Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe

*BUMPED.*

Getting deep into the fictional literature of Ancient Rome.

Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New

At Amazon, Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy.

Tom Holland, The Forge of Christendom

At Amazon, Tom Holland, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West.

Chocolate Easter Candy

At Amazon, Shop Easter Chocolates.

BONUS: C.L. Lewis, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters.

The Christian Exodus From the Middle East

From Robin Wright, at the New Yorker, "War, Terrorism, and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East":

On #Easter, my @newyorker piece on massive exodus of Christians from #Mideast, cradle of the faith. Stunning numbers https://t.co/nioa8yO3tt

— Robin Wright (@wrightr) April 15, 2017

A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.

At least half of Syria’s Christians have fled since then. The flight is so pronounced that, in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, wrote an open letter to his flock: “Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don’t emigrate!”

“We exhort our faithful and call them to patience in these tribulations, especially in this tsunami of stifling, destructive, bloody and tragic crises of our Arab world, particularly in Syria, but also to different degrees in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon,” he wrote. “Jesus tells us, ‘Fear not!’ “

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

Last weekend, suicide bombings in two Egyptian Coptic churches in Alexandria and Tanta, sixty miles north of Cairo, killed almost four dozen Egyptians and injured another hundred. The Palm Sunday attacks, coming just weeks before Pope Francis is due to visit the country, led the Coptic Church to curtail Easter celebrations in a country that has the largest Christian population—some nine million people—in the Middle East. A pillar of the early faith, the Copts trace their origins to the voyage of the Apostle Mark to Alexandria.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution,” Bishop Anba Macarius, of the Minya diocese, who survived an assassination attempt in 2013, said on Thursday.

The isis affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula claimed credit for the attacks. In the past two years, it has carried out a series of gruesome killings of Christians, including the forced march of twenty-one Egyptian workers in Libya, all Coptic Christians, each clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, to a Mediterranean beach, where they were forced to kneel and then beheaded. isis threats against Christians have escalated since a suicide bombing on December 11th at St. Mark’s Cathedral, in Cairo, killed more than two dozen Egyptians. After a February attack that killed seven Christians on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the majority of Copts have fled the Sinai, according to Human Rights Watch.

The largest exodus of Christians is in Iraq, where the group has been trapped in escalating sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, targeted by an Al Qaeda franchise, and forced to flee by the Islamic State. “There were 1.3 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. We’re down by a million since then,” with hundreds more leaving each month, Bashar Warda, a Chaldean bishop in the northern city of Erbil, the Kurdish capital, told me last month. He was wearing a pink zucchetto skullcap and an amaranth sash tied around his black cassock. A large silver cross hung around his neck.

“It’s very hard to maintain a Christian presence now,” Warda said. “Families have ten reasons to leave and not one reason to stay. This is a critical time in our history in this land. We are desperate.”

Last month, I drove to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and home for two millennia to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Within days of its conquest of Mosul, isis issued an ultimatum to Christians to either convert to Islam, pay an exorbitant and open-ended tax, or face death “by the sword.” Homes of Christians were marked by a large “N” for “Nassarah,” a term in the Koran for Christians.

Some thirty-five thousand Christians fled. Many of their homes were ransacked and then set alight. En route to Mosul, I passed other Christian villages, like Bartella, that had also emptied. Even gravestones at the local cemetery were bullet-ridden. In all, a hundred thousand Christians from across the Biblical Nineveh Plains are estimated to have abandoned their farmlands, villages, and towns for refuge in northern Kurdistan—or beyond Iraq’s borders...

Still more.

Easter and Passover: Both Holidays Are About the Dead Rising to New Life

A lovely essay for Easter weekend, which (this year) is also the end of Passover week.

From R.R. Reno, at WSJ, "The Profound Connection Between Easter and Passover."

Easter and Passover share a profound connection: They both are about the dead rising to new life https://t.co/Q65bymKEzt

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 14, 2017

Hat Tip: Dr. Carol Swain.

New Deals. Every Day

At Amazon, Shop Today's Deals.

And going fast, M&M'S Easter Milk Chocolate Candy Party Size 42-Ounce Bag.

BONUS: Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, and Does God Exist? An Answer for Today.

Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith (and Family) Wish You Merry Christmas!

At Instapundit, "MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE REYNOLDS-SMITH HOUSEHOLD!"

And see Glenn's very moving holiday essay, at USA Today, "Finding the good in my dad's final days."

Benjamin Netanyahu's Christmas Message (VIDEO)

I love Benjamin Netanyahu.

His messages always make me feel so good and proud, and so welcomed in Israel.

