Last week Regent University School of Law was featured in a conference hosted in Minsk, Belarus where Professor Lynne Marie Kohm joined a group of scholars in presenting research focusing on principles grounded in liberty interests to strengthen families and nations. Belarus, once a Reformation center of Calvinism, remains today as Eastern Europe's last dictatorship.
Despite their harshly restricted religious freedom, numerous organizations, churches and community groups gathered in a house church to consider legal principles and laws pertaining to liberty and family strength, and how those issues fit together as a true foundation of national liberty and reformation. Kohm delivered five lectures on family restoration including Biblical Foundations of Family Law, State Regulation and Family Law, Jurisprudence on Children in the Law, and two lectures looking ahead to issues concerning Belarus and the United Nations and, Belarus and the European Union.
Understanding that Christian leadership recognizes a strong appreciation of the past, the scholars also visited the national landmark of Kurapaty – a beautiful forest reduced to a necropolis for horrific mass murder of an estimated 200,000 Belarusians from 1937-1941 by Soviets under Stalin. There a nation's intellectual fathers were executed in an atheistic attempt to erase any notion of liberty and family. Attempting to replace that strength with a Communist national identity, the government of Belarus stands at a crossroads today. It can apply lessons from the past toward hope for the future, or continue the oppression of its people by denying them religious and family freedom.
Attentive to the notion that strong liberty protection helps to build strong families which in turn sets the foundation for a strong society, several pastors, professors, and parents learned that the foundation of liberty for any individual or state is founded in the liberty introduced by Jesus Christ. As the four day symposium focused on Biblical principles of liberty and moral strength, pastors immediately began to apply these principles to their congregational needs, encouraging couples in distress to restore the foundations of their marriage rather than rush to divorce, actually working through a reconciliation agreement for a couple that needed to appropriate forgiveness and work toward restoration.
Belarusian Christians represent a hope for future restoration, for their families and for their government, though now persecuted in the context of totalitarianism. A nation which protects liberty, faith and family serves the best interests of its people by declining to interfere with healthy family government in Christian liberty.
PⱤA¥ FѲⱤ THЭ FⱤЭЭDѲM AND ⱤЭSTѲⱤATIѲN ѲF βЭLAⱤUS.
No comments:
Post a Comment