Learning the Language

  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...
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HOT TOPIC: in Memory of Jean Vanier

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...
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Heaven on Earth

  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...
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HOT TOPIC: ‘Alive from New York’ Event Celebrated Ultrasound in Times Square (Newsmax)

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...
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Suicide Acceptance, Abortion Acceptance

  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...
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What We Need

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...
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Seeing the Seeing-Eye Dog

“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...
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HOT TOPIC: Diane Moriarty on All Our Children, playing now at the Sheen Center!

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...
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Rights Talk vs. Reality

  When I was a child, and the neighborhood pack of kids I ran with started squabbling about what to play or how to play it, sooner or later someone would end up yelling, “You can’t tell me what to do! It’s a free country!” Both the assertion and its justification are...
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HOT TOPIC: Three-Parent Baby in Greece (video)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/baby-three-parents-dna-ivf-greece-birth-science-a8864671.html   The medical team in Barcelona used a technique called maternal spindle transfer (MST), in which maternal DNA is put into the egg of a donor woman, which is then...
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