Orthodixie

Turkish TV gameshow looks to convert atheists

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

The whole article.

The Vatican?

How ’bout sending the Christians to Jerusalem too? I mean, really.

No offense to Roman Catholics but this is an obvious slight to Christians. (Okay, it’s a slight to sanity and all things sacred … but, you know what I mean. What’s that you say? Right. We are talking about an atheist that converts to Christianity on a Turkish gameshow. Fine. The Vatican it is.)

The tragic martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas, his family, and all intimately related to him was the signal wave of an in-rushing tide of barbarous secularism that would sweep over Holy Russia in the years after Ekaterinburg. For a century before the royal murders, wise Russian souls forecast a flood of materialist humanism, with brutal cynicism, utilitarian philosophy, and utter disdain for life and the sacred. Satan’s hatred skillfully manipulated, distorted, lied, and deceived, unleashing a fury of bloodletting appalling to the heart. Pray that the Russian tragedy serves to warn this generation in Europe and America: the up-welling of secularism within our culture, societies, and governments announces, in dread and discordant voices, terrible consequences for the beautiful, good, humane, consecrated, and God-fearing. Satan is here. Men chose to murder the Tsar; and, today, men rush to crush holy foundations. They set the stage for horrors to follow.

Stolen from the daily posting of DYNAMIS … read it all HERE.

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This faded face, with a pointed beard and furrowed brow, is believed to be the oldest image in existence of St Paul the Apostle.

Vatican archaeologists uncovered the fresco in a catacomb beneath Rome with the help of a laser, which cleared away centuries of grime, clay and limestone.

The image was created in the 4th century, according to Barbara Mazzei, the director of work at the catacomb.

Oops! Wrong image. (But, Peter & Paul are often pictured together, similarly, in iconography. For those on the so-called New Calendar, Happy Feast!)

Hang on …

There:

The whole story of this remarkable find: HERE.

And, on this Feast Day, the story of finding/uncovering of St Paul’s relics – HERE.

We’ll leave the whole controversy around the finding/unveiling of the — THE — Ark of the Covenant for another day.

Here.

Here.

Here.

HERE.

And, here, too.

UPDATE: Here’s a news story that makes for good reading on the current controversy surrounding the location/unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant.

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A while back, a Russian television crew was in Texas filming a segment for the popular Russian news show “Orthodox Encyclopedia”. The film crew spent an afternoon at St George, Houston. This link will take you to a 24 minute video segment, in Russian, which begins at the state capitol in Austin. At about 10:22 into the segment, Fr John Salem shows the host of Encyclopedia, Fr Alexey Uminskiy (Протоиерей Алексий Уминский), our church. I come in a little later, at the 12:00 mark.

It may take a while for the video segment to load; I recommend: Hit play, hit pause … come back to it in 5-10 minutes and play should remain constant depending on your computer set-up/connection

Now, honest to goodness, the part where I show Fr Alexey my books, One Flew Over the Onion Dome and Defeating Sin was staged and set up — as presented — by the producer of the piece. But it looks like, as Fr John Whiteford (who forwarded me the link) said to our Houston Clergy Association: “Fr. Joseph manages to plug his books to the Russian audience for this TV show.”

Heh heh …

More on the crew’s visit to Houston may be found here.

Here’s the website (in Russian) for Fr Alexey’s parish in Russia.

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