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Build a "DIY" Booklet Rack!

 

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(← Click to see full-screen.) We've designed and built a "DIY" booklet rack for our free 5.5" x 8.5" booklets. You can too, by using these downloadable PDF instructions (set print size to "print to paper") on how to build them yourself from a sheet of 1/4" x 2' x 4' plywood. This booklet rack will cost just about $20 for materials. The only tools and supplies you need are a hammer and 3/4" wire brads, a sabre saw, a drill, wood glue, some sandpaper, paint and a brush. A donation jar is optional. It helps to have a workbench, If you have any further questions about it, write us.

To find these booklets, go to this page: https://agape-biblia.org/literatura/, press Ctrl-F and search for "5.5" (without the quotes) to see the title, author's name, number of pages, and description; or click → here ← for a list of just the titles with the direct link to each booklet.

 

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Here are just a couple of these booklets: Building the New City - St. Basil's Social Vision, by Paul Schroeder. This 16-page booklet is a concise overview of St. Basil's "New City." He donated all his wealth to the poor for constructing the "New City" just outside Caesarea. He devised a new approach for monastics: both monks and nuns should serve God by serving mankind. Basil's Basiliad or "New City" had a hospital, lodging for pilgrims, and housing for the poor and elderly along with the monasteries.

And read Building the ARC by this webmaster. This 11-page essay and 9 pages of sketches illustrate a way to put St. Basil's "New City" (above) into practice on a realistic small scale for a single parish. You might ask - "Why would I want to build an ARC, anyway? Do I look like Noah?" How do you start building it? First, you gather people together who are committed to living together as Christians in community. Then take our 1 year of courses to train people how to do practical, hands-on ministry.

Why bother? Why read all this stuff? Why isn't it enough just to believe in Jesus, repent, be baptized, take holy communion once a month, and put a few dollars in the offering? Now that you've gotten the afterlife taken care of, why not get with it and enjoy this life? – that's the "minimalist" approach for many Christians. So in the past day or two, I've added this short paragraph to my online web page and booklet "A First-Century View of Yeshua, the Messiah" right after his baptism by John –

"If Yeshua the Messiah is now proclaimed to be God's sacrificial Lamb, why didn't he immediately go to Jerusalem, be crucified, and rise again? His three years of ministry were necessary to train his disciples how to do diakonia-ministry!"

(Bookmark this "First Century" web page and/or get the printed booklet here: https://agape-biblia.org/literatura/#1st-century.)

What we've done in the past century by secularizing Christianity is that we've set up a false dualism: an "either-or" choice. Either we believe and preach the message of getting people saved and on their way to heaven, or we get them involved in social action – feeding the poor, healing the sick, and counseling the broken-hearted. But it's not a false "either-or" choice, it's "both-and" – do both ...and start by reading these booklets!

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Ukraine, Russia, and Syria: How They Relate to the Orthodox Church

 

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Caesar fiddled on his violin while Rome burned. Now the political and religious leaders in Ukraine, Russia, and Syria are playing a deadly game of chess while millions of Ukrainian lose everything: their homes and possesions, their physical and mental health, or their very lives. Also, hundreds of millions of malnourished adults and children in poorer countries may be starving to death due to these political-military games.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in order to firm up its political-military alliance with Syria, Russia is stealing grain from Ukrainian storage facilities in territories Russia controls, using its soldiers to drive truckloads of grain to ports on the Black Sea, and shipping this grain – over 400,000 tons of it – to ports in Syria.

The Wall Street Journal's documentary "Video Investigation: Russia Is Using a Secret Network to Steal Ukraine Grain" offers detailed evidence of just how these trucks and ships were tracked from those Ukrainian grainaries to the ports and then to Syria.

This is how Russia intends to profit from conquering Ukraine. Most often, war is not really about ideological or religious issues, it is about profiting from the material wealth garnered from the defeated country and its international trade. Religion or ideology is merely being used as a smokescreen: the Pope has admonished Patriarch Kirill against being "an altar boy for Putin."