I'm planning at trip to Israel, in fact. I'm not sure when. I have two trips on the agenda. I don't know if I can make it one big trip or not. I want to go to France, to Normandy, and I want to visit Auschwitz, in Poland. Then I want to go to Israel. That might be two trips, but we'll see. I'm not sure if my wife wants to go. She's not comfortable traveling outside of the U.S., and I don't blame her. But I'm not worried. Maybe this summer I'll be able to do some traveling. The time is right, financially as well as family-wise. I want my sons to go, especially my young son, who hasn't traveled a lot yet.

In any case, enjoy the prime minister's message, via the Conservative Treehouse:

The Most Important Words Ever Written Are the Ten Commandments (VIDEO)

Following-up, "America, and All That It Stands For, Is In Jeopardy."

Here's Dennis Prager's new book, at Amazon, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code.

The most important words ever written are the Ten Commandments. These words changed the world when they were first presented at Mt. Sinai to Israelites, and they are changing it now. They are the foundation stones of Western Civilization.

Given their staggering importance, you would think that all societies, and certainly our educational and religious institutions, would be intent on studying them closely. Sadly, this is not the case. Our schools ignore them and our churches and synagogues take them for granted. But here's a simple test: Who among us can even name all of the Ten Commandments? And even among those who can name them, how many can explain them in a way that makes sense to the modern eye and ear?

If you are a person of faith, this book will strengthen it; if you are agnostic it will force you to rethink your doubts; if you're atheist, it will test your convictions...

More.

Outrageous! Federal Judge Rules That Christian Cross Has No Place on Los Angeles County Seal

This is ridiculous, a total outrage.

Frankly, the teeny-tiny crosses are almost unnoticeable at the original county seal.

Leftists are once again working to drive even the slightest mention of our religious history from public recognition, and the public memory.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Christian cross has no place on L.A. County seal, judge rules":

In a long-awaited ruling, a federal judge has sided with plaintiffs who argued it was unconstitutional for Los Angeles County supervisors to place a Christian cross on the county seal.

A divided Board of Supervisors voted in 2014 to reinstate the cross on top of a depiction of the San Gabriel Mission, which appears on the seal among other symbols of county history. They were sued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and a group of religious leaders and scholars, who said placement of the cross on the seal unconstitutionally favored Christianity over other religions.

A decade earlier, the county had removed a cross from the seal — this one shown floating above the Hollywood Bowl — after being threatened with a similar lawsuit. The proponents of reinstating the cross on the seal argued it was needed to make the image of the mission historically and architecturally accurate. When the seal was redesigned in 2004, there was no cross on top of the mission, as it had gone missing during earthquake retrofitting. The cross was later restored atop the building...

Keep reading.

The Challenge of Easter

Such a beautiful essay, at WSJ.

#Easter resists commercialism because its story makes a radical claim, says @JamesMartinSJ https://t.co/CvDs06BmnJ pic.twitter.com/CoOSguNtwX

— WSJ Life & Culture (@WSJLife) March 26, 2016

.@JamesMartinSJ eloquent on Easter @WSJ https://t.co/wLD7zJ59sN pic.twitter.com/ZhsLbXLb1L

— Nick Ripatrazone (@nickripatrazone) March 26, 2016

Donald Trump's Normal Campaign Monday (VIDEO)

Well, maybe all the protesting has passed.

At Politico, "Trump’s strange Monday: After a tumultuous weekend, his Ohio rally was among the most surprising things a Trump event can now be: Normal":

VIENNA, Ohio — It had all the trappings of a Donald Trump event, but in the end, something was missing.

Trump took his private, eponymous plane down a runway and parked it behind a stage. He enthralled throngs of fans while speaking at the appropriately named “Winner Aviation” outside Youngstown. He promised to build a border wall with Mexico, to fix a decades-old trade imbalance and to, more generally, “make America great again.” Most of all, he promised repeatedly that he’d win the election.

“I backed McCain. He lost. I backed Romney. He lost,” Trump said. “I said, ‘this time we’re gonna do it ourselves.'”

What the event lacked, however, was even a drop of the drama that defined Trump rallies over the weekend. Without a single interruption, Trump’s speech was a far cry from the violence of his events last week—and the exact opposite of a planned rally in Chicago where clashes between supporters and protesters led to the event being canceled.

Indeed, in the 2016 presidential campaign’s new normal, the rally was among the most surprising things a Trump event can be: normal.

With the protesters absent, the event—which served as Trump’s closing statement to his supporters—centered on the billionaire’s message to his backers: a Trump win in Ohio would all but make him the GOP presidential nominee. The polls suggest that could well happen. Trump and John Kasich are close, and the event here appeared an attempt to snatch a last-minute victory.

“Kasich cannot make America great again,” he said, ridiculing the governor for spending more time in New Hampshire “than Chris Christie,” the New Jersey governor and supporter who introduced Trump...

Keep reading.

