A Gentle Warrior

  Pastor Tsujioka Kenzo passed away on December 16. He was eighty-nine years old.  My friend and fellow pro-life advocate Vincent Kato let me know as soon as he found out. Just a week before, Vincent had shared photos of a Prolife Japan Christmas gathering with me. Pastor...
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Closing Time 2022

  The embers of an exhausted year—one more Christmas behind us—carry with them a familiar melancholy. The time is bittersweet, if not depressing, and I learned long ago to embrace this seasonal interlude with this thought in mind: The end of anything is hard. Once we lapse...
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YouTube Can Help You Unbrainwash Pro-Choicers

  “The pro-lifer’s first obligation is to be informed.” Dr. and Mrs. Jack Willke, Abortion: Questions and Answers “It is not possible to brainwash a curious person with access  to the internet.” —Dennis Prager One day, a waitress named Bonny found a disheveled young woman...
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“There’s Nothing Wrong with This Child!”

  A brilliant novel from 2021 that is mostly about life lived in “the portal,” that is, on social media, makes, mid-course, a dramatic turn and engages the world of the flesh. The sister of the unnamed female narrator conceives a child who is prenatally diagnosed with a...
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This Side Down

  Would a moving company that didn’t respect a “This Side Up” sign on the carton holding grandma’s precious china keep your business? No, they would answer for it. Yet today’s authorities turn precious common sense upside down and get away with it. For decades we were...
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The First Red Wave

  The “red wave,” amplified in some quarters into a “red tsunami,” never materialized. The day after the November midterms, pundits on television shows across the political spectrum fidgeted in their chairs—wrong yet again. For prolifers, the political turmoil of the past...
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Fit to Serve

  In his 1969 hit “Polk Salad Annie,” singer songwriter Tony Joe White, who also penned the immortal (and more traditional) “Rainy Night in Georgia,” tossed off these kooky lines: “The only thing her brothers were fit for / was stealing watermelons out of my truck patch.” A...
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The Moral Muck of “Crawdads”

  In her mega-bestselling novel, Delia Owens commits the perfect murder to print. So perfect is the crime that the reader, right up until the last few paragraphs, is unsure if there was a murder at all, though there is definitely a dead body. Set in the 1960s South, the plot...
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Black Swan in the Pro-Life Personality

  I have organized dozens of pro-life groups, first as an undergraduate, then throughout my career as a high school teacher. And for thirty-plus years, I have been surprised by the number of decent, moral, conscientious students who, though vaguely sympathetic, wouldn’t...
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The Autonomy Ideology

  One afternoon in mid-October, I found myself sitting alone at a long table at the front of a big conference room in the House of Councillors office building in the Nagatachō district of downtown Tokyo. A pro-life group called Seimei Sonchō Sentā (Respect Life Center) had...
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