The www site of Fr. Zakaria Botros a Coptic Priest with a profoundly influential ministry reaching out to Muslims with the truth and love of Christ. It speaks to a profound truth; we cannot change the Islamic world by offering them capitalism, secularism, and consumerism, indeed these in the extremes often practiced in the West are destructive of authentic life, but rather by offering something spiritual, true, and transcendent which can only be found in Christ.
This amazing man has been led to gently and truthfully confront the Islamic world with the reality of its own faith (he was the one, for example, who challenged Islamic scholars in Egypt to justify a hadith that suggested grown men should breastfeed with women so they would be considered "sons" and therefore unavailable as sexual partners ostensibly to get around that religion's strict rules regarding the mixing of genders) yet lovingly and without rancor provides an invitation to consider the claims of Christ. Thousands have responded.
In this we may have a model for reaching our own culture, stuck in the rigid orthodoxy of secular materialism and suffering from the results of that worldview's essential illogic. With love and truth we can confront that worldview (also embedded in ourseles) and call people not simply to a religious version of it, but to something better and higher, authentic life in Christ.
Friday, May 9, 2008
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