David Mills

It was an example of the kind I call “silly-clever,” borrowing the term from George Orwell. He used it in criticizing the work of the major Christian apologists of his day, including Chesterton and Lewis. (I don’t think his argument against them is very good, for what it’s... Read More →

It was an example of the kind I call “silly-clever,” borrowing the term from George Orwell. He used it in criticizing the work of the major Christian apologists of his day, including Chesterton and Lewis. (I don’t think his argument against them is very good, for what it’s... Read More →

(This first appeared on our site on January 23, 2017. The visual is an original Nick Downes cartoon created for  Hentoff’s Great Defender of Life Award, in 2005) He shocked his friends, and lost a good many of them. He said something no one in his circles would say. In... Read More →

  [David Mills is a senior editor of The Stream (https://stream.org/), where the following column was published on January 14, 2021. Reprinted with permission.] It depends on who gets disappeared. The “grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo” had worn white headscarves when they... Read More →

It turned out to be open mic comedy night. I’d met a priest I know at a new microbrewery in his parish, and after an enjoyable time and enough beers he went home, while I finished my last one. The comics started after my friend (who had come dressed as a priest) had left, which... Read More →

  She tried the “Where do you draw the line?” argument. A young Facebook friend reported that she’d just got home from a college class that had taken up abortion. Most students treated it as self-evidently good. If aborting an unborn child is all right, she asked them, what... Read More →

  Most editors would have let it go. The young writer had described a law “allowing abortion up to 12 weeks.” She believed strongly in the right to life, but she was writing with journalistic efficiency, and her editors evaluated her work by a readability score. She used the... Read More →

  By a quirk of gerrymandering, we live in Pennsylvania’s eighteenth congressional district and got to vote in the special election to fill former Congressman Tim Murphy’s seat. Murphy resigned after being exposed for asking his mistress to abort their child, despite his... Read More →

  We had been close friends for twelve years, and I was blessed to be with him as the doctor helped him die. Growing stiffer and frailer over the last year or so, he had still enjoyed life, including a short walk we’d taken just a few days before, with him happily chasing... Read More →

  The Harvey Weinstein Hollywood sexual-predator story offers one lesson for defenders of life: We defend or deny life even when we’re not within a thousand miles of a life issue. Here’s why. We don’t form a culture mainly by what we do in the big obvious cases. We form a... Read More →