You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2009.
For over five centuries the Moravian Church has proclaimed the gospel in all parts of the world. Its influence has far exceeded its numbers as it has cooperated with Christians on every continent and has been a visible part of the Body of Christ, the Church. Proud of its heritage and firm in its faith, the Moravian Church ministers to the needs of people wherever they are.
The name Moravian identifies the fact that this historic church had its origin in ancient Bohemia and Moravia in what is the present-day Czech Republic. In the mid-ninth century these countries converted to Christianity chiefly through the influence of two Greek Orthodox missionaries, Cyril and Methodius. They translated the Bible into the common language and introduced a national church ritual. In the centuries that followed, Bohemia and Moravia gradually fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome, but some of the Czech people protested.
The foremost of Czech reformers, John Hus (1369-1415) was a professor of philosophy and rector of the University in Prague. The Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where Hus preached, became a rallying place for the Czech reformation. Gaining support from students and the common people, he led a protest movement against many practices of the Roman Catholic clergy and hierarchy. Hus was accused of heresy, underwent a long trial at the Council of Constance, and was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.
ORGANIZED IN 1457
The reformation spirit did not die with Hus. The Moravian Church, or Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren), as it has been officially known since 1457, arose as followers of Hus gathered in the village of Kunvald, about 100 miles east of Prague, in eastern Bohemia, and organized the church. This was 60 years before Martin Luther began his reformation and 100 years before the establishment of the Anglican Church. By 1467 the Moravian Church had established its own ministry, and in the years that followed three orders of the ministry were defined: deacon, presbyter and bishop.
GROWTH, PERSECUTION, EXILE
By 1517 the Unity of Brethren numbered at least 200,000 with over 400 parishes. Using a hymnal and catechism of its own, the church promoted the Scriptures through its two printing presses and provided the people of Bohemia and Moravia with the Bible in their own language.
A bitter persecution, which broke out in 1547, led to the spread of the Brethren’s Church to Poland where it grew rapidly. By 1557 there were three provinces of the church: Bohemia, Moravia and Poland. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) brought further persecution to the Brethren’s Church, and the Protestants of Bohemia were severely defeated at the battle of White Mountain in 1620.
The prime leader of the Unitas Fratrum in these tempestuous years was Bishop John Amos Comenius (1592-1670). He became world-renowned for his progressive views of education. Comenius, lived most of his life in exile in England and in Holland where he died. His prayer was that some day the “hidden seed” of his beloved Unitas Fratrum might once again spring to new life.
RENEWED IN THE 1700S
The eighteenth century saw the renewal of the Moravian Church through the patronage of Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a pietist nobleman in Saxony. Some Moravian families fleeing persecution in Bohemia and Moravia found refuge on Zinzendorf’s estate in 1722 and built the community of Herrnhut. The new community became the haven for many more Moravian refugees. Count Zinzendorf encouraged them to keep the discipline of the Unitas Fratrum, and he gave them the vision to take the gospel to the far corners of the globe. August 13, 1727, marked the culmination of a great spiritual renewal for the Moravian Church in Herrnhut, and in 1732 the first missionaries were sent to the West Indies.
TO AMERICA IN 1735
After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a Moravian settlement in Georgia (1735-1740), the Moravians settled in Pennsylvania on the estate of George Whitefield. Moravian settlers purchased 500 acres to establish the settlement of Bethlehem in 1741. Soon they bought the 5,000 acres of the Barony of Nazareth from Whitefield’s manager, and the two communities of Bethlehem and Nazareth became closely linked in their agricultural and industrial economy. Other settlement congregations were established in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. All were considered frontier centers for the spread of the gospel, particularly in mission to the Native Americans.
Bishop Augustus Spangenberg led a party to survey a 100,000 acre tract of land in North Carolina, which came to be known as Wachau after an Austrian estate of Count Zinzendorf. The name, later anglicized to Wachovia, became the center of growth for the church in that region. Bethabara, Bethania and Salem (now Winston-Salem) were the first Moravian settlements in North Carolina.
Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and Winston-Salem in North Carolina became the headquarters of the two provinces (North and South), which developed as the Moravian Church in North America became established as an autonomous church body after the Unity Synod of 1848. The church spread out from the geographical centers of Bethlehem and Winston-Salem, following German emigrants to the Midwest. At the end of the nineteenth century they responded to the spiritual needs of Moravian refugees of German ancestry who were fleeing to western Canada because of persecution in Eastern Europe. Such wide geographical spread caused the Northern Province to be divided into Eastern, Western and Canadian Districts.
After World War II, strong pushes for church extension took the Northern Province to Southern California (where only an Indian mission had existed since 1890) as well as to some Eastern, Midwestern and Canadian sites. The Southern Province added numerous churches in the Winston-Salem area, throughout North Carolina and extended its outreach to Florida and to Georgia. In North America, the Moravian Church has congregations in 16 states, the District of Columbia, and in two Provinces of Canada.
