In Two Cities: June 2009

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

St. Paul’s Body Found?

Independent carbon dating of bone fragments extracted from traditional tomb consistent with traditional martyrdom.

There is a reasonable probability that the remains are those of the Apostle Paul.
In the time of Pius XII the possible remains of the Apostle Peter were found where they were supposed to be, beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica on Vatican hill in Rome. And then lost in a Vatican storeroom. And then rediscovered in the time of Paul VI. Interesting book about it: "The Bones of Saint Peter".
There is an interesting biblical parallel between the lives of Daniel and his three friends in Babylon near the time of the destruction of the first Jerusalem temple. And the traditional martyrdom of leading Apostles in Rome near the time of the destruction of the second Jerusalem temple.

From my comment on a Daily Mail .co .uk article, Have we found the body of St Paul?, article excerpts below:

I report and link. You decide. - J:)

Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place. - 2nd Corinthians 2:14

Excerpts from a Daily Mail .co .uk article, Have we found the body of St Paul?
:

Have we found the body of St Paul? [/] By A N Wilson Last updated at 2:43 AM on 30th June 2009 [/] Ruthless, half mad, he stoned Christians to death. He also founded modern civilisation. And until yesterday, his fate was one of history's great mysteries...
Deeply moved, the Pope delivered the news on Sunday that fragments of bones found in the tomb traditionally considered to be that of Saint Paul did indeed date from the first or second century. [/] Which means that, in all likelihood, they are the bones of the Apostle Paul - bones that have lain there for 1,950 years yet, astonishingly, have only been discovered in our time.
You might say, so what? Aren't Roman Catholics always making claims about bones and relics? Was it not said that if you measured all the bits of the True Cross venerated throughout the world you could build a bridge to the moon? Yes, yes. [/] But this is slightly different, and it is very exciting. The Pope was not saying that he revered some relics as a matter of faith. He was saying that scientists, by carbon dating, have come as close as possible to identifying the very bones of St Paul himself.
Why is he so convinced? Though the carbon-dating experts knew nothing of their origins, the bone fragments were recovered after a tiny probe was inserted into the tomb which lies in a crypt beneath the Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls in Rome - a church long held to have been built on the site where Paul was buried.
It was only three years ago that the tomb itself was discovered by Vatican archaeologists. [/] The fact that it was positioned exactly underneath the epigraph Paulo Apostolo Mart (Paul the Apostle and Martyr) at the base of the altar convinced them it was Paul's tomb. [/] Now backed by the evidence of his carbon-dated bone fragments, the Pope has announced: 'This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that the bone fragments are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul.'
What makes the discovery all the more exciting is that the last days of Saint Paul have always been a bit of an historical puzzle. [/] To understand why this news is being treated as such a sensation, we have to examine his life - an extraordinary and dramatic life which, it is no exaggeration to say, changed the course of the world.
[…] You can tell from his letters that he is a driven, hyperactive genius of a man - more like a half-mad poet, I have often thought, than a clergyman. [/] His great flights of beautiful prose-poetry about the nature of love, or about the consolations of faith, echo down the ages to inspire new generations of readers afresh. [/] 'Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword?'
Paul was the first great theologian, insisting that we are forgiven not because of our good deeds, but solely because of God's love for us. He was the prime influence on all the great Christian philosophers and thinkers from Augustine to Luther.
But what happened to him in the end? We never knew. We know from the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible that he was arrested for causing an affray in Jerusalem, when Jews set upon him for preaching Christianity. [/] We're told that, as a Roman citizen, he made an appeal to Caesar's supreme court in Rome, living for two years under house arrest. But then his story fizzles out. [/] Now, it appears that the aural tradition, passed on by word of mouth since the second century, that he had suffered martyrdom and was beheaded for his faith, is true.
[...] Historical research alone will never produce faith. But it has always been part of the Christian claim that it was historically rooted. The ministry of the Church - its bishops and priests - goes back, as far as the West is concerned, in an unbroken line to the martyrs of Rome in the early days of Christianity. [/] These were men and women who were alive during the lifetime of Jesus, and their lives had been turned around by their beliefs concerning his life, death and resurrection. To all the apostles, therefore, the Church owes an historic debt.
But to none more so than Paul, who opened up to the Gentile world the inexhaustible riches of the Jewish spiritual tradition which culminated in Jesus Christ. [/] A.N. WILSON is author of Paul: The Mind Of The Apostle. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Monday, June 29, 2009

Nine Supremes Dis Wise Latina!?!

(Sorry, the muse of sock-it-to-‘em headlines could not be denied.)

It is not encouraging that Judge Sotomayor showed less concern than the four liberal Justices for protecting white employees from being treated differently from other employees based on their race, and for avoiding a de facto quota system. Nor is it encouraging that Judge Sotomayor reached this result without appearing to engage the issue, through a summary order that may well have been intended to bury the claims of the white firefighters. But such is the jurisprudence of the "wise Latina" jurist President Obama has nominated for the Supreme Court.

