Saturday, April 28, 2018

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, April 28

By Dr. David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

WEEKLY BRIEF
The April 26 meeting of Kin Jong un of North Korea and Moon Jae-in of South Korea was marked by each crossing into the other's side of their divided national homeland. Their dramatic gestures and the intent of their joint message is to eventually reunite their ancient civilization.  It is a great irony that the two aggressive racial empires that sprang from Japan and Germany are now self governing nations while the earliest victim of the 20th century empire wars is still divided. (See North Korea and American Foreign Policy.) Is it possible that this Berlin Wall of the East is really coming down? It will be up to these two Korean leaders to work with the two national leaders who built this platform for agreement:  Xi Jinping of China and Donald Trump of the United States.
The next day an April 27 meeting of Narendra Modi of India and Xi Jinping of China was another encouraging step in establishing better relations between these two often warring nations representing 2.6 of the world's 7.5 billion people. China and India as well as Russia and Iran will be key to extracting the US from our longest war still waging in Afghanistan(scroll to Islam and Mideast).
Amidst this dangerous world of men and nations, the US Senate confirmed Mike Pompeo ( b 1963, former Representative from Kansas and ex CIA director) as Secretary of State. Several Democrats said he was unfit for office because of his opposition to abortion and the homosexual agenda. These "rights " had come to claim center stage in the foreign policy objectives of the Obama/Clinton era. There will be no American Christian foreign policy if American Christians are denied office for their opposition to the sexual revolution. The disgraceful interrogation by the abortion/sodomy advocates  should have been vigorously countered by Republican senators. Usually loquacious media seeking Senators like Lindsey Graham however went mute during the grilling. Mr. Pompeo emerged as the first serious national leader one could imagine carrying on the Trump legacy. Indeed the other major line of argument by Democrats against his nomination was that Pompeo  would use his office to carry out the president's policy instead of undermining him.
Speaking of undermining policy, former FBI chief James Comey reports a recent dinner with former Director of National Intelligence  James Clapper and ex CIA head John Brennan. Their wives rounded out the dinner party.  The great intelligence failure of the US foreign policy establishment in the last two decades has been the exoneration of Wahhabi Islam and Saudi Arabia in the 911 attack and the continued spread of worldwide jihadist terror.  These three men (as well as Robert Mueller) are central players in the circus of incompetence driven by sexual and religious confusion in our nation's war against this still unnamed religious brotherhood.  Candidate Trump once proposed a ban on Muslim immigration until we figured out "what the hell is going on." We don't need a ban on Muslim immigration but we still need to figure out "what the hell is going on". The self righteous smugness of the "table for six" is a perfect symbol of the basket of incompetents who have shrunk and subordinated a nation's foreign policy to the careerist ambitions of feminists and their male geldings.  Yesterday's power couples are not a dominating conspiracy but a clueless self referential and decadent ruling class that lost control  in the real world of men, nations, religion and military loyalties. As the lights are turned on the swamp we are not finding powerful well armed mobsters in the deep state. We are seeing how fleeting are the ties of texting adulterers and temporary the loyalties of careerist bosses. The deep state is very broad and sometimes seems an ether hovering over the workplaces, the universities, the media centers and the dining places of the East Coast. The deep state is a lot like the Republican field of candidates in the 2016 election. What was advertised as a battleship of formidable warriors is turning out to be a sinking raft of numerous but surprisingly shallow players.                       




I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE FRANCIS - BAPTIZE YOUR CHILDREN: That they may have life within them.

POPE FRANCIS - THE MYSTIC RECONCILING PROGRESSIVES AND CONSERVATIVES: An interview with Massimo Borghesi, an intellectual who understands the Pope's thinking far more profoundly than his critics. Edward Pentin is to be thanked for allowing a defender of the Pope in his column space. It would be a great gift if some English speaking Catholic journalists would do for Francis what Ignatius Press did for Pope Benedict - translate his writings and the works of his favorite thinkers into English to encourage conversation with literate English speaking Catholics. At the end of the interview Pentin offers thumbnail descriptions of the thinkers who have influenced the Pope. They are cartoonish. The brief sketches miss what it is about the thinker that interests Francis and emphasize what it is about the thinker that irritates Pentin.

One of the thinkers who influenced many favorites of Pope Francis is Johann Adam Mohler (1796-1838). Here is a very good paper on Mohler's ecclesiology ending with this quote:
"No more beautiful object presents itself to the imagination of the Catholic... than the image of the harmonious interworkings of countless spirits who, though scattered over the whole globe... yet preserving still their various peculiarities, constitute one great brotherhood (Bruderbund) for the advancement of each other's spiritual existence and are become one body."

