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  The charm of the toy kaleidoscope from ancient childhood was seeing order come out of chaos. Holding the cylinder to our eye, we would give it a twist; then free-floating pieces, falling randomly, would be reflected by a series of mirrors, transforming randomness into... Read More →

  Boys say when.  Girls say why. Boys get mad.  Girls they cry. I quote the chorus of an old song by The Producers, a band I listened to in high school. Although too young to understand what the words meant, I did wonder about them. Now, having lived longer and seen more,... Read More →

  Every Thursday morning I have a little cross-cultural experience. The rituals of greeting—taking off my shoes before entering a home, warm exchanges, inquiring about one another’s families—come fairly naturally to me. More difficult is a solicitous style of text messaging, in... Read More →

https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/05/07/a-luminous-example-of-the-gospel-in-memory-of-jean-vanier/   Jean Vanier, the Canadian Catholic philosopher and humanitarian who died on Tuesday aged 90, was a giant of a man. Well over six feet tall, he towered over me... Read More →

  A curious path now leads us away from hell and punishment. It skirts nimbly heaven and reward, then ends in the ephemeral cloud of heaven on earth. Its achievements are stupefying. They are nothing less than a repudiation of the afterlife’s heaven and hell plus the... Read More →

Nothing would dampen the spirits of those gathered, not the noisy chanting and drumming of the 75 or so pro-abortion protestors gathered on the sidewalk across from the stage (and kept across the street by a line of NYC police). Not even a fake “terrorism” scare, which occurred... Read More →

  Abortion remains at the center of the pro-life movement, which began as a reaction against efforts to legalize the practice in one country after another across the Western world in the middle of the last century. Those efforts largely succeeded, in the United States and... Read More →

Last month, Utah Senator Mike Lee gave a bold and, for many, wildly counterintuitive speech about the Green New Deal in which he concluded that The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution, but the serious business of human flourishing—the solution to so many... Read More →

“Service animals” have been much in the news these past few years. During one recent summer, stories proliferated about problems on airplanes as passengers were bringing all manner of wildlife on board under the rubric of “emotional support.” Suddenly there were service pigs in... Read More →

All Our Children, written by Stephen Unwin and presented by the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture (now until May 12), is a play about the exterminating of disabled children and young adults in Nazi Germany. They weren’t packed into cattle cars, taken to concentration camps... Read More →