From a Power Line Blog .com post, RICCI: THE MAJORITY'S WAY, THE DISSENTERS' WAY, AND SOTOMAYOR'S WAY, more below.

I report and link. You decide. - BJon

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7

RICCI: THE MAJORITY'S WAY, THE DISSENTERS' WAY, AND SOTOMAYOR'S WAY [/] Power Line Blog: John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Paul Mirengoff [/] June 29, 2009 Posted by Paul at 1:39 PM
[…] In Ricci, the Supreme Court was called upon to decide whether, or under what circumstances, an employer can discard the results of a facially neutral selection device in order to favor members of a particular racial group, where the purpose of doing so is to avoid a potential claim of disparate impact discriminaton. The City argued that employers should be able to do so where they have a "good faith belief" that this step is necessary to avoid liability for disparate impact discrimination.
The Ricci majority rejected this view. Justice Kennedy explained that the "minimal standard" advocated by the City
could cause employers to discard the results of lawful and beneficial promotional examinations even where there is little if any evidence of disparate-impact discrimination. That would amount to a de facto quota system in which a focus on statistics could put undue pressure on employers to adopt inappropriate prophylactic measures.

This is the heart of the matter. For more than 30 years, since my days as a government civil rights lawyer, important elements of the civil rights community and the civil rights bureaucracy have wanted employers to relax their standards to the extent necessary to guarantee that minorities enjoy proportional representation in the workplace. This urge has increased over the years, as it has often seemed that no matter how hard employers try to create tests and other selection devices that will not adversely affect minorities, they continue to come up short (or, stated differently, minorities continue to come up short on the tests).
For example, in the New Haven case, the city took testimony from a professor at Boston College whose area of "expertise" was "race and culture as they influence performance on tests and other assessment procedures." Declining even to look at the City's exam, she testified that no matter what test the City had administered it would have revealed a disparity between blacks and whites, as well as Hispanics and whites, particularly on a written test. In the 1960s, liberals would considered such a claim to "racist." These days, some liberals liberal rely on it.
Today's decision represents a setback to those who would impose a de facto quota regime. Employers will not be allowed to throw up their hands and abandon selection criteria merely because the criteria have an adverse impact on minorities and they don't feel like being sued (or in the case of political entitiies, because they want to favor, or curry favor with, minority groups and cite the risk of litigation as an excuse for doing so).
Under the standard articulated for the majority by Justice Kennedy, an employer may discard the results of a selection device that would have an adverse impact on minorities only if the employer has a "strong basis in the evidence" to believe that using the selection device would cause it to violate Title VII by engaging in disparate impact discrimination. Thus, the employer must have a strong basis in the evidence to believe that (1) using the device will result in disparate impact and (2) the test cannot be justified under the job relatedness/business necessiity standard or (3) there exists an equally valid, less-discriminatory alternative selection device that it refused to adopt.
Justice Ginsburg, in dissent, argued for a more lenient standard than the majority's "strong basis in the evidence" test. The dissenters would uphold the discarding of results from a test with a disparate impact where "the employer has good cause to believe the device would not withstand examination for business necessity." Depending on how this standard were applied, it could perhaps be sufficient to avoid a de facto quota system, and Justice Ginsburg made a point of claiming (albeit not very persuasively) that her standard would, in fact, avoid that result.
In any event, even the dissent's more lenient standard is a departure from that endorsed by Judge Sotomayor. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in footnote 10, "the lower courts focused on respondents' 'intent' rather than on whether respondents in fact had good cause to act." In other words, Judge Sotomayor refused to demand even that New Haven have "good cause" (never mind a strong basis in the evidence) to believe that it was vulnerable to a meritorious suit for disparate impact discrimination, before depriving the white firefighers of promotions they would have received had they been black.
It is not encouraging that Judge Sotomayor showed less concern than the four liberal Justices for protecting white employees from being treated differently from other employees based on their race, and for avoiding a de facto quota system. Nor is it encouraging that Judge Sotomayor reached this result without appearing to engage the issue, through a summary order that may well have been intended to bury the claims of the white firefighters. But such is the jurisprudence of the "wise Latina" jurist President Obama has nominated for the Supreme Court. [My ellipses and emphasis]

Monday, June 15, 2009

Radical Christianity? Good or Bad?

”Radical” has the basic meaning of “uproot”. – “Mark 4:16-17 KJV […] when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness; 17 And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, […]”

I realized that during that time of my life my obsession was in obliterating myself in subjugation to the idea of salvation. My mantras of the time were to "lose my life for Christ" and to "pick up my cross and follow Him." And this tendency to destroy the self in this manner can be found amongst radicals of almost all political and religious ideologies -- you certainly show how leftist and Islamist radicals do it. [/] Radicalism is a universal phenomenon that can be fueled by almost any ideology. And sometimes these radicalisms stumble upon common objectives. [My emphasis]

From a Front Page Mag .com article, FrontPage Interview, more below:

Taking up your cross and following Jesus is, in the context of the gospels, a call to the “so great salvation” later made available through the blood sacrifice of the Son of God. Interpreting these passages as a mere call to self sacrifice has led many astray.