Year: 2024

Did May Give Birth to Jesus in a Cave With a Midwife? Infancy Gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew
Bible Stories and Parables

Did Mary Give Birth to Jesus in a Cave With a Midwife? Infancy Gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew

12/21/2024 Bruce Strom 0

The Infancy Gospel of James was well known by the early Church Fathers, especially Origen, and possibly Clement of Alexandria. Although this infancy narrative was condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 and was considered apocryphal by the Gelasian Decree around the year 500, it was one source of the early church tradition of the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary, Theotokos, Mother of God. It was especially treasured by the faithful in both the ancient and medieval worlds. St Jerome even speculated that Joseph was also perpetually virgin, and that the Hebrew word translated as his sons were actually his cousins.
Should we reject the Infancy Gospel of James as apocryphal? Would it be fair to label them as heretical? Although this infancy gospel contains many fanciful stories, there are no obviously heretical teachings, nor are the actions by anyone in the Holy Family morally or doctrinally objectionable. Rather, they are similar to the many Jewish midrash Talmudic stories, many of which are similarly fantastic, but are instead cherished for their moral teachings. Indeed, they wouldn’t be midrash if they weren’t improbable. […]

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Choose To Stay?
Current Events and History

Should You Leave Your MAGA Church? Or Should You Stay?

12/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Rev Trevors does not address the common situation where the pastor or priest is setting the MAGA tone when he is leading the congregation, which is so often true in congregations in America. This generates another concern: Should you stay in a church where you will be challenging the teaching authority of the pastor or priest?
Is this a special case for this more basic question: Does the Decalogue exhort us that respect precedes love? Is love impossible when we disrespect either God or those in authority?
There is no verse in Scripture that directly commands the believer to attend weekly services. Several verses in the Psalms sing on how the believer should joyfully be drawn to the house of God, but in the New Testament we only have the verse in Hebrews that simply exhorts:
“Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” […]

St John Climacus on Love, Lust, and Marriage: Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, on Purity & Chastity
Ladder of Divine Ascent

St John Climacus on Love, Lust, and Marriage: Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, on Purity and Chastity

12/07/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Laymen often wonder: How can those who are married be chaste? In his commentary on the Ladder of Divine Ascent, Father Vassilios Papavassiliou teaches us that “people tend to think of chastity in purely sexual terms as the virtue opposed to sexual depravity.” But just as the word concupiscence has a deeper meaning for Catholics, chastity has a deeper meaning for Orthodox Christians. “In the Orthodox marriage service, we pray that the newlyweds may live in chastity. But yet in the same service, we pray numerous times that they may have honorable children. How can a couple live in” “sexual purity, and yet have children?”
The simple answer is that chastity and sexual purity are not exactly the same. He points out that “a fuller, more accurate translation of the Greek term sphrosini is whole-mindedness, or harmony between the flesh and the spirit.” Father Vassilios teaches us that in the Church “the intimate union between husband and wife is a living symbol of the union between Christ, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride,” which is why intimacy should be experienced by a man and his wife. […]

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?
Current Events and History

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?

11/26/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Trump’s only path to victory in 2024 was to continue stirring up the hate and prejudice that won him the election in 2016. Simply put, more Americans approved of Trump’s divisive message than disapproved. Trump’s question to black journalists: When did Kamala Harris turn black? may have been more calculating than it seemed. Since Kamala Harris could pass for white, Trump wanted to hammer home the message to his base that Harris was as black as a burnt black kettle.
In this past election, we learned that many older white voters who will vote for an old boring white guy will never vote for a younger black woman, whether she could pass for white or not. Joe Biden won in 2020 because he was an old boring white guy with significant support from black voters. Unfortunately, in 2024 black and liberal voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers to tip the balance. My gut feeling is that a Tim Waltz-Kamala Harris ticket would have won, but that was a political impossibility given the short time frame needed to swap the candidates. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, he was not seen as a winner.
Again, do not forget that half the country lives in the news bubble dominated by right-wingnut media, including Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s podcast, and Alex Jones, that lie with abandon. […]

