“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...
Read More →

When I’m Sixty-Four

Facebook found me out. At least I think it must have been the Zuckerberg conglomerate that culled and sold my personal data so that months before I turned the age the Beatles sang about, I began seeing targeted web ads for retirement investments—401k, IRA and estate strategies,...
Read More →

Pope Francis, Pets, Babies . . . and God

Pope Francis has been widely criticized for comments he made last week about young couples choosing pets over children: We see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more. And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have...
Read More →

Abortion, the Hunger for Heaven and Thomas Hardy

Whenever we think of the forces arrayed against the pro-life cause—and they can sometimes seem rather formidable, especially when we take into account that they include what St. John Henry Cardinal Newman nicely referred to as the “aboriginal calamity” of original sin—we must...
Read More →

“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...
Read More →

Innocents Then and Now

Bleak and brutal. These words come to mind today—December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents—when the Church remembers the children who were murdered in what the poet John Donne calls “Herod’s jealous general doom” (“La Corona”). Of course, no words, poetic or prophetic, can...
Read More →

Before You Were a Twinkle in Your Father’s Eye

The other night while dial-surfing on FM radio for some music, I came upon a talk-radio guest sputtering excitedly: “The people behind the 15-week ban on abortion in Mississippi are trying to change the definition of viability!” The nerve! Not only an assault on abortion rights...
Read More →

The Roe v. Wade Deception

Abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, under all circumstances, in every state, and Americans are not allowed to vote on it. That is what the Supreme Court mandated when it handed down the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Furthermore, the Supreme Court justices...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

Dobbs v. Jackson: Folly—and Furor

Every day, the beneficence and wisdom of our public “expert” class look less beneficent, and certainly less wise. There’s Covid; there’s public schooling and job opportunity; there’s race relations; there’s government spending. To which well-known topics, let’s join abortion and...
Read More →