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  Speaking October 16 to the Food and Agriculture Organization on the occasion of its 80th anniversary, Pope Leo XIV observed that 673 million people go to bed each night without eating.  Another 2.3 billion cannot afford adequate nutrition.  That’s 36% of the people living... Read More →

  Recently I attended a wedding in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The bride was the daughter of an old family friend. The beautiful young woman, radiant in her white wedding dress, used to be a curly-haired toddler with a Minnie Mouse doll always in her arms. The... Read More →

  “Disinformation” and “misinformation” have been buzz words for the past several years.  Social media, where every opinionator has global access without the need of a fact-checker or benefit of an editor, spawns this.  Apart from innocent ignoramuses, social media is also... Read More →

  Fifteen years ago, someone in the United States would wear a garment seven to ten times before getting rid of it  Now it’s worn only two or three times. Roughly 11.3 million tons of discarded clothing winds up in U.S. landfills annually; about 60 percent of it made of... Read More →

  In the fall of 1979, less than a year after being elected pope, John Paul II took America by storm. Landing in Boston and stopping at major eastern cities, the youthful pontiff lifted the spirits of a nation that was dragging its way toward the end of a long, dispiriting... Read More →

  When our sons were diagnosed with autism, I knew life would change for my husband and me—but not in the ways most people imagine. Yes, there were challenges: sleepless nights, therapies, learning new ways to communicate, and adapting our world to theirs. But there were... Read More →

  Political violence is pretty much a daily feature of today’s news cycle. Assassins are guaranteed their fifteen minutes of fame. But something more than notoriety is happening in the wake of political violence today. Shoot at a pro-life speaker on a college campus, a group... Read More →

  What’s in a name? I was enjoying a nature show on television when the narrator said something that made me sit up, squint, grab the kindle I keep next to my easy chair, and go for Google. With orangutans swinging wildly through the branches, the speaker blithely informed... Read More →

  Long before Pope Leo XIV spoke of the mixed blessings of artificial intelligence and was named by Time a Top 100 figure on the hot topic, the Catholic Church had expounded on another AI, i.e., artificial insemination. The two AIs have more in common than might seem at... Read More →

  A speaker from Harvard, whose name I have long forgotten, recited to us the only poem he ever penned. The last two lines of his sole poetic effort linger in my memory: “It’s just the reverse of what Darwin said/We are going back to the quadruped.” The lines are comical, but... Read More →