Posted on 06/17/2015 5:00:43 AM PDT by marshmallow
Three monks and six students have taken refuge in the ancient monastery of Mar Mattai in northern Iraq, just 12 miles from the Islamic State-occupied Mosul City, not willing to flee, and expressing "their faith that this is a secure place."
Erbil's Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda said a small unit of the Kurdish military is protecting the nine Christians but that's not why they believe they are safe in the shrine, also known as St. Matthew's Monastery.
"There is a kind of feeling that they cannot express but they at least feel relaxed in a way that even if, God forbid, something would happen, they are in safe hands," Warda told Catholic News Agency.
Many people in nearby villages have fled as the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, now maintains control over much of the region.
ISIS, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, is seeking to establish a caliphate in the Levant region and beyond, and is fast expanding its control in Syria and Iraq. The Christian minority is one of its main targets.
An international coalition led by the United State has been launching airstrikes on ISIS targets. "We can see the battles and the airstrikes from here in front of us, especially at night. The sky lights up at night, but we of course are not scared. God protects us," Yousif Ibrahim, one of three monks, told USA Today
(Excerpt) Read more at christianpost.com ...
That chapter fits perfectly. May God reveal himself to the enemy in a might way and protect those that dwell in his temple for protection.
SOMEBODY SHOULD!
Not until they get that climate change under control.
Short-sighted of them. Those traditional Christian settlements live a lifestyle that doesn't destroy the environment.
Bttt
“Those traditional Christian settlements live a lifestyle that doesn’t destroy the environment.”
There has been a raging argument about how much monasteries changed the lands they settled upon. Until just a handful of years ago it was assumed that many ancient and medieval monasteries caused massive changes in local environments by draining swamps and cutting forests for instance. I’m not saying the environment was “destroyed”. It was altered - often in significant ways that would now be illegal in many countries. At least this “major altering” of the local environment was the going theory until a few years ago. Now, after much more research it seems the “scholarly consensus” is that much of that is a myth for those monasteries had every reason to protect their isolation (i.e. not drain swamps) and every reason to protect sources of revenue (forests).
If you’re interested there are some books that talk about all this sort of thing:
John Aberth, An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature, (2012).
Richard Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, (2014).
The President of the United States is a moslem and a friend of the "Muslim Brotherhood".
Thank you for the reading selections.
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