Free Republic

‘Deeply Honored’: Jesuit Priests Praise Biden After Brunch at White HouseA pair of controversial liberal priests visited President Joe Biden’s White House Sunday as part of an event billed as a “St. Patrick’s Day Brunch with Catholic Leaders.”Frs. James Martin and Thomas Reese, SJ, were among the brunch’s attendees. Three days earlier, Biden running mate Vice President Kamala Harris became the highest-ranking incumbent official in American history to visit an abortion facility, where she praised Planned Parenthood and attacked the work of pro-life elected officials.Addressing Martin, Reese, and the other attendees on Sunday, Biden said:The Catholic Church has always stepped...

A stunning 19th-century Seattle mansion, sold for $6 million, is set to be torn down because its last owners were the Moonies - members of the Unification Church. Nestled on the shores of Lake Washington, the three-story Spanish Mission revival mansion was once home to the family of early pioneers of Seattle, including Rolland Denny, the son of the city's founder, Arthur Denny. Later in the 1970s, it was purchased by the Unification Church when the religion was still in its infancy and served as a domicile for founders Sun Myung Moon, his wife, and their followers. Leonard Garfield, the...

Francis: “We Must Obey The United Nations” “If we consider ourselves humanity, then our duty is to obey when international organizations make statements,” Pope Francis insisted during his September 10 press conference on board from Madagascar to Rome. He gave as examples the the United Nations (UN) and the International Crime Court (ICC) in The Hague. Francis added, that “we must obey international institutions.” And, “That is why the United Nations were created.” However, many UN policies are deeply immoral. They punish countries and institutions which do not bow to the demands of the abortion and gay tyranny. The ICC...

What does anyone here know about the Waldorf education system and the person upon who it is based, Rudolph Steiner? The school near us flies a flag with an image of the earth on it; no US flag. I know they are into biodynamics. Most of the folks I know who are really into biodynamics are usually pretty out there. I also know that many of the people who pioneered various education systems that came out of Germany during the era of John Dewey were socialists or strongly leaned that way. What constructive information can you provide other than nut...

While Pontius Pilate's wife, Claudia, has been glorified as a saint, what happened to Pontius Pilate himself? There are three writers from the Early Church who say he became a Christian. There is a similar tradition in Ethiopia, and sometimes there one can find icons of Pontius Pilate, together with his wife Claudia. The fate of Pontius Pilate after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is disputed among historians. According to some, Pilate killed himself while in exile to Gallia. Others suggest that he was executed during the reign of Emperor Nero. According to legend, the bad omens accompanying...

124 artifacts made of stone, ceramics, and metal were discovered during archaeological excavations in the Church of the Holy Mother in the town of Melnik in the Blagoevgrad province of southwestern Bulgaria.Recent archaeological excavations have unearthed treasures that connect fragments of history, providing a glimpse into the medieval and early modern lives of this Bulgarian town.Two in particular stand out among the findings. A second fragment of a medieval inscription from the 13th-14th centuries hints at the church’s initial construction period, while a fragment of a marble relief plate from the 18th or early 19th century, depicting seraphim, showcases the...

Italian Catholics reverting to ancient Roman gods, seers and sorcerersA startling number of lapsed Catholics in Italy are reverting to the deities of ancient Rome and turning to pagan seers, astrologers and psychics, attesting to a potentially catastrophic collapse of Catholicism in its traditional bastion. Over 160,000 sorcerers are doing brisk business in the occult and New Age practises, with over three million Italians consulting the so-called “maghi” every year for advice. This involves shelling out an astronomical €8 billion, according to data from the Osservatorio Antiplagio. Between 10 to 13 million Italians – almost all of them baptised Catholics...

The idea that wisdom is found through exploration has long been with us. It is a cornerstone of many cultures and the driving force behind scientific inquiry. We venture forth into the undiscovered, leaving behind the familiar, and the distractions and temptations therein, as the early Christian desert fathers and mothers did in Egypt. One need not travel far to satisfy this impulse. Extremes of experience have long fueled enlightenment, as memoirs of exile, debauchery, and disaster promise to this day. Many of the adventurers had no choice, however. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned, facing execution on...

A north Indian town is preparing for a mega event next week, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate a grand Hindu temple that symbolizes the country’s surging Hindu cultural nationalism, a movement also known as Hindutva. The inauguration of the grand temple in Ayodhya, India is set for Monday, January 22. The temple is dedicated to the Hindu deity Lord Ram and stands on the site of a demolished 16th-century mosque. Some Hindu leaders have begun calling the town a "Hindu Vatican." Many Hindus claim that Ram was born in Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh — exactly...

