RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Unexpected and Unusual Ordination of a Priest J. Christian Adams

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11330/pub_detail.asp

AMERICA HAS BECOME SO COERCIVELY SECULAR THAT THIS STORY AS WELL AS THE THOUSANDS OF STORIES OF JEWISH “SETTLERS” IN ISRAEL WHO FOUND A PATH THROUGH FAITH IS VERY INSPIRING…..RSK

This is a true story about Rich Dyer, a Virginia man who never expected to become a priest, but became one sooner than he expected. Dyer, 48, left behind a successful career in business after hearing a calling to the priesthood.Some of you don’t believe in miracles, and others are certain they exist. But, this is a story for the multitudes who still wonder. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, his autobiography of his journey from atheism to faith said, “You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear.”

Naturally, it would be easy if bushes regularly burned and spoke, erasing all doubt. But revelations so cheap and easy, dispense with human freewill. How difficult would moral choices be when faith has no role? If the answers were so obvious, goodness and grace would not be human choices, but rather servile obedience to a revealed omnipotent.

Instead of miracles, many have experienced a weighty and unmistakable synchronicity, where seemingly impossible events occur. Answered prayers fall into this category. But so do smaller revelations, joyous moments when blessings reveal themselves in hindsight, blessings that once seemed ordinary, or even dreadful. Those who have experienced this weighty synchronicity know there is no such thing as a coincidence.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11333,css.print/pub_detail.asp
Canadian terrorist Omar Khadr, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner who pled guilty to a litany of al-Qaida terrorism charges in October 2010, soon will be released to Canada. As the Toronto Sun’s Ezra Levant puts it in his new book, The Enemy Within, Khadr’s reception by Canadian liberals will cover up his crimes and salute him as the victim of American abuses.

Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002, after throwing grenades at American soldiers, and was discovered with video of his helping to build and places anti-vehicle mines for Afghan resistance fighters. Khadr, who was 15 at the time of his arrest, spent the next eight years in Guantanamo interrogations, awaiting his American trial.

During this time, liberal activists like the Canadian Bar Association advocated on Khadr’s behalf alongside local Muslim associations, arguing that the Canadian conservative government was responsible to protect his rights while he was in American custody and to bring him home.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11329/pub_detail.asp
The continuing existence of the Jewish people during the 2,000 years of the post-biblical era is surely a miracle, an enigma; indeed an astonishing testament to an enduring faith and that of its adherents.

For all of those long years the Jews lived in almost perpetual danger of extinction because they were stateless and at the mercy and whims from those within whichever nation they could find refuge.

Despite the oppression and misery endured by this most human of peoples, the People of the Book, defenseless and powerless, despised and persecuted, they nevertheless survived the fiery crucibles of the Church and the relentless subjugation of the Mosque.

The two daughter religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though meting out horrific slaughters upon the Jews, nevertheless could not exist were it not for Judaism or Israel. And the world, be it religious or secular, has been forever touched by Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Maimonides, Spinoza, Freud, Einstein, and by so many others who have sprung from this remarkable people.

Yet another miracle occurred to the remnant of the Jewish folk who survived the Holocaust or the mass expulsions of Jews from Arab lands. The European Jewish remnant arose like a phoenix from what Europe had become: One giant Jewish graveyard.

BDS and Academia http://www.romirowsky.com/11093/bds-academia A self-proclaimed National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference is set to take place at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy league institution in the heart of Philadelphia, during the weekend of February 4. Last held in 2009, according to the organizers, the BDS movement intends to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict […]

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2012/01/31/war_through_weakness

One of the memorable slogans from the Reagan administration was “peace through strength.” Reagan believed a strong defense was a safeguard against enemy attacks and the best hope of victory should America go to war.

President Obama is taking the opposite approach. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced cuts in defense spending of $487 billion over the next 10 years. Supposedly, these cuts will reduce the federal deficit, but Congress always finds new ways to spend money, so I am not optimistic.