FROM POPE FRANCIS GAUDATE ET EXSULTATE
 "A dangerous confusion can arise. We can think that because we know something, or are able to explain it in certain terms, we are already saints, perfect and better than the “ignorant masses.” Saint John Paul II warned of the temptation on the part of those in the Church who are more highly educated “to feel somehow superior to other members of the faithful.” In point of fact, what we think we know should always motivate us to respond more fully to God’s love. Indeed, “you learn so as to live: theology and holiness are inseparable.”

TWO AMERICAN CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS, DANIEL MAHONEY AND GEORGE WEIGEL IN DIFFERENT FORUMS  AGREE IN THEIR JUDGMENT OF POPE FRANCIS:
Pope Francis is a provincial thinker very much bound by his Argentinian experience.

AOA SEES A HOLIER AND WISER POPE
Defending Pope Francis by listening to him

II. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

WHY AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS ARE RISING AND AMERICA'S UNSUSTAINABLE EMPIRE: Pat Buchanan and Pat Buchanan. There are so few journalists today steeped in history and geography. Buchanan is an exception.

THE BROTHERS: KAYNE WEST AND DONALD TRUMP 
Maybe this is an alliance of two well employed men cheering the low unemployment rates for other men less fortunate. But probably this is deeper than that.  Thus the guardians of racial segregation are in a frenzy. Two "fire breathing dragons", two alpha males respect the mountains each has climbed. Brotherhood is a special form of public love. We built our religion and our country on such bonds.  
It scares the modern huckster racists who benefit only when American men are divided by party, color, and ideology.

HOW MANAGERIAL ELITES GAVE US GAY MARRIAGE: Scott Yenor reviews Darel Paul's account of the revolution. An excerpt:
"How did this ideology gain ascendancy.. The short answer, for Paul, is through the influence of the learned professions and the acceptance of a new corporate ethic. Paul catalogues how learned profession after learned profession—from psychologists to social workers to lawyers to medical doctors to mainline Protestant clergy—embraced first homosexuality starting in the early 1970s and then same-sex marriage in the 1990s. The broad public did not follow quickly. As late as 1992, a large majority of Americans thought homosexual acts were always wrong; fewer than 20 percent thought it was not wrong at all. As late as 2012, most Americans opposed public recognition of same-sex marriage.

The Importance of the New Managerial Elite

Only when America’s corporate managerial elite embraced homosexuality and same-sex marriage as an essential expression of diversity did America cross the “cultural Rubicon.” Normalization of homosexuality and acceptance of same-sex marriage became class values for our new class of corporate managers—those employed as public administration officials, financial managers, computer system analysts, computer scientists, college professors, lawyers, physicians, and other high achievers. Managers gain admittance to their jobs through higher education. They then oversee corporate and governmental bureaucracies. Through affirmative action, the leverage of benefits, diversity training, consciousness raising, and the promulgation of “shared values,” managers help create a new corporate regime, in which managers value diversity as much as profits and where opinions about language, food, and sexuality are as central to one’s personal identity as earnings, capital, or one’s place in the labor market.

Before they could vote in public to make pro-homosexual policies official governmental policy, America’s corporations, Paul shows, imposed nondiscrimination policies on themselves. They also extended benefits to same-sex partners without coercion. The first US employer extended benefits to same-sex partners in 1982. By 1996, 500 employers had done so; by 2004, the number was over 8,200. Twenty-eight Fortune 500 companies offered such benefits in 1996; 216 did by 2004. Many global companies signed amicus briefs to affirm same-sex marriage in Obergefell, while none opposed it.

Corporations built diversity-centered human resources departments to spearhead these and other celebrations of cultural diversity. They won approval from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights activist group. These corporations marketed to America an acceptance of homosexuality. Gay was more than OK. Many managers left religion, patriotism, and the pursuit of family life behind. Instead, their lives were given meaning by their devotion to careers celebrating cultural diversity, and celebrating homosexuality is the key expression of that diversity. Homosexuality symbolized, in Paul’s words, “creativity, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, toleration, and the reward of merit.” In homosexuals, America’s corporate, coastal elites found a minority that looked like them: well-educated, creative, successful, white, and safe. According to Paul, and the various studies he cites, this corporate elite actively avoids living near the poor or near ethnic minorities. Celebrating diversity by celebrating homosexuality thus became the way corporate managers lived with what would otherwise have been an astounding cognitive dissonance."

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