Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

By Julie Robison

Last Tuesday evening, I saw ‘Of Gods and Men’ at the only theater in Cincinnati showing the excellent French film, based on a 1995 true story. There were only three other people in the theater with me, and none of them cried like I did during the latter half of the movie. The monks’ triumphs over their own desires, and their overpowering love of God through darkness and desert, brought true grace to flow in a desperate situation.

"love is eternal hope" --five stars, see it.

‘Of Gods and Men’ is about a small group of Trappist monks who live in Algeria, serving a mostly Muslim village by providing health care and friendship. Their very familiarity with the people is what prompts more disruption in the community when radical Muslim terrorists begin inflicting terror and killing Croatians, Muslim women not wearing the burqa, and those who protested against their regime. The scene of Christmas night, the fateful night when the terrorists went to the monastery, showed the true caliber of the monks. In an effort to reach common ground, one monk referenced the Qu’ran to remind the leader that Christians and Muslims are brothers under one God, not enemies.

The monastery’s relationship with the government was significantly less cordial, and the “might makes right” attitude pervades the actions of the overly aggressive military force against the peaceful monks. When one monk prays over the body of one of the Muslim terrorists whom he is being forced to identify, the disrespect for the dead and human life is evident through the passive-aggressive anger of the government official. It cannot be surprising, then, that the monks’ lives were not respected either.

It is no coincidence, in my mind at least, that Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011. In the Roman Catholic Church, May 1 was Divine Mercy Sunday—and who can be more in need of God’s divine mercy than the mastermind behind the ruthless attack on September 11, 2001, affecting thousands of souls? The celebrations of the man’s death prompted P. Fredrico Lombardi, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, to release this statement:

Renewing America’s Soul: Part IV of Faith and Civil Society

By Barbara J. Elliott                              

         When did the conversation of conservatives in America shift predominantly to the realm of politics, to the exclusion of virtually everything else?  What was once a rich philosophy of ideas imbedded in imaginative literature, philosophy, history and theology has thinned out to a one-note samba played on a political tin drum. Both political parties have reduced their vision to the material realm, where the only disagreement is over whether the government should be vast and bankrupt now or large and bankrupt soon. The assumption is that the government must provide all significant solutions. Is politics really the main engine that drives history? 

        

Seeking Secular Salvation

        

Deep beneath this shift toward the political realm was a philosophical drift that began in an undercurrent early in the 13^th century.  Eric Voegelin, one of the most astute critics of modernity, argued that the modern age has been characterized by the emergence of politics as a secular means of salvation.  He traces the unraveling of order back to Joachim of Flora, a medieval mystic who depicted man’s history in three ascending ages, which would bring about the final age of perfection.  According to Voegelin, Fiore “and his successors replaced faith in God with faith in man’s ability to build heaven on earth.  The new earthly faith depended upon the fallacious notion that history itself has a purpose:  the achievement of human perfection.  Salvation was to be sought in this world, through the pursuit of temporal achievements aimed at making material the transcendent world of God.” [1]  Hobbes and Rousseau took the next steps, claiming that the political order could provide the means to rescue man from his fallen state and remake his image.