The cuts were announced before critical questions were asked: What is America’s role in the world in the 21st century? Where does the military fit into that role? The administration thinks a sleeker, more mobile military — like SEAL Team Six, which has had recent successes taking out Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages from Somali pirates — is the way to go, but even the highly-trained SEALs can’t confront, say, a nuclear threat from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or China’s increasing military power. The administration says it will preserve its manpower and weapons systems in the Middle East and shift resources to Asia.

Ships and planes take time to build. If America is not building them to ward off present and future threats, someone else — like the Chinese — will. The world does not remain stagnant and threats are not always obvious.

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/01/31/camp_mittens_duplicity_on_allen_west_worse_than_conspiracy_its_a_habit/print
Camp Mittens Duplicity on Allen West Worse than Conspiracy: It’s a Habit
All the crying going on from Camp Mittens denying that Romney set out to screw Congressman Allen West out of his seat in Palm Beach County is just the usual exaggerated outrage that we should be accustomed to from Mitt and Company when they’ve been caught in the act.

Remember these are the same guys who are saying that Mitt’s the most electable candidate, but if we question Mitt’s electability we’ll only have ourselves to blame if Mitt doesn’t get elected.

Or something like that.

It’s hard to keep up with the rhetoric when a campaign has one set of lies to fool the public, one set of lies to fool reporters and one set of lies to fool themselves, in a paraphrase of war-time British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

“I must have missed something in today’s column” wrote one rabid Romney fan, deliberately misreading criticism of Romney, “what office in the Florida legislature does Mitt Romney hold?”

None, of course

And no one is saying that Mitt Romney, much less his campaign, set out specifically to hurt Colonel West.

What we are saying, and what has been acknowledged to have some level of veracity, is that people in the Florida GOP who represent Mitt set out to hurt West during the redistricting process. They did it because they are essentially hostile to the Tea Party element. So get used to it because these are the people who Mitt picked to surround himself with.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/01/31/the_florida_smear_campaign/print

The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party’s nominee for President of the United States — and some are not letting the facts get in their way.

Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state’s primary election, is that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the House of Representatives investigation.

But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records — 1,280 pages of them — are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.

Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2019/General-Boykin-and-the-War-for-Muslim-Outreach-Redux.aspx Eight years and three months ago, I wrote a column inspired by the furor over statements by General William Boykin attesting to the religious dimension of the so-called war on terror. The thought that there might be a religious dimension to Islamic terrorism is, absurdly and disastrously,  the Big No-No-No of our age (as […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as “wealthy”.
The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its ‘Power to the People’ antics American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people, there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate.

The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/update-cair-applauds-west-point-prayer-breakfast-withdrawal-of-general-critical-of-islam/
Faith Update: CAIR Applauds West Point Prayer Breakfast Withdrawal of General Critical of Islam

A retired U.S. lieutenant general who made comments some consider disparaging to Islam withdrew Monday from speaking at a West Point prayer breakfast after a progressive veterans’ advocacy group — VoteVets.org — along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked the Army chief of staff to rescind the invitation.

Last week The Blaze reported VoteVets.org told Gen. Raymond Odierno in a letter that allowing retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin to speak at West Point next week would be anathema to Army values and disrespectful to Muslim cadets.

According to the Associate Press, late Monday afternoon, West Point issued a statement saying Boykin had decided to withdraw speaking at the Feb. 8 event and that another speaker would take his place.

For its part, CAIR is celebrating the outcome.

“We welcome Mr. Boykin’s withdrawal from this event and hope that the speaker who replaces him will offer cadets a spiritual message that promotes tolerance and mutual understanding,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a press release.

Awad added that CAIR has been challenging Boykin’s “un-American bigotry” for a number of years.

From The Blaze’s earlier report:

Retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin was the Pentagon’s senior military intelligence official until 2004, when he was reprimanded for remarks comparing the war against radical Islam to a Christian struggle against Satan and for saying Muslims worship idols and not “a real God,” according to the Washington Post. He has also said he believes no mosques should be built in America and has called Islam “a totalitarian way of life.”

Boykin, an ordained minister who speaks around the country, was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a West Point prayer breakfast.