GOP Evangelicals Hold Less Sway After Mini-Super Tuesday

This is interesting.

If Trump knocks out Rubio after a Florida win tomorrow (which looks pretty likely), and upcoming GOP calendar is extremely narrow for Ted Cruz, especially in terms of the evangelical vote.

At the Wall Street Journal, "After Tuesday, Evangelicals Hold Less Sway in GOP Nominating Calendar":

Missouri and North Carolina have gotten the least public attention among the five states that will vote on Tuesday. But they could be particularly meaningful for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

The two states are just about the last on the nominating calendar with large numbers of evangelical Christians, a group that Mr. Cruz has tried to consolidate. After Tuesday, the primary calendar shifts to states with smaller shares of evangelicals.

The evangelical shares of Missouri and North Carolina residents are 36% and 35%, respectively, according to data from the Pew Research Center. The only state with a larger evangelical population that has yet to vote is West Virginia, where 39% of residents identify as evangelical Christians. That state doesn’t vote until May.

Mr. Cruz’s campaign, which emphasizes social conservative values, was supposed to be built for states with large evangelical populations. But seven of the 10 states with the largest evangelical populations, according to Pew, have voted so far, and Donald Trump has won six of them: Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi and Georgia. Mr. Cruz won only Oklahoma, which borders on his home state of Texas.

As upcoming primaries and caucuses move north and west, away from the states that were supposed to be Mr. Cruz’s base, he could use a win or two. Missouri and North Carolina would give any winning candidate a boost. Together, they award 124 delegates, more than Florida’s cache of 99, the biggest prize on Tuesday. They award their delegates proportionally, so Mr. Cruz could lose the states but still emerge with a prize.

Mr. Cruz may have greater success in Missouri than North Carolina...

Still more.

Wheaton College Prepares to Fire Larycia Hawkins, Hijab-Wearing Professor Who Claimed Christains and Muslims Worship Same God

I didn't get a chance to blog this story earlier.

The woman's definitely a weirdo. And fired! Wow, that's major. But yes, it's a private Evangelical Protestant Christian college, and Professor Hawkins' pro-Muslim advocacy is not keeping with the mission of the institution, obviously. Frankly, she's a freakin' radical leftist who's working to destabilize the school's traditional program. It's so clean-cut it's ridiculous. And she's been there nine years. Man, you'd think someone might have seen this coming?

Here's the statement from the college, "Statement by Wheaton College Regarding Notice of Recommendation to Initiate Termination Proceedings as to Dr. Larycia Hawkins."

And at the Washington Post, "Wheaton is planning to fire professor who said Muslims and Christians worship the same God":

Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois, had placed associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins on administrative leave after she made a controversial theological statement on Facebook that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. The school has now begun the process to fire her due to an “impasse,” it said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Hawkins, a tenured political science professor, posted on Facebook that she would wear a hijab during the Advent season in support of Muslims.

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” Hawkins wrote on Facebook. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

It’s unclear what specific statement Hawkins was referring to from Pope Francis, though the pontiff said in November that “Christians and Muslims are brothers and sisters.” The Catholic Church has taught since the Second Vatican Council that Muslims and Christians worship one God, though they view Jesus differently.

The theological debate has centered on how evangelicals teach about a Trinitarian God, meaning that they believe in a three-person God — God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — existing as one being. Muslims do not believe in the Trinity.

“While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life of prayer,” the college said in a Dec. 22 statement.

During Hawkins’s administrative review process, which was paused over the holidays, Wheaton administration requested a theological statement, which Hawkins submitted. She was put on leave through the spring semester pending review.

“Following Dr. Hawkins’ written response on December 17 to questions regarding her theological convictions, the College requested further theological discussion and clarification,” the college said in the statement. “However, as posted previously, Dr. Hawkins declined to participate in further dialogue about the theological implications of her public statements and her December 17 response.”

Hawkins, a tenured political science professor, posted on Facebook that she would wear a hijab during the Advent season in support of Muslims.

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” Hawkins wrote on Facebook. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

It’s unclear what specific statement Hawkins was referring to from Pope Francis, though the pontiff said in November that “Christians and Muslims are brothers and sisters.” The Catholic Church has taught since the Second Vatican Council that Muslims and Christians worship one God, though they view Jesus differently.

The theological debate has centered on how evangelicals teach about a Trinitarian God, meaning that they believe in a three-person God — God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — existing as one being. Muslims do not believe in the Trinity.

“While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life of prayer,” the college said in a Dec. 22 statement.

During Hawkins’s administrative review process, which was paused over the holidays, Wheaton administration requested a theological statement, which Hawkins submitted. She was put on leave through the spring semester pending review.