ROME — Pope Francis has written to his “Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel,” exhorting them to break the “incessant cycles” of war and hatred in the Holy Land. Since October 7 the Holy Land “has been cast into a spiral of unprecedented violence,” the pontiff writes. “My heart is torn at the sight of what is happening in the Holy Land, by the power of so much division and so much hatred.” In his letter, the pope laments the manifestations of “anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism” that have emerged during the conflict, underscoring the “particular and singular” relationship binding Jews to...

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — The author of “Little Women” may have been even more productive and sensational than previously thought. Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s. One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts, and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.” He also found...

One of the key contrasts between the various classical Chinese thinkers is what to make of Heaven (天). For Confucius, Heaven is the source of moral virtue and an ideal to emulate in human conduct. By and large, he concerns himself with human affairs: self-cultivation, education, and good rule. But Heaven has a will on Earth, personality and intent, and what is good in men flows down from Heaven. As the Master says, "How great was Yao as a ruler! So majestic! It is Heaven that is great, and it was Yao who modeled himself upon it" (Analects 8.19). Mengzi...

Canada, is scheduled for unveiling in April next year. Crafted by sculptor Naresh Kumawat from Rajasthan and funded by the local temple management, the statue will be formally unveiled at the Hindu Sabha Mandir in Brampton, Canada, on April 23, coinciding with the Hanuman Jayanti, the deity’s birth anniversary. Kumawat, known for his expertise in sculpting Hindu deities, has erected over 200 statues across 80 countries. He told The Indian Express that the final touches to the statue will be given during the upcoming summer months before the statue’s unveiling next April. Previously, Kumawat constructed Canada’s former tallest Hanuman statue,...

In an interview with Mexican television N+, Pope Francis revealed that he will not be buried inside the Vatican, but that he asked to be buried in the royal church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which is located near Rome’s main railway station Termini. In this church is the Byzantine icon of the Virgin Salus Populi Romani, “for the salvation of the Roman people”, in front of which the Pope kneels and prays when he returns from every trip.

(SNIP) Over the last 70 or so years, declaring death has gotten progressively messier. Scientific advances such as ventilators and life support have made it harder and harder to find the line between being a person and being a body. Now, mind-blowing experiments in pigs, and the development of a souped-up life-support system called OrganEx, are reinvigorating a decades-old debate about how our lives end. (SNIP) Yale neurobiologist Nenad Sestan researches genes that control how neurons grow and form connections in the developing brain. To perform these studies, he orders slices of tissue from brain banks around the world. Eight...

Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult. Neuroscientists have identified a number of neural correlates of consciousness—brain states associated with specific mental states—but have not explained how matter forms minds in the first place. As philosopher Colin McGinn put it in a 1989 paper, “Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness.” Philosopher David...

Javier Milei Elected President of Argentina in a Repudiation of Francis and Peronism by the People of ArgentinaJavier Milei, a Catholic libertarian and outspoken critic of Pope Francis, has been elected President of Argentina over a Peronist candidate in a stunning, double-digit upset win. Milei stated that Pope Francis “has an affinity for murderous communists” and accused him of violating the Ten Commandments. Some Westerners thought these comments might hurt Milei in Argentina, Francis's home country. instead, Milei's aggressive criticisms of Pope Francis carried him to an upset victory.Since Francis became Pope a decade ago, Argentina has seen record disaffiliation...

Argentina is teetering on the brink of an unpredictable new political era this weekend with an erratic far-right populist known as “El Loco” (the Madman) the slight favourite to become president of South America’s second-largest economy in Sunday’s election. As polls opened on Sunday morning against a backdrop of soaring inflation and widespread poverty, analysts believed Javier Milei, a TV celebrity turned congressman, held a slender advantage over his rival, the finance minister, Sergio Massa, but said the result was too close to call. Massa, a centrist member of Alberto Fernández’s incumbent Peronist administration, unexpectedly won last month’s first round,...

The Last Gasp of Our Akhenaten Pope Francis's new motu proprio Ad Theologiam Promovendam has called for a "paradigm shift" in Catholic theology, citing the "profound cultural changes" of the modern world as the justification. The pope insisted on a "courageous cultural revolution" within Catholic thought, calling for our theology to become "fundamentally contextual." Among other things, he called for theology to be primarily "inductive," focused on "dialogue and encounter between different traditions and different knowledge, between different Christian confessions and different religions, openly engaging with everyone." He contrasted this new approach with "abstractly re-proposing formulas and themes from the...

The spike in interest in all things related to Matthew Perry includes a nearly five-minute excerpt of an interview with Bill Maher where the deceased actor talks about a near-death experience, his belief in God and the "math" that was involved to feed his drug habit. "I believe there is a higher power. I believe I have a very close relationship with him that's helped me a lot," Perry said on Real Time with Bill Maher in November 2022 while promoting his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. "A lot of people did have you in the 'dead...