✣ Highlights from the week online
Hold to the faith – but listen like the Fathers Our time has many similarities with the Roman Empire, said Fr Dwight Longenecker at his blog. “Trade and business flowed from India and China to Spain and Britain, from France to Egypt and beyond, and where there was trade there was movement of people and where there was movement of people there was movement of ideas.” That made the Empire “a whirling marketplace of philosophies, ideologies, religions, spiritual movements, cults and sects”. The Church Fathers’ response was to accept what was true, while rejecting what was false, in these other traditions. “The heretic Marcion rejected Judaism. The orthodox Fathers accepted it, but transformed it. The heretic Tatian rejected Greek thought and religion. The orthodox Fathers accepted it and transformed it.” Beijing is ‘holding up’ talks with the Vatican Beijing is stalling in talks with the Vatican, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper said that, according to people familiar with the dialogue, a meeting was planned in Rome later this month at which Vatican officials would agree to recognise seven excommunicated bishops appointed by the government – a move that would force two underground bishops to resign. But Beijing has so far declined to agree on a date for the meeting. A source familiar with Vatican thinking told the paper the Vatican was “unenthusiastic” about the agreement but “resigned to it as the best possibility on the table”. Beijing was “holding up the process for unknown reasons”. “We thought we had an agreement,” the source was quoted as saying. Why the Orthodox shun capitalism Rod Dreher’s American Conservative blog asked why majority Orthodox countries seemed to struggle with capitalism. He quoted a column by Leonid Bershidsky, writing for Bloomberg, who said he had come to accept an old idea: that Orthodoxy itself was partly to blame, at least in Russia. The column quoted a sociologist who said: “The specific character of Orthodoxy is that it regards not vocation or professional activities as a means to salvation, but obedience and humility in relation to a (spiritually) more experienced person or a person at a higher place in the hierarchy.” Sociological data, wrote Bershidsky, suggested that Orthodox Christians were “less likely to support new ideas, take risks or want to work in large private companies”. Dreher said he believed there was something to this, “but only something”. He pointed to the history of Orthodox people, suffering first under Islamic rule and later under communism, which “eviscerated civil society”, eroding the trust necessary for democracy. He compared Orthodox experience to that of black Americans. Both suffered massive oppression that caused their Christian traditions to develop in a different way. At any rate, Dreher wrote, “one cannot judge the truth of a religion based on whether or not it makes people into better capitalists or liberal democrats”.
