Why did God make Eve? Why not just stop with Adam? God made Eve for the same reason God makes anything ...

Why Did God Make Eve?

by Tyler Blanski

Why did God make Eve? Why not just stop with Adam? God made Eve for the same reason God makes anything—as a celebration of his own glory.

God was up to something of eternal importance in making his special image-bearers male and female. When God made Eve he was magnifying his supreme glory. He was making a womanly creature who could enjoy him and reflect his glory back to him forever. I would like to suggest to you that Paul says “woman was made for man” (1 Cor. 11:9), ultimately, because the Church is made for Christ (Rev. 21:2).

Eve was not Adam’s original idea. Our first parents did not woo, solicit, or choose each other. This was an arranged marriage, a match literally made in heaven: “Then God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’” (Gen. 2:18-24).

Eve was God’s original idea. God approaches Adam with the blueprints for a male-and-female creation. If it were not for God, Adam would have never realized that it was not good for him to be alone. He did not know any better. He was not lonely, and if he was he didn’t know it. In an unfallen world, walking with God is not lonely.

So why did God say “it is not good that man should be alone”? When we read this passage, we tend to automatically insert a few extra words, “it is not good for Adam that Adam should be alone.” But in doing so, we have slightly missed the point. God’s creativity is not about us. God’s creativity is God’s way of seeing and savoring God’s own glory. “Everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power, and everything is for his glory” (Rom. 11:36). “The Lord made everything for his own purposes” (Prov. 16:4). If this is true of creation in general, it is especially true of the creatures made in God’s own image and likeness. The woman is good “for the man” only because she completes God’s pattern for his special creatures to reflect God’s glory back to God (1 Cor. 11:9). The reason it is not good for Adam to be alone is ultimately because it is not good for God’s glory that Adam should be alone, “everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isa. 43:7).

Adam did not design Eve’s female body or her feminine heart for his own pleasure. Eve was not made merely to help Adam with the dishes and laundry. Adam is not Eve’s ultimate ground and final goal. Eve is the absolute pinnacle of creation, the crown of Adam, “the glory of the man” (1 Cor. 11:7). She was sculpted to “make known the riches of God’s glory upon vessels of mercy” (Rom. 9:23). And Eve was made to join Adam in knowing and treasuring and showing the glory of God above all else.

Eve was God’s idea, made for God’s glory.

Eve is a Gift…

Without Eve, the image of God’s own Trinitarian glory in man would be insufficient, lacking. So God sovereignly declares, “it is not good that man should be alone.” Then he immediately follows up with his special divine solution: “I will make him a helper fit for him.”

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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

Le réac opte pour la boussole de « l’invariant », cette aiguille fixe, obstinément pointée vers l’étoile du Nord

Livre: 

Du bonheur d’être réac - 

Denis Tillinac

par 

Aristide Leucate

Paraphrasant Jean Yanne, je dirais qu’être réac c’est comme un sport de combat. On se sert de la connerie de l’adversaire. Car le réac est comme ça. Nostalgique d’un ancien monde idéalisé, il demeure résolument encastré (« embedded » disent les Anglais) dans le monde actuel. Dès lors, il vit, donc il réagit. J’en vois déjà quelques-uns lever un sourcil soupçonneux devant cette phrase laissant échapper le fumet dérangeant d’un maurrassisme subliminal.

Qu’importe, car le réac, le vrai, se fiche pas mal, précisément, d’être conforme au dogme, donc aux évangélistes dominants. Maurras ou Marx, Leroux, Berth ou Sartre et Evola, Aragon ou Brasillach, Asimov ou Lovecraft, tant mieux s’il est rassasié de ce brouet improbable qui lui procure son miel intellectuel, parce que le réac est d’abord, selon la formule de Drieu la Rochelle (décidément, j’aggrave mon K aurait dit Kafka), plus fidèle à une attitude qu’à des idées.

Du bonheur d’être réac de Denis Tillinac, est une paideia philosophique qui nous enseigne, finalement, qu’être réac est d’abord un état d’esprit. 

Certes, le plus exigeant qui soit, à rebours de toute paresse intellectuelle. Aux prises avec la météo de son âme, le réac doit perpétuellement remuer la vase des eaux saumâtres du conformisme pour exhumer la vieille malle aux ducats d’or des idées neuves (c’est-à-dire, de toujours) tombée de je-ne-sais quel galion de notre ultra histoire politique et littéraire. 