While living in Moscow for 11 years, we frequently picked up the latest issues of The Moscow Times newspaper. At the start of this war, the newspaper's staff fled to various countries and has assembled a virtual network of reporters to publish The Moscow Times online that I receive each week. Their piece "Investigations Uncover Russia's Alleged Ukrainian Grain Smuggling" adds some details to the above story:

"Satellite images and GPS data indicate that Russia could be exporting grain smuggled out of occupied Ukrainian territory, investigations by the BBC and the Financial Times have revealed. Russia has been accused by Western powers of using food as a weapon in its war with Ukraine by targeting the country's grain storage facilities and blockading its Black Sea exports.

"The Financial Times said its analysis of satellite photographs and port records indicated that Russia had exported huge amounts of grain in eight shipments from annexed Crimea to Syria and Turkey in May. The figures mark an unseasonal increase in the volume of grain exports at the sanctioned Crimean port compared with previous years.

The publication also tracked activity consistent with the smuggling of looted goods, such as vessels switching off their transponders in violation of international law, using ship-to-ship transfers at sea and forging paperwork to obscure the origins of its cargo." "Alleged" is too soft a word: the evidence is rather damning.

Dmitri Trenin, director-in-exile of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes in his article "Russia's Interests in Syria" that "because Russian foreign policy is currently acquiring an ideological dimension, with the Russian Orthodox Church becoming a key political ally and partner of the Kremlin, the protection [my emphasis] of the dwindling Christian community in Syria, and more broadly in the Middle East, is ostensibly beginning to feature as a new geopolitical interest, at least rhetorically."

How does Patriarch John of the Greek Orthodox of Antioch pay for this "protection"? – by switching from supporting its traditional ally, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, as the Greek Orthodox Church does, to supporting Russia's Patriarch Kirill, who would like to make himself the Ecumenical Patriarch, denies that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople had the authority to grant autocephaly to the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and has gone into schism against the true Ecumenical Patriarch. Grain stolen by Russia from Ukraine is now feeding members of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in Syria. In turn, with Russian assistance Assad's army protects that Church in Syria.

According to the article "Widespread Orthodox Church Backlash Unleashed Against Russia's Aggression in Ukraine," the three-way political chess game that is the war in Ukraine "is one of high stakes for the Russian Orthodox patriarch... as a bad outcome could imperil the dominant sway he [Patriarch Kirill] holds within Orthodox Christianity because his Church is much larger numerically than any other national Orthodox Church. By losing Ukraine, Russia would lose a very substantial part of its own Church; if it lost Ukraine, it would become much less than half of what it is now, and with this it would also lose universal primacy in Orthodoxy." Due to his "third Rome" mindset, the Moscow Patriarch considers that he already possesses "universal primacy" and does not want to lose it by losing Ukraine. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of soldiers on each side are being maimed or killed and millions of civilians have been forced to become refugees in other lands.

Holding the Antiochian Church hostage for "protection" is the same sort of tactic as blackmailing Western Europe by threatening those countries with an oil and gas embargo. In "Ukrainian World Congress to sue Canada for returning Nord Stream 1 turbine," we read that Paul Grod, Ukrainian World Congress President and CEO in Canada, says – "We cannot supply a terrorist state with the tools it needs to finance the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people. This is not just about a turbine or possible many turbines to support Russia's energy exports, this is about continuously succumbing to Russia's blackmail." [my emphasis] I wonder whether the consciences of any Antiochian Orthodox Christians besides mine is troubled about participating in this theft, protection racket, and blackmailing?

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Who Has Most Abortions?

 

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Click the picture to read the whole article: scroll down about 1/3 of the way to "WHO HAS ABORTIONS?" This shows you that unmarried women account for 86% of all abortions. Further down, you see that unmarried women "living with a partner" account for 25% of abortions. This means that 61% of all abortions (86% minus 25%) are due to casual sex – "hooking up" and having "one-night flings."

Pro-abortion people will almost always bring up the "whattabout" argument: "What about cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's death is likely?" The article "Just the FAQS" in USA Today – hardly a conservative source – states: "Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yet the battle over exceptions for both has garnered outsized attention in the national abortion debate." The Guttmacher Institute is a pro-abortion research group, so again these figures are not from a conservative viewpoint.

