October 2010 – Page 4

Where the Heck is Mopsuestia?

Often times reading about the Church Fathers you run into strange place names. You run into them just in the names of the people who lived back then: Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyr, Epiphanius of Salamis. Whew!

Where were these places?

The matter is complicated by the fact that many of them don't even exist any more. They are just ruins (if that).

For The Fathers Know Best, I wanted to clarify all of this, and so part of the project was looking up where all the places mentioned in the book are (or were) and then composing a set of maps–a process in which I had the very able assistance of my colleague Jon Sorensen, who is a photoshop wiz!

Below is one of the maps used in the book (click to enlarge). It's the one that covers the modern territory of Turkey or–as it's sometimes called–"the Second Holy Land." (Look at the number of important Christian sites on the map! And that's not even all of them!)

You might spend a few moments with the map, seeing how many of the sites you can identify. Two of St. Paul's surviving epistles were written to the Christian communities of cities on this map (as well as one of his lost epistles). The island where St. John saw the Revelation is here, as are the famed "seven churches of Asia." Several ecumenical councils occurred on this map, and many saints came from these different cities.

How many can you identify?

VIEW MAP.

How To Get Your Autographed Copy of The Fathers Know Best

At last!

I’ve had a lot of people ask when the book would be available for pre-order, and now it is!

In fact, I’m pleased to tell you how to get your very own, autographed copy of the book–together with an exclusive audio interview that will not be available anywhere else.

Catholic Answers is doing a fundraising appeal based on the book because printing and properly promoting a book is expensive–particularly in the orthodox Catholic, non-profit world of niche publishing.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

As Karl Keating explains in a recent letter,

I want to launch this book with a bang, not a whimper

The book is ready for the printer. The text has been finished, proofed, and typeset. But this is a big book—about 400 pages—and to print it in a large enough quantity to get a good per-copy rate from the printer and to give it the initial public promotion it deserves . . . well, that takes cash that we just don’t have.

But—ahem!—you and our other friends do, and so I’m asking you to give us a hand in getting The Fathers Know Best printed and publicized.

I’ve been involved in writing and publishing for a long time, so I know that bringing a book to fruition and getting it noticed (and sold!) is no easy thing.

Each year more than 40,000 titles are published in the U.S., and it takes savvy and, alas, cash to get a worthwhile book “noticed” and reviewed and (as I think this one will be) praised, but that’s what needs to be done if The Fathers Know Best is to have the influence I think it ought to have.

In publishing, as in other areas, there’s a “window of opportunity.”

If a publisher can make a big splash right from the start, then a book has a chance to carry itself, so to speak, and to go from success to success.

But if a publisher isn’t in a position to print many copies or to give the book the marketing oomph it needs, even the best book will languish.

And The Fathers Know Best mustn’t languish, because it’s a book that can do an immense amount of good—both spiritual and intellectual—for countless thousands of people, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

That’s why I want to have a large first-run printing and an extensive right-out-of-the-gate marketing campaign.

I want this book to “go viral”—because Christians of all stripes need it

To use a term common on the Internet, I want this book to “go viral,” which means to have publicity about it be self-sustaining so that more and more people can learn about—and learn from—this important book.

I hope you can help us pull this off.

As I said, we need money to print a large number of copies of The Fathers Know Best—the more copies we order, the cheaper the unit cost and thus the lower we can set the retail price—and to undertake an extensive promotional campaign.

I hope you might be one of those willing to help with a gift of $500 or $1,000 or even more. Or maybe you can afford to send us $100 or $200 toward this effort. Whatever you give, you have our thanks.

If you’re able to help us with a donation of at least $50, as a thank-you, we’ll send you in return two things:

1. A copy of the book itself, of course, autographed by Jimmy Akin.

2. An exclusive audio interview with Jimmy about the book and its background. This interview will not be made available in the future and is available only as a thank-you to those who help with this project.

Perhaps you can tell from this letter that I’m excited about this project. I think Jimmy’s new book will do a lot of good for a lot of people.

Over the years, I’ve learned of many people who, having stumbled across the Fathers, found themselves compelled to go where they didn’t want to go—into the Catholic Church.

They saw that the Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs go back beyond the Council of Trent, beyond the medieval councils, all the way to the earliest councils—and further back still, all the way to Christ.

Won’t you help us help thousands come to see this truth?

You and I are witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith—and I think we’ve had some success in that—but the most powerful witnesses I know, outside the Bible itself, are the Fathers of the Church.

Please help us introduce them to today’s readers, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

I’m excited about the book finally being available for pre-order, and I hope you will consider supporting it–and Catholic Answers as a whole–through a generous donation.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Of course, you could simply wait a little longer and purchase the book, but I hope that you will offer your support in this way because it helps the ministry continue its work and it helps us do a decent print run and proper promotion for the book–maximizing the apostolic good that is done and helping Catholic Answers undertake more publishing projects like this in the future.

To give those who support this appeal added value, I’m going to be sitting down and autographing all the copies that are sent to those who donate.

I’m also–and I haven’t talked about this elsewhere–going to be personalizing the autographs by adding a citation to a relevant Bible verse to each one. That’s something I always do when I autograph things as a lagniappe–“a little bit extra.” Years ago when I was given a book by a Christian author, he wrote a Bible verse under his signature. I went home and looked it up, and I decided I liked the custom, so I always do that when I autograph.

