Magic Statistics

The Church of St Simon the Zealot in Shiraz is one of the few remaining Anglican churches in Iran. Because it is led by a lay preacher, Stephen Kambiz Jaeintan, baptism and holy communion must be conducted in secret by visiting British pastors about once a year.

"We have big problems with the government," said Mr Jaeintan, 33, a once-devout Muslim who converted 14 years ago. "The authorities monitor the church to see who goes into the services. The entry of non-Christians is strictly forbidden. We are suffering repression for worshipping a God and the problems are getting worse. I am not allowed to travel abroad to study to be ordained as a priest."
. . .
"I was called into an interrogation with the intelligence service. They told me that the period when people were killed for being Christian is past but that I might find myself with two kilos of heroin in my possession. The punishment for that is life in prison or death. They told me they won't make a hero out of me."

Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the church's pastor, Parviz Sayaphsina Arastu, was beheaded in the churchyard after being accused of performing baptisms.

Read the whole thing.

via Christianity Today Weblog.

How to read between the lines of descriptions of houses for sale:

Words that should ring alarm bells when house hunting include "quaint", "compact", "cosy" and "bijou" - all of which mean small.

Other tell-tale signs that the property may not be as wonderful as it sounds include a photograph taken from the rear of the property. In other words, "the road at the front is too busy for the estate agent to stand in and take a photograph".

The article mentions Roy Brooks, a refreshingly honest real estate agent, who once used these phrases in a house listing: "not fearfully attactive", "slum-like qualities", and "foul little garden at the back". Mr Brooks founded a successful real estate agency firm that bills itself as "London's most famous estate agents". I wonder if they're as truthful as their founder was. The firm offers a collection of Mr Brooks's writings–but only to those listing a property for sale.

Prime Minister Paul Martin and Toronto Mayor David Miller blame the US for recent shootings in Canada's largest city:

Canadian officials, seeking to make sense of another fatal shooting in what has been a record year for gun-related deaths, said Tuesday that along with a host of social ills, part of the problem stemmed from what they said was the United States exporting its violence.

On Boxing Day, a teenage girl was shot dead and six bystanders wounded on a street full of shoppers.

The shooting stemmed from a dispute among a group of 10 to 15 youth, and the victim was a teenager out with a parent near a popular shopping mall, police said Tuesday.

"I think it's a day that Toronto has finally lost its innocence," Det. Sgt. Savas Kyriacou said.

Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford says that last comment is simply wrong:

[D]espite the sure pronouncements yesterday from several quarters that this shooting — this particular one — means the end of Toronto's innocence, this has been a long time in the coming.
. . .
Toronto's elephant in the room, for about a decade, has been the number of gun slayings.
. . .
In the Boxing Day shooting, Toronto lost a lovely teenage girl who used to get up for six o'clock swimming practice. She was a perfect innocent, absolutely. The city herself, its citizens and leadership, not so much.

via titusonenine.

The Christie Blatchford column is behind the Globe and Mail's subscriber wall, but it can be accessed for free by going to Google's news site and searching for Christie Blatchford.

UPDATE (28 Dec.): After spending some time researching at the FBI and Statistics Canada's sites, I find that the FBI classifies violent crime offences differently than does the RCMP. The FBI does not count simple assault as a violent crime but the RCMP does. So, John Lott's claims are incorrect, and the link to Prof Lott's article has been removed.

The most recent discussion of crime in the US and Canada that uses comparably defined crimes is this 2001 item from Statistics Canada, which concludes that violent crime rates are lower in Canada but property crime rates are higher.

I wish this were a joke. The latest fad snack food in Quebec is communion wafers.

For older Quebeckers, the snacks offer up a form of nostalgia. Surprisingly, however, they're also finding favour with a younger generation that has rarely, if ever, set foot inside a church.

"My son can eat a whole bag while he's watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He's had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."

Not quite the same thing, though, is it?

I don't think St Paul's warning about eating and drinking judgment upon oneself precisely applies here, but maybe it should.

via The Curt Jester via Relapsed Catholic.

UPDATE (10 Jan 2006): Wait a minute!

Holy Cross Japanese Canadian Anglican Church, Vancouver, was part of the Anglican Communion in New Westminster (ACiNW), a coalition of parishes who declared themselves out of communion with the Bishop and Synod of New Westminster, until its rector decided to accept a call to another parish. Then, Michael Ingham, Bishop of New Westminster, installed preachers more to his liking.

A congregation made up of Japanese Anglican believers has left their 'Holy Cross Japanese Church building' after its rector, the Rev. Dawn McDonald, 47, an Evangelical and former lesbian, departed to take a parish in Fort Nelson in the Diocese of the Yukon under Bishop Terry Buckle.

Speaking from the Yukon, McDonald told VirtueOnline that most of the Holy Cross members left the church building after she moved on, with only five parishioners staying behind.
. . .
The revisionist Bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham immediately made a grab for Holy Cross Japanese Church, putting in two part time preachers following the departure of McDonald . . .

