The slayer of fell beasts

“Come, let us bow down and worship him;
  let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!”
                           (Psalm 95)


Tomorrow we celebrate CHRIST the KING:
He is the living hope who tramples the Dragon – and shrieking Ringwraiths and Hell Hawks – under his feet, ushering in the end of the great darkness.

It marks the final Sunday of the Church year.

"His sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty
  which shall never pass away,
  nor will his empire ever be destroyed."
                          (Daniel 7)

             

                 

Taylor Marshall blog

Mr. Marshall is invariably pithy and wise.  He has a deep understanding of masculinity and Catholicism.

Many thanks for all the good work of this erstwhile Anglican priest!

ISRAEL: certainly no Goliath

The land area of Israel is not as big as the smallest country in Central America – El Salvador!

Israel – at almost 8 million population – is more than 20 percent Arab.

Jerusalem has 800,000 residents; Tel Aviv on the coast has about half that number.

                  

[After the Civil War in America had ended, Mark Twain visited the Holy Land.  He described it as “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent, mournful expanse…”]

Michael Medved on a similarity between the American Revolution and Israel’s struggle for independence:

“In the end, an estimated 25,000 Americans died in the war – nearly 1 percent of the Colonial population at the time… Israel lost 6,373 fighters in its War of Independence – nearly 1 percent of the Jewish population of the nation at the time.”

UPDATE: Here is the most encouraging analysis of Israel I've seen in some time.



A partial timeline of modern Israel:


1948– Israel became a nation (May)

1956– Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal (July);
Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula (late October)

1967– Six-Day War (June)

1970– Egypt’s Nasser died at 52 (September)

1972– massacre at Munich Olympics (late summer)

1973– Yom Kippur War (October)

1978– Camp David peace accords with Sadat/Begin/Carter  (September)

1979– the Shah left Iran for exile (January)

1981– Israel destroyed nuclear reactor under construction in Baghdad (June);
Anwar Sadat assassinated (October)

1982– First Lebanon War began (June) with Israel invasion: they drove out the PLO and installed a Christian government;
Bachir Gemayel, the 34-yr-old president, is assassinated (September)

A Chinese truth-teller

"THIRTY-SIX MILLION people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

"The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II. 

"After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book 'Tombstone' could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China…"

Thus begins Yang Jisheng in his recent essay in the ‘NY Times.’  God bless the prophets who refuse to swallow lies.

Here is an earlier profile of the author; and a link to his book.


UPDATE:  Some interesting video from an old PBS documentary.

Four categories for better understanding the spiritual entities we call nations

Pence says this is the best way of laying out a realistic depiction of the historical landscape in which the Church and nation act in the divine drama:

I.  Physical Ecology (including physical geography, demographics, and a biome-driven assessment of food, shelter, and infrastructure strategies)

II.  Communal Loyalties (religious, ethnic, and language groupings)

III.  Military Assessment (the present force structure; allies & enemies – past and present)

IV. Biographies (the men who made the nation)