The Great Doxology

Great Doxology from Truveo.com

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From The Church Fathers

Those who labor for the vain things in life strive to make those who labor for God's sake stumble, that they might not be confronted with examples that accuse their consciences; but in so doing they only embellish the crowns of conscientious laborers.

St Eprhaim the Syrian, A Spiritual Psalter

Michael Novak Examines Evil and the Atheism

First Things' On the Square today features an essay by Michael Novak that is worth your attention. It's titled Atheism and Evil. Here is a snippet to whet your whistle.

Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance.

Read the entire essay here.

Incidentally, Mr Novak also has an interesting article recently printed in USA Today and available on his website. It's entitled, Reconciling Evil with Faith.

It's high time we all did some serious meditation on evil and suffering.

St Athanasios on Music

Just as we make known and signify the thoughts of the soul through the words we express, so too the Lord wished the melody of the words to be a sign of the spiritual harmony of the soul, and ordained that the canticles be sung with melody and the psalms be read with the canticles.

Letter to Marcellunus, Saint Athanasios the Great (d 373)

Sometimes...

Sometimes an image is worth a thousand words...
(This is very 'graphic')


And if words are still needed...

Two Stories - Interesting Contrast

I happened upon both of these stories this morning. They provide an interesting contrast in the one's assertion of the persistence of perception versus reality, and the other's observation of a reality that has historically been minimized or forgotten entirely.

Check out So Much for the 'Looted Sites' from the Wall Street Journal and Those Whitewashed Walls from First Things On the Square.

Reflect on both articles and consider the need for greater prayer and fasting in a fallen and corrupt world.

St John Chrysostom on Contraception

Why do you sow where the field is eager to destroy the fruit, where there are medicines of sterility [oral contraceptives], where there is murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you make her a murderess as well…Indeed, it is something worse than murder, and I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but prevents its formation. What then? Do you condemn the gift of God and fight with his [natural] laws?…Yet such turpitude…the matter still seems indifferent to many men—even to many men having wives. In this indifference of the married men there is greater evil filth; for then poisons are prepared, not against the womb of a prostitute, but against your injured wife. Against her are these innumerable tricks.

Homilies on Romans, 24 - .St. John Chrysostom