31 October 2017
America Magazine: What would Martin Luther say about today’s migrant and refugee crises?
Pastoral and theological reflections on immigrants and refugees from the perspective of theological traditions, including Catholic and Lutheran, are available. However, as Christians commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it is surprising that little has been said on what Martin Luther’s teaching on hospitality toward strangers and exiles might offer to our current situation. We need to revisit the views of this 16th-century reformer on hospitality now more than ever: We live in an increasingly multiethnic nation, at a time when Christianity’s center of gravity has shifted to the global South, and in a world experiencing the greatest transnational movement of refugees and immigrants in history, including those coming to our shores and their children. In this day and age, I believe we are called to embody a radical hospitality toward these marginal neighbors. Let us rediscover that part of Luther’s teaching that can help us in this task. [...]
Although Luther focuses on exiles who flee for their lives due to religious persecution, he also reminds Christians to be “generous not only toward the brethren...but also toward those who are strangers in the state, provided that they are not manifestly evil.” For example, if a “Turk” (in today’s language, a Muslim) came to us as a “stranger” and “in distress” we should not disregard him “even though he is not suffering because of the Word.” Even if a Christian’s first responsibility is to those of “the household of faith,” they also should assist others “who experience misfortune.” [...]
Moreover, Luther teaches us that Christians must not lump all immigrants together with those who have an evil intent. This suggests we must put a human face on debates about refugee policy and immigration law. Not all refugees and travelers from the Middle East are radical Muslims bent on killing Americans. Not all undocumented immigrants are criminals, rapists or “bad hombres.” Christians must set a higher example and ask deeper questions about the kinds of sufferings these neighbors experience. As church, we must hear their stories with compassion. As citizens and residents, we must also seriously consider whether there is, as Luther would say, “some little domain of a godly prince in which there can be room for such people.” Going through this process of discernment will help us make decisions about advocacy and support for those whom Luther calls exiles on account of God’s Word and other “exiles of the state.”
America Magazine: Ahead of Reformation anniversary, Lutherans pray for full communion with Catholics
Though today’s Lutherans and Catholics may feel more unified, obstacles remain to sacramental unity between the churches. The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification allowed Lutherans and Catholics to express a common understanding of “justification by God’s grace through faith in Christ.” The central issues for which Lutherans and Catholics mutually condemned each other in the 16th century are no longer church-dividing. The issues of church and ministry—particularly the ordination of women, married clergy and apostolic succession—are today’s main challenges. [...]
But Ms. Johnson knows the pain of Catholic-Lutheran tensions. When she was growing up, her Catholic cousins told her younger brothers that they were going to hell because they were not Catholic. Later in life, a priest publicly told her she was not welcome when she went up for Communion at her Catholic granddaughter’s Confirmation. Today, she is grateful for Pope Francis, whom she sees as moving away from the pain of the past. [...]
With Pope Francis and Catholic leaders making institutional efforts to promote unity among Christians, the work of ecumenism should also flourish at the ground level. Pastor Mills and his parishioners can offer Catholic parishes a model of friendship and prayer while both Catholics and Lutherans await full sacramental unity.
minutephysics: Time Travel in Fiction Rundown
For ages I’ve been thinking about doing a video analyzing time travel in fiction and doing a comparison of different fictional time travels – some do use wormholes, some relativistic/faster than light travel with time dilation, some closed timelike curves, some have essentially “magic” or no consistent rules that make any sense, or TARDIS's, or whatever. This video is an explanation of how time travel functions in different popular movies, books, & shows – not how it works “under the hood", but how it causally affects the perspective of characters’ timelines (who has free will? can you change things by going back to the past or forwards into the future?). In particular, I explain Ender's Game, Planet of the Apes, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Primer, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, Looper, the video game “Braid”, and Lifeline.
The Guardian: The Guardian view on the Reformation: justification through faith
Historians today have a much more balanced and pluralistic view. It is impossible to read Luther, for all his coarse vitality, as an apostle of common sense. Nor is it clear that he, or the other reformers, wanted to end the traditions of argument in which they had themselves been schooled. The reformation was an argument within western Christianity, not a rejection of all that had gone before. No one involved could have imagined the consequences that would flow from the argument Luther started – consequences that ranged from mass literacy to the emergence of modern nation states, among them Germany; to the vast European empires of the 19th century; to the modern liberal idea that people exist as individuals before they are a part of society; the archbishop of Canterbury has even claimed that it led to the emergence of modern banking. It certainly gave us the principle of religious tolerance, after all possible alternatives had been tried and bloodily failed. [...]
The Reformation gave us the idea of progress: the hope that the future might be better than the past, and fundamentally different to it. This is implicit in Christianity itself, but it first took earthly shape when the Anabaptists – extreme reformers who rejected all external authority – took control of the town of Münster. They turned it into a kind of hell, before being bloodily suppressed, with Luther’s enthusiastic approval. But their idea that earthly history might improve towards a heavenly state has haunted us ever since.
The Reformation is in one sense over. Christianity has not entirely faded away even in Europe. But the theological arguments of the Reformation no longer seem central. Christians today can live with each other while disagreeing over transubstantiation: if they are going to excommunicate each other it will be over sexuality or even politics. “Theology” has become a term of abuse.
Deutsche Welle: Pope Francis speaks out against nationalism in Europe
He pointed to the two world wars that ravaged the Continent during the last century, and described peace as a "fragile good," when he spoke near the end of the two-day Catholic Church in the European Union (COMECE) conference on Europe's future that was held at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican City. [...]
"A European Union that, in facing its crises, fails to recover a sense of being a single community that sustains and assists its members - and not just a collection of small interest groups - would miss out not only on one of the greatest challenges of its history, but also on one of the greatest opportunities for its own future," the pope said. [...]
The pope also appeared to warn against the dangers posed by anti-immigrant parties. "Extremist and populist groups are finding fertile ground in many countries," he said. "They make protest the heart of their political message, without offering the alternative of a constructive political project."
Maps on the Web: Polio-free countries by year of last recorded case of indigenous wild poliovirus
Most of the world is free of indigenous transmission of wild, or naturally-occurring, poliovirus. Only six cases of polio caused by the wild virus have been reported so far in 2017. Polio remains endemic in three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. Until poliovirus transmission is interrupted in these countries, all countries remain at risk of importation of polio, especially vulnerable countries with weak public health and immunization services and travel or trade links to endemic countries.
This is different from vaccine-derived polio, which happens if a population is seriously under-immunized and an excreted vaccine-virus spreads in the immediate community. This is a very rare occurrence, as it happened in Israel and Palestine during 2013-2014, and in Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo during 2017.
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