“Following Dr. Hawkins’ written response on December 17 to questions regarding her theological convictions, the College requested further theological discussion and clarification,” the college said in the statement. “However, as posted previously, Dr. Hawkins declined to participate in further dialogue about the theological implications of her public statements and her December 17 response.”

Hawkins has been asked to affirm the college’s statement of faith four times since she started teaching at Wheaton nearly nine years ago, according to the Chicago Tribune. She was called in over a paper on black liberation theology that the provost thought endorsed Marxism, the paper reported. She was reportedly asked to defend a Facebook photo showing her at a party inside a downtown Chicago home the same day as Chicago’s Pride Parade. And she was asked to affirm the college’s statement after suggesting that diversifying the college curriculum should include diplomatic vocabulary for conversations around sexuality, according to the Tribune.

Last month, college officials said in a statement that Hawkins’s administrative leave came from her theological statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, not her desire to wear a hijab, her race or her gender. The statement has sparked a larger discussion over theological questions and the identity of the evangelical college where faculty are required to sign a statement of faith. Attempts to reach Hawkins and college administrators on Tuesday were unsuccessful...

Still more.

Christianity's Dangerous Idea

I love this book, from Alister McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution — A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First.

I reread chapter 5 last night, "England: The Emergence of Anglican Protestantism." I was talking about King Henry VIII in my classes yesterday, and I wanted to review this history for next week as well. It's fascinating.

Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?

Melissa Clouthier tweets a powerful yet depressing report at the New York Times, "Do American Christians care?"

Again, a longer piece. Better get a cup of coffee before chilling with it.

Shroud of Turin to Go on Display in Rare Exposition Expected to Attract Millions of Visitors

At Reuters, "Millions expected to view Turin Shroud in rare display."

And at Pajamas, "Shroud of Turin Goes on Display Tomorrow."

Distorting Christian History to Defend Islam

From Michael Ortiz, at the Wall Street Journal, "Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists":

In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

But what he and many others miss is the conviction that Western core values come from a faith in which God enters into human history precisely to save the world from the erring reason that fails, among other things, to recognize that terrorism is an affront to God and humanity.

The all-too-common narrative goes like this: Centuries ago, Catholics and Protestants gladly burned heretics up and down Europe by the thousands until, thank God—or All Powerful Goodness, as Ben Franklin would put it—the rise of Enlightenment thinkers banished the barbarity that is somehow native to religious fervor. Only with the liberalizing mandates of Vatican II (1962-65), we’re told, did Catholicism—usually the main boogeyman in this version of history—come to grips with the idea of democracy and religious freedom, and finally extinguish the last embers of the Inquisition.

This narrative is false according to the historical record and to the origins and abiding ethos of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Historians call this the la leyenda negra—the “Black Legend”—because it blackens the name of Catholicism in particular and religion in general. According to this legend, the Inquisition is on a continuum with the Holocaust and the terrors of Stalinism.

Yet objective historians realize that in the most infamous example, in Spain, several popes condemned the Inquisition’s excesses. Moreover, the 6,832 members of the clergy executed by the Spanish Republican Red Terror in 1936 is more than twice the number of those executed in 345 years of the Inquisition in Spain.

Far from being an enemy of reason and peace, Christianity’s overwhelming message through the centuries has been one of tolerance, a message that underpins many of the values that people of all faiths, and of no faith, can live by. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI ’s work as a theologian has done great service in trying to correct the erroneous view that faith and civil tolerance must always be opposed.

He looks forthrightly at the negative aspects of the rise of democracies in the West, while not forgetting their positive legacies. As then- Pope Benedict pointed out in a 2005 address to the Roman Curia—the church’s governing body—popes of the 19th century condemned democracy because so many of its exponents were claiming “to embrace with their knowledge the whole of reality to its limit, stubbornly proposing to make” God completely “superfluous.” He thus reminds us that a Western culture beset by nihilism cannot provide a way out of the nihilism of the jihadist...

Still more.

The Case Against the Case Against the Crusades

From Ross Douthat, at the New York Times:

The Crusades as an epoch-spanning phenomenon aren’t in and of themselves a great stain on Christian history: They’re a phenomenon in Christian history that includes many stains and sins and great crimes, but also involves many admirable figures and heroic moments, many great tragedies, and many individuals and incidents that simply resist any kind of manichaean reading. Contemporary Christians should reject and disavow the great crimes that some Crusaders committed as they should reject and disavow the un-Christian hatreds that motivated them. But we are under no obligation to reject and disavow the entire multi-century struggle with an armed and equally-militant foe as merely the manifestation of some irrational religious “phobia,” let alone accede to analogies that cast an entire civilization’s worth of kings and theologians and soldiers as the moral equivalent of Osama Bin Laden.

Keep reading.

Hat Tip: Instapundit, "Obama is a historical illiterate."