A third article, "Abortion and Maternal Mortality," explains that the mortality rate of mothers is only 27 per 100,000 live births, or less than 0.003% which is a statistically insignificant number. So using the under 1.5% of pregnancies, the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother as a "whattabout" argument to justify all abortions is like justifying all speeding by pointing to an instance of a husband exceeding the speed limit to get his pregnant wife who's in labor to the hospital. The exceptions do not make the rule. We simply don't write wide-ranging laws just because of rare exceptions. We should not invent a blanket "right to abortion for any reason" due to these rarities. And adding the crime of murdering a live human being to the crimes of rape or incest does not lessen the evil of those two latter crimes.

Is the right to life found anywhere in the U.S. Constitution? The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says a state cannot "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So the general rule is that all persons possess the right to life and equal protection. If states pass laws allowing abortion in the cases of rape or incest, the laws must follow "due process" – the rape or incest must be proven by law to have taken place.

The 14th Amendment uses the word "person" – is an unborn baby a "person"? My high school biology teacher who believed in evolution showed us illustrations of the supposed evolutionary ladder of monkeys and apes becoming humans and of a little tadpole as it passed through stages of development to become a frog. He made the analogy that a fetus is just like a tadpole, not a real human being. A few years later, we learned that he was convicted of having sex with one of his students. It is obvious from the first paragraph above that the vast majority of pro-abortion people adopt that position to rationalize having sex outside of marriage: what you really believe determines how you behave and vice-versa.

When Roe v. Wade was decided, one of the Justices wrote that the science was inconclusive as to when human life begins. But long before that case, people such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that human life begins at conception. And a fourth article, "The science is conclusive: That fetus is a baby," quots several scientific and academic and legal sources that state, for example: "In McGraw-Hill's textbook, Patten's Foundations of Embryology, 6th ed., ... biology professor Bruce M. Carlson of the University of Michigan, writes, 'The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.'" An unborn baby is a human person, not a tadpole or a frog or a dog or a monkey.

Thus, Justice Samuel Alito was correct in writing the Court's decision: Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided from the outset. It was contrary to known science and had no basis in the U.S. Constitution. Now it is up to the states to pass laws that follow the Constitution. Pro-abortion women have gone to extremes over this decision: one of the most egregious examples is "Pro-abortion women threaten sex strike over Roe v. Wade reversal" telling that they will abstain from sex outside of marriage because of the Court's decision. At last, we have agreement between the Pro-abortion and Pro-life folks on abstinence!

In the proper context of marriage, a man's and a woman's sexual desires coincide: a man desires to have intercourse, and a woman desires to have a baby. This creates normal, healthy families. But the "hookup culture" after the 1973 Roe decision has deceived women to believe they have the same desires as men. The article "Supreme Court Decision May Force Young Women to Confront Sexual Reality" explains – "The hookup culture only benefited men. And men have benefited from abortion becoming a form of birth control. Abortion on demand meant that men impregnating women to whom they were not married came with no consequences. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to marry the woman they impregnated. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to raise the child they conceived. And abortion meant that men didn’t have to pay child support."

86% of all abortions result from having sex outside of marriage, a lack of abstinence. As for the remaining 16% of abortions, married couples' excuses of "not ready yet" or the financial cost of "unexpectedly expecting," there are more married couples seeking to adopt than there are babies in the U.S. available for adoption and there are well over 3,000 pregnancy care centers and pregnancy resource centers in the U.S. – see Here's Where to Go If You Need Help With Your Unexpected Pregnancy. The pro-abortion people argue – "What is the use of a new baby? It wakes us up at night with its crying, it makes stinky diapers, it's always outgrowing its clothes, it's very inconvenient and expensive... and it gets in the way of our having uninhibited sex!" But that "useless" baby might be the next Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Michael Jordan, or Ben Carson... if he or she (not "it") lives.

The pro-abortion folks are supreme hypocrites:
if they'd just practice on themselves
what they preach for others,
it would put an end to this foolish debate.

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