation?

The Establishment's Suppression of the January 6 Investigation (II)

The US sought unipolarity in 1989 and thirty years later it finds itself in grave danger, the dream lost, and US hegemony under threat. The American Establishment is desperate to re-engage the world and rekindle the kind of American dominance that the nation had in the decades after World War II. The vast wealth and power the US accumulated post-1945, is now under existential threat from foreign rivals.

The Establishment's Suppression of the January 6 Investigation (I)

Some independent commentators have picked up on the fact that the mainstream media, the so-called 'Leftist' media has all but ignored the recent 'bombshell' Rolling Stone article that exposes the fact that several members of congress were actively involved in the failed January 6 insurrection.

Why? Why would the media ignore this? It's like the goose that laid the golden egg, a chance to take down several Republicans – and yet they're ignoring it. The January 6 investigation should be like Watergate with around the clock coverage and televised hearings. But instead it barely gets noticed and while the congressional investigation continues – tepid is a word that comes to mind. Given the magnitude of what happened and the nature of emerging revelations since, one would think this would be a major story.