A “Saint” of the Sumo World

In a recent Human Life Review blog (https://humanlifereview.com/wrestling-with-life-issues-in-japan/) I wrote about a loutish sumo wrestler, the mistress he mistreated, and the child they conceived. When his mistress told him she was pregnant with his baby, the sumo wrestler in...
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Wrestling with Life Issues in Japan

An article in a Japanese magazine caught my eye a few months back. It was about a sumo wrestler, but that’s not what was unusual about it. Sumo remains very popular in Japan, and top wrestlers have the status of major celebrities. News coverage of goings-on inside and outside of...
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The Fullness of Forgotten Lives

When I was in graduate school, using the word “agency” was a favorite signal of one’s in-group status. In the cutthroat world of graduate history seminars, “agency” is a way to criticize “tropes” about people in the past. A commonly called-out “trope” is that “subalterns,” or...
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Lubbock and Evanston: Pro-Life, Slow Death

As reported by Breitbart, in early June a U.S. District Court judge dismissed a Planned Parenthood/ACLU lawsuit against the city of Lubbock, Texas. The lawsuit, which opens with “The Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to have an abortion,” claims that Lubbock,...
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The Truth Is Not Out There

When my brother and I were younger we used to love watching The X-Files. Anyone who came of age in the 90s will remember the show. Mulder and Scully were FBI agents trying to track down shadowy figures in government—today we would call it “the deep state”— believed to have...
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Our Life Is Not Our Own: Remembering March 11, 2011

  It was an overcast afternoon ten years ago when all hell broke loose. A massive earthquake hit off the Pacific coast of Japan, rocking buildings from the Sendai area—where it was the strongest—all the way down to Tokyo and farther south. The quake-wracked ground broke open...
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Hanko and Embodiment

The digitization of the Japanese bureaucracy appears inevitable. The hanko, although still used everywhere today, may be destined to end up in museums alongside the typewriter and the floppy disk.
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The Forgotten Go-Between

  A wedding is supposed to be a happy—almost deliriously happy—affair. Two people in love pledging to honor and cherish one another until death parts them. It is heady stuff, standing before God and man to make a promise that will profoundly affect the rest of one’s earthly...
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Turning Point, or Eternal Return?

  In 2015, when the Center for Medical Progress released undercover videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s illegal side business in selling fetal-body parts, I thought the abortion giant was finished. Recorded by pro-life journalist David Daleiden, the videos were so shocking...
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Structures of Spin

  During the pontificate of John Paul II the world began to hear about “structures of sin.” In paragraph 12 (Chapter One) of his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the late pontiff described structural sin as a pattern of institutional evil that rendered society hostile to...
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