The Practical Parson

 President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently signed into law a complete ban on the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.   While that may seem and sound like a commendable action from the outside, banning a church that has a patriarch in Russia while there is an ongoing war with Russia; the reality of what the law invites is actually quite sinister, and I would dare say, diabolical.  Let's start with the foundational issue: banning Russian Orthodox anything in Ukraine.  While it might sound like they're just cutting off the Patriarch of Moscow, what is truly happening is the Ukrainian government is seizing church properties: monasteries, cathedrals, convents, churches, shelters for the poor and homeless- all being seized by the state.  However it doesn't end at seizing church property, oh no.  The government has now enabled themselves to seize the personal and private property of private citizens who are Russian Orthodox as well.  This level of land-g...

  The sitting President of the United States of America made an unscheduled and highly secretive visit to Kyiv, Ukraine this past weekend; to announce that he was allocating an additional half a billion dollars of American Taxpayer money to aid the Ukrainians.  This is NEW spending, on top of the money that was previously agreed upon in the cursed "omnibus" spending package which the congress approved in December.  While there are many who may be truly sympathetic to the plight of innocent Ukrainian citizens in the ongoing war with Russia, it is worthwhile to point out that, for a country not actively engaged in a war ourselves; the United States seems to have quite a few lines in the water there in terms of spending: and by spending, I mean an international hemorrhage of taxpayer money.  The American people have been made to pay dearly for the war in Ukraine; a war for which we have no cause to be involved, and for which we have invested much and received ...