From http://www.moravian.org/history/
You can buy famous Daily Texts 2009, Hardcover , $14.50, here: http://www.moravian.org/publications/catalog/
Once Upon a Time there was the theory of the deterrence of the death penalty.
This theory was easy to understand: “the more the State kills, the less there are homidices”, but it was a hoax.
Americans belive in death penalty even if in the Thirties, when executions were common, the homicide rate was very hight and in Forties and Fifties both executions and murders fall. They take for granted that the grow of homicides in the Sixties was linked to the suspension of executions (1967-1977) and forget that America was without capital punishment for a very short time after Furman. According to the hangmanfriends any drop in the homicide rate is the benefit of the soar of executions and they do not notice that both rise from 1984 to 1991.
Anyway.
Their mantra is that each execution saves 18 innocent lives (someone offers even more) and from 1991 to 1999 this seemed to happen: with more and more executions and less and less murders. The triumph of the executioner was 1999 with 98 executions, 300 death sentences and the lowest homicide rate in decades: 5,7.
So, they all lived happily ever after?
Not exactly.
Executioners’ triumphalism ends the following year.
Their bombastic confidence suddenly disappeared as the supposed deterrent effect of the death penalty vanished. Since 2000 we saw a breakneck drop both in sentences as well as executions and, in the same time, we assisted to a remarkable stability in the homicide rate. Death sentences are now a little more than one hundred per year and executions were only 53 in 2006, 42 in 2007 and a mere 37 in 2008. On the other side the homicide rate looks nailed between 5,5 and 5,7.
This can be explained in two ways: prospective murderers do not know that the probability to be condemned to death is even rarer than before, or the whole theory of the deterrence of capital punishment is an enormous bullshit.
I am inclined to the second explanation.
Americans hangmanfriends are very insular and do not like to get a look abroad: not even north of the border. It’s a pity because they could learn a lot.
In 2002 Americans were very happy because they had only 16.638 criminal homicides. They were right because, from 1984 to 1993, criminal homicides were 22.000 per year and 25.000 in 1991. Au contraire, in the same 2002, in Italy we were very afraid because, with a population that is grosso modo one fifth of the American one, we had 638 homicides. We were very concerned about it, even if those 638 were less than one third the 2.000 homicides we had in 1991. Americans love to think the drop in homicides is a benefit of the death penalty. We cannot agree because we are a death penalty free country. (In Europe this punishment is strictly forbidden and the majority of the world is abolitionist).
Actually Italy ended capital punishment in 1877 and had it again only under fascism. In those sad years the homicide rate was five times bigger that we have now, and, in the twenty years following the definitive end of the death penalty (1948-1968), the homicide rate dropped from 5 to 1,4.
Something very similar happened in Canada in the years that followed the end of capital punishment in 1976. Since then its homicide rate fell down constantly.
Curiously in the same July 1976 the US Supreme Court gave green light to the “new and improved” American death penalty and, with the shooting of Gary Gilmore (17th January 1977), the hangman was back in business and the experiment begun. Now, after more than 1.100 human sacrifices, we can say with Justice Blackmun: “the death penalty experiment has failed”.
Americans can see that capital punishment is not a deterrent even in their own country, where 15 jurisdictions are abolitionist (Michigan since 1837). A long time ago Thorsten Sellin observed that: “the states with executions chambers had rate or murder that were significantly higher than states that did not execute murders”. Possibly this is a consequence of the wild examples of brutality executions give, because: “ Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” (Justice Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead).
Of course this does not satisfy hangmanfriends, so John Lott writes:
“This simple comparison really doesn’t prove anything. The 12 states without the death penalty have long enjoyed relatively low murder rates due to factors unrelated to capital punishment.”
And wins the 2008 chutzpah prize.
Claudio Giusti
P.S.
Please, excuse my very bad English
Dott. Claudio Giusti
Via Don Minzoni 40, 47100 Forlì, Italia
Tel. 39/0543/401562 39/340/4872522
e-mail giusticlaudio@aliceposta.it
Member of the Scientific Committee of Osservatorio sulla Legalità e i Diritti, Claudio Giusti had the privilege and the honour to participate in the first congress of the Italian Section of Amnesty International: later he was one of the founders of the World Coalition Against The Death Penalty.
Do you want receive news from an important press Agency?
You can add yr e.mail address in the little box of http://www.eni.ch/
Ecumenical News International, PO Box 2100
CH – 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41-22 791 6111 Fax: +41-22 788 7244
Email: eni@eni.ch
ENI is sponsored by the:
World Council of Churches
Lutheran World Federation
World Alliance of Reformed Churches
Conference of European Churches