Ellen Wilson Fielding

  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... Read More →

  Once I heard a futures trader explain the thought processes behind his job, and the way he explained it illuminated a mindset about earning a living alien to my own. Oh, I already knew the basics about his daily activity: buying and selling futures of commodities, with the... Read More →

  Last Sunday the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of Christ the King. Conjuring up images of thrones, royal robes, and scepters, it is a feast day that can strike secularized Western societies like ours as particularly alien. An Australian bishop recently expressed a... Read More →

Even good things—perhaps especially good things—can be desired too much, or in the wrong way, or potentially so. Take babies, for instance. To be specific, take Rose, the baby daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Devotees of the Little House on the Prairie series of frontier books... Read More →

  Lately my grandson’s interest in the Marvel and DC comics world of superheroes has been turning his mind to the conundrums of time travel and the intricacies of rewriting the past. My own pop-culture exposure to time-travel plotlines dates from the Back to the Future... Read More →

  Last week my office held a baby shower for a coworker and his eight-months-pregnant wife. It is their first baby, and there was lots of conversation about the nursery, the childbirth classes—all the usual things. And there was one of those cutesy baby-shower games: On... Read More →

  My familiarity with Star Wars is largely confined to the first few releases of the franchise back in the late 1970s. In the initial Star Wars film, aside from the romantic weirdness of this “galaxy far, far away” and the David-and-Goliath quality of the battle of Good... Read More →

We asked our participants to reflect on “Pro-life in the Time of Trump,” and offered them the following two opposing views to consider: Charles Camosy writing the day after the election in Crux, and Marjorie Dannenfelser quoted in Susan B. Anthony List’s press release the same... Read More →