And I don’t give the same verse to everybody. I’m going to be picking out a selection of Fathers-related Bible verses and using them for the autographs.

I wonder what your verse will be?

To add even more value for the donor, I recently sat down to record an exclusive interview with Patrick Coffin about the Church Fathers and the making of the book. We will be sending a copy of this on CD to those who generously respond to the appeal. It will not be aired on Catholic Answers live, will not be posted online, and will not be available in any other way in the future. It is exclusively a thank-you for those who are able to help the ministry through their generosity.

So I look forward to autographing a book for you, and I hope you can give to this appeal and help Catholic Answers maximize the apostolic good it can do though The Fathers Know Best.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Nobel Committee Issues Another Ignoble Prize

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wins a Grammy Award, and the following dialog occurs:

Homer: Oh, why won’t anyone give me an award?

Lisa: You won a Grammy!

Homer: I mean an award that’s worth winning.

Then a crawl line scrolls across the bottom of the screen, stating: “LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Mr. Simpson’s opinions does not reflect those of the producers, who don’t consider the Grammy an award at all.”

That’s how I’m coming to feel about the once-noble Nobel Prize.

One of the most egregious awards they made was last year’s honoring of our president with a Nobel Peace Prize before he’d done anything. (It was awarded on his 11th day after inauguration.)

Even he said he did not feel worthy of the award—not that that stopped him from accepting it, mind you.

And the Nobel folks have a long history of lame decisions.

Now they have added to that legacy with the latest award, in which the culture of evil celebrates itself.

According to the Nobel web site,

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards “for the development of in vitro fertilization”.

Edwards was one of two doctors who pioneered IVF, though his partner has since died.

Take it away, Christian Science Monitor! . . .

The Nobel medicine prize committee acknowledged the role of British biologist Robert Edwards in developing in vitro fertilization, handing him on Monday the prestigious award for bringing “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

Of course, the Nobel committee didn’t mention that it also brought death to millions of children conceived in a dish and then intentionally not used, some of them spending their entire existence in a freezer, only to be treated later as medical waste.

Between 2 and 3 percent of newborns in many developed countries are now IVF babies. And about 4 million individuals have born so far been through IVF, according to the Nobel committee. The birth of the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, was in 1978.

“What Louise Brown meant was, you held her up, all her parts were there, and she smiled, and that ended the ethics criticism,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Well, among culture-of-death, establishment bioethicists, maybe. Their job is to not to actually say no to anything but to rationalize whatever whatever comes down the pike and help society accept it by declaring it ethical.

So where do we go from here?

“The Nobel Prize is for the work Edwards did helping the infertile, but [he could also have] unleashed the most controversial technology I can think of, which is, should we use it to design our offspring?”

At the same time, the prospect of scientists helping to create human life in a lab has raised vexing ethical issues. The foremost question – very real for many IVF parents – is about what happens to fertilized, but unused, embryos.

One unintended consequence of IVF includes an explosion in multiple births – as a result of parents choosing to implant multiple embryos to raise the likelihood of success for an expensive procedure.

FILE UNDER: Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show

What are your thoughts?

Eco-Fundamentalists? Hate, Actually.

Let me say up front that I have nothing against treating the environment in a responsible manner. It’s implied by the commission God gave mankind in Genesis 1. I also try to avoid fights about words, so whether one would call a responsible environmental position “conservationion” or “environmentalism” is a thing that does not need to be fought about.

But there is a very prominent strand in the environmental movement that takes matters to extreme and anti-human limits. In a previous post, I have referred to this position as environmental fundamentalism, to distinguish it from healthy concern for the environment.

I mean, nobody wants to make Iron Eyes Cody‘s iron eyes cry. Do they?

However that may be, the deeply misanthropic views and “convert-or-die” rhetoric of environmental fundamentalism was very clearly on display this week, with the release of a shock video produced by 10:10, an international initiative to get people to cut their “carbon emissions” by 10%.

Here’s the video . . . WARNING: EXTREMELY GROSS AND OFFENSIVE!

Oh, and that is Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame at the end, now sporting long blond tresses.

According to the 10:10 initiative, the script for this video was written by “Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis,” who is the director of the 2003 romantic comedy, “Love Actually.” What the video displays, however, is hate, actually. Hatred of those who disagree with you such that you find it funny to ironically lie to them (“No pressure”) and then depict their bloody and explosive deaths in graphic detail (shlurppp!) . . . even if they are children.

The Telegraph’s James Delingpole, “a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything” puts it well when he says:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Meanwhile, over at 10:10’s “media partner” The Guardian, we read the following from 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong:

“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.

But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.

GAH!

Well, the blowback on this one was such that 10:10 swiftly pulled its own video and issued this completely inadequate and insincere half-apology:

Sorry.

Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team

The casual, breezy tone adopted by Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie, and the whole 10:10 team makes it clear that they just don’t “get it.” Note also how “many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but . . . some didn’t.”

Yeah. Nice defense of your own filmmaking in the first clause. Nice dissing of the people you’re apologizing to in the second. You’re so sincere.

And this is by no means that eco-fundamentalism has revealed its misanthropic face in the media.

Delingpole helpfully provides a link to this threatening videogram delivered by Greenpeace, in which a wee bairn stonefacedly appears to make patricidal and matricidal insinuations:

Charming lad, that.

So . . . nice to see the mask coming off.

What are your thoughts?