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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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Elon Musk, Progress, and Common-Sense Realism

Like theirs of old, our life is death, Our light is darkness, till we see The eternal Word made flesh and breath, The God who walked by Galilee. We have not known thee: to the skies Our monuments of folly soar, And all our self-wrought miseries Have made us trust ourselves the...
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Don’t Forget Andrew Cuomo’s Other Coronavirus Victims

Editor’s Note: Dear Reader: We share here a column (https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/dont-forget-andrew-cuomos-other-coronavirus-victims/) published on National Review Online about the other victims harmed by Governor Cuomo’s dangerous nursing-home policies—New...
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Where Are the Babies?

American birth rates plummeted between 2009 and 2019. Lyman Stone offers us a concerning metric to measure the loss: “missing births.” If, he asks, birth rates had remained throughout the following decade what they were in 2008, “how many more babies would have been born?” The...
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The Price of One Life

  Akin to my namesake Holden Caulfield, I can’t stand the movies. What could be more phony than a bunch of highly paid actors pretending to be other people in scripted situations? Yet there is no denying the draw of drama, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and continues...
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The Statue of Liberty’s Arm

  No, the picture that accompanies this blog isn’t a still frame from the original Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston, seeing Lady Liberty’s beached head, realizes in horror that he hasn’t traveled to another galaxy but rather to a future America where war has reduced...
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 Saving the Law

On the human level, salvation comes from restoration of the essential features of our humanity: reason over irrationality, responsibility over fate, an orientation toward love over the bestial tendency to rivalry. The pro-life movement, insofar as it affirms the basic humanity of...
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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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Epiphany 2021

  January 6, 2021, would have been my brother Robert’s 61st birthday. He died of cancer on December 28, 1994, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, at age 34. Always at this time of year, Robert is present in the minds and hearts of his family and friends—we share memories, eat...
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Vaccinations, Life, and the Common Good

Most of us have a commonsensical grasp of the common good, which we can apply easily if we do not allow ourselves to be misled. Pro-life arguments can be strengthened by appeals to the common good. Pro-choice forces, however, often encourage us to misunderstand or neglect the...
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