Eugenics Under Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany: Sterilization, Euthanasia, Lynchings, and Holocaust
Civil Rights

Eugenics and Scientific Racism in the Jim Crow Deep South and Nazi Germany

11/22/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Was there a similar Final Solution in America? True, there were no gas chambers in the Deep South, nor was there a similar system of systematic mass murder, but there were riots such as the Tulsa Riots where the homes, businesses, and churches of thousands of blacks were torched and looted, and many blacks were injured and murdered. In these riots, mostly occurring in many cities during the interwar years, on rare occasions when there were police arrests, they arrested the black victims who fought back. The major difference is that the Nazis murdered far more people much quicker, and their regime lasted only a decade, as opposed to the seventy-year reign of Jim Crow racism in America. […]

Redemption Era of Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election
Civil War and Reconstruction

After Grant: Southern Redemption and Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election

11/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

What were his greatest accomplishments? Chernow states that “Grant showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.”
Chernow rues: “Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.” […]

President Grant's Indian Policy, and Custer's Battle of Little Bighorn
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses Grant’s Indian Policy, and Custer’s Defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn

11/06/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Custer had a reputation for cruelty to both Indians and to his own men. Chernow notes: “In 1867, Custer was court-martialed for ordering deserters to be shot and Grant thought he was guilty. The following year, Custer and his cavalry obliterated an Indian village,” “wantonly murdering more than a hundred Southern Cheyenne, including women and children.”
Grant told Sherman and Sheridan that he did not want Custer to lead a force in the campaign against the Sioux Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Custer had the chutzpah to request a personal interview with Grant at the White House to appeal this decision, but Grant refused to meet with him. But with Sheridan’s intervention, Grant gave in and allowed Custer to join the expedition against the Indians. […]

Moral Lessons Learned From Historical Black Leaders, Guest on BMK Podcast
Civil Rights

What Moral Lessons Can We Learn From Black Civil Rights Leaders? From the Brahim Kellon Podcast

10/30/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Will the Civil Rights movement ever be fulfilled? It has not yet been fulfilled. But I can tell you when it’ll be fulfilled. It will be fulfilled when you make that last trip across the river, and you go to that place where everybody’s kind to you, and everybody’s nice to you, and where there is no discrimination. But once you go to that place, you’re not coming back. It’s a one-way trip, because when you are singing with Elvis, you know, you can’t come back.
Civil Rights is just an eternal struggle, the struggle for encouraging everyone to love their neighbor, and to be kind to their neighbor, which is really what the Civil Rights movement is all about. From the minute that President Nixon got elected, the Republicans have been trying to rollback civil rights, and the Republican Supreme Court justices have been pushing back against civil rights ever since. So, it is a never-ending, eternal struggle. It just never ends. […]

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term

10/27/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Why was President Grant easily reelected to second term, when there were so many problems faced in his first term? Why did the Liberal Republican Party become a third party? Was it truly liberal? Why did the Union Army fight several battles in Louisiana after the Civil War? How did […]

President Ulysses S Grant, First Term, Battling the KKK, Fighting for Civil Rights
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses S Grant, First Term, Defeating the KKK, Fighting for Civil Rights

10/26/2024 Bruce Strom 1

Ulysses S Grant won the presidential race handily. Although he won only 53% of the popular vote, he won the electoral college vote by a landslide, 214-80. “Bolstered by black and white carpetbagger votes, all southern states, with the notable exception of Georgia and Louisiana, where Klan violence was rife, tumbled into the Republican column. White violence had also diminished Republican turnout in Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina.”
Grant’s acceptance speech was curt, as usual. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear, if I can have the same support which has been given to me thus far.”
Former General Grant too often made decisions without asking for advice from more politically astute advisors, behaving like a general fearful of leaks tipping off enemy forces. His success as a general made him too complacent. Many years later, in hindsight, Grant expressed his regrets. “I entered the White House as President without any previous experience either in civil or political life. I thought I could run the government of the United States as I did the staff of my army. It was my mistake, and it led me into other mistakes.” […]