Ascétique et enraciné, « le réac est inactuel. Ses points d’appui sont immémoriaux, et pour ainsi dire anthropologiques : l’Histoire au long cours, les ressacs des civilisations et des nuits de l’esprit. (…) 

Il ne sera jamais rétro, désuet ou anachronique puisqu’il n’est pas contemporain », observe finement notre corrézien de sa voix argileuse. 

Il a bien compris qu’on n’innove rien moins que dans la tradition. 

« Tout novateur véritable est un continuateur. Nihil innovatur nisi quod traditum est », tonnait l’impétueux Léon Daudet, autre réac apoplectique.

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Lire la suite: www.bvoltaire.fr

Guillaume Bernard, maître de conférences à l'Institut catholique d'études supérieures, tire 5 enseignements du second tour

Il n'y a plus d'adhésion de la majorité des électeurs envers un parti

Source: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

"1. Le désaveu de la classe politique

La progression de l'abstention manifeste la défiance voire le rejet de la classe politique dans son ensemble. Ce désaveu est d'autant plus significatif que le maire était, jusqu'à présent, le personnage politique qui était le plus (même relativement) apprécié des Français. Avec la présidentielle, les municipales étaient les élections où l'abstention était la moins élevée. [...]

2. La déroute de la gauche

La défaite de la gauche est, en particulier, celle du PS. Réciproquement, mathématiquement pourrait-il être dit, elle est doublée d'une victoire de la droite, principalement de l'UMP. [...] La gauche a, cependant, évité des défaites symboliques (à Paris, Lyon, Lille, Nantes, Rennes, Strasbourg), pour l'essentiel, comme l'a remarqué Eric Zemmour, de grandes villes mondialisées que les classes populaires (hors mis celles qui bénéficient de logements sociaux) et moyennes ont dû quitter ou voulu fuir. [...]

3. L'effet de balancier

[...] La droite, qui avait sévèrement perdu les municipales de 2008 après l'accession au pouvoir de Nicolas Sarkozy en 2007, prend aujourd'hui très largement sa revanche. Mais, il existe un risque assez important que le vainqueur de l'élection ne prenne sa victoire pour une adhésion à son programme et son personnel. Or, le taux d'abstention ne permet pas d'accréditer cette interprétation. Il n'y a plus d'adhésion pérenne de la majorité des électeurs envers un camp politique, mais une succession de votes sanction.

4. L'enracinement du Font national

Le FN a réussi son implantation locale: outre l'élection de très nombreux conseillers municipaux qui va lui permettre de se professionnaliser, il emporte une dizaine de villes de tailles assez différentes [...]. Enfin, sous l'effet du «mouvement dextrogyre», il semble bien qu'il y ait la mise en place progressive d'une tripolarisation de la vie politique française (gauche, droite, FN) qui devrait s'achever - en raison de l'élection présidentielle à deux tours (le second n'opposant que les deux candidats arrivés en tête) et du phénomène majoritaire qui suit aux législatives - par une recomposition du système partisan et l'écrasement de l'une de ces forces.

5. Un avenir plus ou moins incertain

Le remaniement du Gouvernement fait peu de doutes [...]. En tout cas, aux européennes, la droite comme la gauche modérées vont se retrouver face à la même difficulté car leurs électorats sont divisés sur la question de la construction et des orientations de l'UE. Sur ce sujet, comme sur d'autres d'ailleurs, le clivage passe beaucoup plus au sein de la droite et de la gauche qu'entre elles. [...]"

Rencontre de l'Institut Thomas More | Restaurant Le Procope, Paris, Mardi 15 avril 2014

Russie-Occident 

Enjeux et menaces de la crise ukrainienne

Rencontre de l'Institut Thomas More

Mardi 15 avril 2014, 8h30-10h

Restaurant Le Procope, Paris

Quelques semaines après le début de la crise ukrainienne, l’issue de ce grave conflit géopolitique demeure incertaine. La Crimée est passée sous le contrôle militaire de la Russie, au mépris des engagements internationaux de Moscou. Un référendum a été précipitamment organisé et ce morceau d’Ukraine a été rattaché à Moscou. Confrontés à ce fait accompli, les Occidentaux ont pris des sanctions, encore limitées, mais la porte des négociations est maintenue ouverte.

Pourtant, a-t-on pleinement conscience des contrecoups de cette politique de force sur l’ordre international public européen et la sécurité de l’Ancien Monde ? 

