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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Names and the Nameless

As the novel coronavirus spread across the globe this past spring, a debate in the United States emerged regarding its name: Was it racist to call a virus that originated in Wuhan, China, Chinese? Was it acceptable even to mention the city or country of origin? But the name of...
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Virtually Nowhere

  In February, a South Korean television program called Meeting You featured a segment that was devastating to watch. A woman named Jang Ji-sung, who had lost her seven-year-old daughter three years before, was asked to don a virtual-reality kit—goggles, earphones, and...
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Contrapasso and the Culture of Death

  Dante Alighieri’s 14-century poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy is not just a work of literary genius—it’s also a spiritual roadmap. Unlike our age of muddy relativism, Dante’s vision is stark. There is good and there is evil. Men and women make a free choice between the...
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Merī Kurisumasu!

    President Donald Trump has made it a motif of his administration to acknowledge his and the First Lady’s Christian faith in public. One of the most striking ways they do this is by wishing the nation, not a happy holiday season or a safe month of interfaith...
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