This is not the first time Bp Ingham has neutralised ACiNW parishes against the wishes of church members.

With the obliteration of Holy Cross Vancouver, the ACiNW went from eleven to four parishes that are still in the Diocese of New Westminster, and one that has officially been obliterated. They include St. Matthew's Abbotsford, St John's Shaughnessy, Church of the Good Shepherd Chinese Church, St. Matthias and St Luke Church, whose rector the Rev. Simon Chin is very near retirement, said a coalition leader.

Bp Ingham's actions show that he is more concerned with property than people:

A long time priest in the Diocese of New Westminster, told VirtueOnline that this is a story that needs to be told if only for posterity. "The world needs to hold that this is how Ingham and company treat their ethnic minorities who still hold to traditional family values - so much for so called liberal inclusiveness. [The Diocese of] New Westminster has shown in its take over of the buildings of four former ACiNW congregations that at the end of the day, it is all about buildings, not about people. In all four buildings, Ingham has done the same trick, putting in pseudo-wardens, changing the locks, and often importing 'ringers' from other liberal Anglican congregations, going through the show of it for media purposes. The implied message is 'all is well' and 'carrying on as normal, thank you very much'. The truth is that the vast majority of members of these four former ACiNW parishes' have moved on and are now worshipping in Anglican settings completely free from the oppressive hand of the Diocese of New Westminster."

Read the whole thing.

The first chapter of Rodney Stark's new book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success was printed in the New York Times on Christmas day. Stark argues that Christianity gave rise to the most successful civilisation on the planet because it was the only religion that necessitated the use of human reason in understanding God.

Sometimes described as "the science of faith," theology consists of formal reasoning about God. The emphasis is on discovering God's nature, intentions, and demands, and on understanding how these define the relationship between human beings and God. The gods of polytheism cannot sustain theology because they are far too inconsequential. Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: Why does God allow us to sin? Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war? When does an infant acquire a soul?

Christian theologians have devoted more attention to doctrinal questions than even Jewish or Muslim thinkers.

Judaism and Islam also embrace an image of God sufficient to sustain theology, but their scholars have tended not to pursue such matters. Rather, traditional Jews and Muslims incline toward strict constructionism and approach scripture as law to be understood and applied, not as the basis for inquiry about questions of ultimate meaning. For this reason scholars often refer to Judaism and Islam as "orthoprax" religions, concerned with correct (ortho) practice (praxis) and therefore placing their "fundamental emphasis on law and regulation of community life." In contrast, scholars describe Christianity as an "orthodox" religion because it stresses correct (ortho) opinion (doxa), placing "greater emphasis on belief and its intellectual structuring of creeds, catechisms, and theologies."
. . .
Things might have been different had Jesus left a written scripture. But unlike Muhammad or Moses, whose texts were accepted as divine transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism, Jesus wrote nothing, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings-the New Testament is not a unified scripture but an anthology. Consequently, the precedent for a theology of deduction and inference and for the idea of theological progress began with Paul: "For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect." Contrast this with the second verse of the Qur'an, which proclaims itself to be "the Scripture whereof there is no doubt."

This is another reason why calling the Qur'an the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Bible obscures the true natures of the two holy books.

Dr Stark argues forcefully that Western civilisation rose to world prominence because Christianity uniquely encouraged the use of reason and logic in thinking about God and his creation. Whatever one thinks of that proposition, Christianity's intellectual achievement cannot be gainsaid, especially when one considers the real-world alternatives.

via Dr Mohler's Blog.

The collect for today, the Innocents' Day, from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

O Almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths; Mortify and kill all vice in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For The Epistle: Revelation 14:1-5
The Gospel: St Matthew 2:13-18

When wise men from the East visited King Herod in Jerusalem to ask where the king of the Jews had been born, Herod felt his throne was in jeopardy. So, he ordered all the boys of Bethlehem aged two and under to be killed. On this day, the church remembers those children.

 The Massacre of the Innocents is recorded only in St Matthew's Gospel, where it is said to be fulfillment of a prophecy of Jeremiah.

The church has kept this feast day since the 5th century. The Western churches commemorate the innocents on 28 December; the Eastern Orthodox Church on 29 December. Medieval authors spoke of up to 144,000 murdered boys, in accordance with Revelation 14:3. More recent estimates, however, recognising that Bethlehem was a very small town, place the number between ten and thirty.

This episode has been challenged as a fabrication with no basis in actual historic events. James Kiefer has a thorough point-by-point presentation of the objections with replies in defence of biblical historicity.

The Massacre of the Innocents has been a frequent subject of artists. This page contains links to many paintings posted on the Internet (unfortunately, some of the links are no longer active).

Father Peregrinator at Canterbury Tales reminds us that this is an appropriate day to remember the victims of abortion.