Après l’annexion de facto de l’Abkhazie et de l’Ossétie du Sud en 2008, comment accepter cette nouvelle atteinte aux principes de souveraineté et d’intégrité territoriale ? Quel impact sur les pays d’Europe centrale et orientale ? 

Quelles menaces sur la sécurité énergétique européenne ? 

In fine, la Russie peut-elle encore être considérée comme un « partenaire » de l’Occident ? 

L'Institut Thomas More a le plaisir de vous inviter à venir participer à sa prochaine Rencontre autour de :

Françoise THOM

Historienne, Maître de conférences à l'Université Paris IV-Sorbonne

Antoine ARJAKOVSKY

Directeur de recherche au Collège des Bernardins

Jean-Sylvestre MONGRENIER

Chercheur associé à l’Institut Thomas More

| La Rencontre se déroulera au restaurant Le Procope
| 13, rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, 75 006 Paris | Voir le Plan
| Le nombre de places est limité | Inscription obligatoire
| Participation : 35 euros
| Tarif réduit (voir détails dans l'invitation) : 20 euros
| Réponse souhaitée avant le lundi 14 avril 2014

Lire la suite: www.institut-thomas-more.org

Books: a Catechism for Business

A Free Market Gets 

Its Long-Overdue Catechism

by Peter Jesserer Smith

The editors of the new A Catechism for Business talk with the Register about how they’ve created a way for business to know an obligation to achieve a just society.

Running a business on the ethics and social teachings of the Catholic Church has never been easier, thanks to the production of a concise, easy-to-read handbook called A Catechism for Business.

A Catechism for Business is the product of a herculean seven-year labor by two professors at The Catholic University of America (CUA), Andrew Abela, dean of CUA’s School of Business and Economics, andJoseph Capizzi, associate professor of moral theology at CUA.

The two editors have made it easy for people in both small business and big business to engage with the Church’s social doctrine and understand what their obligations are to work for a just society as business people. The new book helps answer challenging ethical questions faced daily in the 21st-century global economy by providing quotations and references — not the editors’ interpretations — to the relevant social teaching.

The Register spoke with Abela and Capizzi before the March 26 launch of their book at the Catholic Information Center in Washington and discussed how A Catechism for Business can evangelize the business world and build the foundations for a more just economy inclusive of those on the margins of society.

Why is A Catechism for Business so important for our modern context?

Abela: What we wanted to do with this book is make [the Church’s social teachings] more accessible for busy business people — especially faithful business people who are trying to live the Gospel in their business but not sure how to do that. This treasure of the social doctrine is scattered throughout many, many documents, and they don’t necessarily know where to look. So the book collects all of that and makes it much more readily accessible.

How did you put the social teachings of the Church in this book for people?

Abela: This little volume is seven years in the making. It took a long time to gather and find all the materials because we had to read everything. All the social encyclicals, all the documents of Vatican II, the Catechism …

Capizzi: And then there’s the process of distillation. You’re obviously not putting in every quotation that pertains to every question. Instead, you’re trying to find the ones that are the most emblematic of the teaching as a whole or somehow crystallize the point as much as possible.


So you both did a lot of work to make it easy for people?

Capizzi: [Laughing] We think so; yes.

A lot of people view the purpose or end of the economy as just about profit and say that’s what business is all about. But what is actually the purpose, or end goal, of the economy, in the Catholic view?

Abela: Basically, serving the material needs of human beings. The view that profit is the end of business is actually a relatively recent innovation, even in the secular world.

Really? How recent is it?

Abela: Certainly the last 100 years, at the most; and in terms of making it the conventional wisdom, only probably in the last 30 or 40 years.

And it’s not even as widespread as you would think. We speak to small business people, and they don’t think they’re in it [for profit] — yes, they’re in it for profit, in the sense that they have to make profit, but they don’t get up every day and go to work and say, “I am going to make profit.” They say, “I am going to make shoes" or "I am going to run a shop.” So there’s this strange distortion.

So what are you trying to change here?

Abela: What we’re trying to do with this book — and it’s actually part of a broader strategy we’re doing at our School of Business and Economics at Catholic University — is to combat this notion that business is amoral.

Human beings — we’re moral beings. We don’t really do anything amoral. So if you pretend that business is amoral, then other people are going to try to shove morality in somehow, which usually involves heavier government regulations.

