Covid’s List

How do we count the dead? One by one. Parading statistics down a path of false horror can only end in a competition of fools. Who can cite the biggest statistic of American deaths: 225,000; 250,000; 283,000? The World Health Organization counts over 1.5 million people worldwide. ...
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Negligent Homicide and the Butterfly Effect

Murder begins as a thought. Homicide, the broader category that includes murder, begins as either a thought or the failure to take thought—that is, the failure to take care. Let’s say I was texting on my phone while driving a car. If in my distraction I hit a pedestrian who then...
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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Are We Still One Nation Under God?

  After visiting the United States, G. K. Chesterton asked himself the question, “What makes America peculiar?” He answered it with accustomed perspicacity: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth in the Declaration of...
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Dreams in a Pandemic

  I am the proud owner of a coffee mug that displays wisely worded encouragement from Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. I got it at a high-end “Second Time Around” sale at a well-heeled Episcopal Church in New York City—for...
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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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Closer Than You Think

The aliens have finally arrived, but they’re not shaking their heads with dismay at our self-destructive and violent natures as evidenced by war.
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A Miracle for Life

  Did you ever see a miracle walking? Or running, jumping, laughing, and hugging like any active five-year-old? This is the story of the miraculous healing of a child in the womb attributed to the intercession of Venerable Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of...
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The Odd Couple and Abortion Culture

  I was seven years old when Neil Simon’s Broadway play The Odd Couple became a TV series. Forty-five years later, I still remember Oscar and Felix as perfect embodiments of the liberated and the oppressed—which, I suppose, might reveal something about my own organizational...
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Life is Expensive

  “Life is cheap” is an expression usually reserved for primitive peoples or violent times, be it warring tribes and clans slaughtering each other like chickens or the showdown-at-noon culture of the American Wild West. At least drawing six-shooters was between two men...
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The Sorry State of Love and Marriage

  I had just started high school at the beginning of the Seventies when Erich Segal’s best-selling tearjerker Love Story and its theater-filling movie version were released to harrow the souls of the romantic. Segal had set out to write an elemental love story in a...
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