Campaign Finance and the Right to Life

  In her important new book Dollars for Life, Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California-Davis School of Law (formerly at Florida State University College of Law), traces how American prolifers of various descriptions and...
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Back on the Chain Gang

  There’s an old fable in Japan titled Ubasuteyama, or “Throw-Away-Grandma Mountain.” There are two versions. The one I know best is as follows: There’s a mountain—Throw-Away-Grandma Mountain—where people from a nearby village abandon their aged parents when the parents can...
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Fashion Victims

  The term “fashion victim” came into vogue during my lifetime. It was apparently first used by Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) to describe people who try too hard to keep up with the latest design trends. Perhaps you’ve seen such poor souls, thoroughbred clotheshorses who...
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The Bleakness of Objective Tomorrow

Monozukuri (ものづくり) is one of the most important concepts in the Japanese cultural universe. The straight translation of monozukuri is deceptively simple: literally, “making things.” But in practice it is so much more than that. My colleague Rebecca Chunghee Kim at Ritsumeikan...
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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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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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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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Icons, Iconography, Iconoclasm

  A few months ago, my wife and I did a rare thing for us—we went out to see a movie. A documentary about Audrey Hepburn was playing at the arthouse cinema across town, and, as a movie theater had been out of the question during the Covid years, we jumped at the chance to...
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The Answer to Roe is Nuremberg

  In the twentieth century, transgression outstripped the framework of crime. The maddest dreams of the maddest men of the past could never have conjured up the horrors of modern mass killing—Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Buchenwald. It was in numb recognition of the inability of...
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Count the Living

  As a prolifer in the United States, I was haunted for years by the staggering number of dead. The children who never see sunlight. The mothers who carry the ghosts of these murdered little ones in their wounded hearts. The toll of abortion, the stories of death and misery...
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