If businesses aren’t striving to care for society, then government feels like it has to do it. One of our board members said the other day, “If business had taken care of the 17% of Americans who didn’t have health insurance, then the Affordable Care Act never would have happened.” So when business leaders decline the responsibility, we hand it over to government. And how’s that working out for us?

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Read more: www.ncregister.com

Think of the Ukraine crisis as a Rorschach test. Russia has shown President Obama an inkblot that looks like a bear, and all he sees is a frightened rabbit

Obama fails the Crimea Rorschach test

By Kim R. Holmes

Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine could not be clearer. Yet Mr. Obama clings to the notion that Moscow is motivated by weakness and fear.

Russia is acting, he says, “not out of strength, but out of weakness,” and from the groundless fear that we’re trying to “encircl[e] Russia.” So the real problem is us. If we could only reassure Mr. Putin we mean no harm, maybe he’ll back off.

Sometimes, though, a bear really is a bear. Mr. Putin may not have some grand plan worked out to the last detail, but he is an opportunist. And, unlike Mr. Obama, he appears not to be bluffing. Rather he’s a man who, step by step, appears to be coldly calculating his options.

The “Putin fears us” narrative offers a possible win-win setup for Mr. Obama, however. If the Russian stops at annexing Crimea, Mr. Obama can claim victory. (“The sanctions worked!”) If Russia invades Ukraine? Well, it was Mr. Putin’s “paranoia’ that made him do it — paranoia supposedly stoked by American hawks like Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.

There are lots of problems with this line of reasoning. For one thing, there’s no reason to think that this is how Mr. Putin views the situation. He may not be afraid of confrontation over Ukraine. But he may well think that Mr. Obama is. That would be a reasonable interpretation of Mr. Obama’s blowing hot and cold in the crisis — threatening sanctions one day while implying he’s open to negotiations to assuage Russia’s paranoia.

Beyond that, such reasoning confirms the legitimacy of Mr. Putin’s claim that he’s merely responding to our threats. If Western intimidation truly is the source of the conflict, what’s to stop Mr. Putin at Ukraine? Why not take on the Baltic states or even Poland? The insatiability of Mr. Putin’s appetite thus becomes the only truly limiting factor in the crisis, because he now knows that our president wants an “off-ramp” from the crisis more than he does.

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Read more: www.washingtontimes.com

Wealth inequality is not nearly as out of control as many left liberal pundits say. This, of course, does not mean everything is fine and dandy.

A Closer Look at Income Inequality

by Andrew Syrios

Cronyism and government largesse have caused serious problems throughout the economy, and should be done away with, not compounded with more redistribution and government control.

Economic inequality is the big thing these days. Barack Obama has called it the “defining challenge of our time” and the number of books being published on the subject could fill a small library. Of particular note is a survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely of 5,000 Americans asking what they thought wealth inequality should be compared to what it actually is. Norton and Ariely asked which of two distributions the survey participants preferred, either that of the United States or Sweden (without knowing what those distributions represented). Here’s what they were given:

Needless to say, 92 percent chose Sweden. This survey has become all the buzz on the progressive left and a Youtube video about the study has gone viral with over 14 million views. Not surprisingly, however, there are enormous problems with this analysis. First and foremost, Norton and Ariely used Sweden’s income distribution instead of wealth because “... it provided a clearer contrast.” I’m sure the left’s love affair with Sweden and an attempt to stack the deck had nothing to do with it. The top 20 percent in Sweden actually own 73 percent of the wealth (in the United States it’s 85 percent).

More importantly though, like just about every other discussion on inequality, they neglect to control for age. Age is by far the most important and most ignored variable in both income and wealth inequality. The word “age” doesn’t appear once in Norton and Ariely’s paper, nor does it in theWikipedia page on the subject, and it is not controlled for in Edward N. Wolff’s influential paper on wealth inequality, on which this survey appears to be based.

This feeds the illusion that the top 1 percent or 10 percent, or whatever, is a static group. But as the OECD noted, in 2008 there was an annual 27.2 percent turnover figure in who was in the top 1 percent of income earners.[1] Further, a University of Michigan study showed that only 5 percent of the people in the bottom income quintile in 1975 were still there in 1991 and 29 percent had moved to the top.

Wealth is a bit more stable than income, but it grows with time just the same. According to a Pew study, the net wealth of those over 65 between 1989 and 2009 went from $120,000 to $170,000. For those younger than 35, their wealth actually decreased from $11,500 to $3,500. Indeed, people under the age of 44 possess only 11 percent of the wealth in the United States.

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Read more: mises.org