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Dear Friends,
With greater demands than ever on our time, Randy and I are playing zone defense -- he from the Cornerstone Forum office in Sonoma, and me from my home-office in San Diego. Randy has been posting to our weblog and I have tried to keep current on our Facebook page.
For those who are as busy as we are, below is a sampler of a few of the recent posts.
The first from Facebook page.
Beneath the roiling surface of our political debates are two monumental mysteries: human history and the human person. Neither can be fully or properly understood except by reference to something that renders each comprehensible and relates each to the other. That something, however, is not a something. It is a someone, a first century Jew whose ontological uniqueness imprinted itself on a small group of his contemporaries, who, in turn, became contagious of the existential alteration they had undergone in his presence. The community of those altered by direct or mediated exposure to the life, mission, death, and resurrection of Christ was to prove as institutionally sui generis as Christ was ontologically so, perduring for two millennia under the most diverse and often inauspicious of historical circumstances, thriving under oppression and persecution, all the while responding to intellectual antagonism without and theological controversy within, not by jettisoning its antique doctrines, but by discovering their theretofore riches and developing their latent resources. Those of us who - through no merit of our own - find ourselves within that "ever ancient, ever new" community are privileged beyond words, and our responsibilities are commensurate with our privilege.
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Not everyone is as concerned as I am about the rapid erosion of religious liberty, but those who are may find this five and a half minute video of remarks by the archbishop-designate of San Francisco, Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, worthwhile. It is here.
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On the same theme, not long ago I posted the following excerpt from an editorial by the editors of National Review, with which I concur:
"This is not a dispute about contraception or abortion, but about our constitutional order: All Americans, regardless of whether they share those objections, should protest the Obama administration's willful assault on religious liberty. ... The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to explicitly limit the power of government over critical spheres of life: the press, the private home, and the church among them. A government that intrudes into one will intrude into the others soon enough."
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And, finally, over on our weblog, Randy has been posting excerpts from talks I gave many years ago on the Gospel of Luke and Virgil's Aeneid. To no one's surprise, one of the talks wandered off into a discussion of primitive ritual sacrifice, as depicted below.
You can listen to it here.
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Thank you as always for your interest in our work and especially for your prayers and support. Randy and I are both sincerely grateful to you for making it possible for us to do the work we do.
With gratitude and affection,
Gil Bailie
 
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