“Harriet Looks to You for Justice”

Those Who Give All for Life I got to know Will Goodman when I was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, some ten years ago. On Friday afternoons I prayed outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Will would often be there with...
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Who Has the Loneliest Hearts in the Cosmos?

  Dennis Overbye’s 1991 book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos is a story of solitary cosmologists staring through big telescopes into the night sky.1 In an essay praising Overbye’s work, physicist and popular science writer David Kaiser writes that cosmologists had lonely hearts...
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Fathers and Sons

  In Herodotus’ Histories we learn that Croesus, King of Lydia, waged war upon his neighbor Cyrus II, the great king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. At the outset, Croesus felt assured of his victory, having been told by the oracle at Delphi that he would destroy a great...
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ONE BILLION AMERICANS: THE CASE FOR THINKING BIGGER

  ONE BILLION AMERICANS: THE CASE FOR THINKING BIGGER Matthew Yglesias (New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020, 288 pages, hardcover, $24) Reviewed by Jason Morgan ________________________________________________ Canadian journalist Doug Saunders’ 2017 book Maximum Canada:...
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Bringing 40 Days for Life to Japan: The Cultural Coloring of Pro-Life Work in East Asia

A week or so ago I sat in on a Zoom meeting hosted by the London office of 40 Days for Life.  Prolifers will recognize the name: From its inception back in 2004 as a Lenten movement to shut down a Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, Forty Days for Life has grown into an...
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“Total Anarchy”: How Is a Human Being to Live?

Some old friends were in town recently, so I joined them for lunch. Among their number was Miroslav Marinov, a Bulgarian intellectual who fled his communist homeland long ago and settled in Canada, where he still resides today. One of the most erudite people I know, Miro, as we...
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“Every Moment Is Precious”

  As we can see in the debate anticipating the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, many abortion arguments boil down to the question of when the occupant of the womb should be considered a human being. Prolifers—and biology textbooks—state the obvious...
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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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