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...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

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.
Read More →

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...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

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...
Read More →

A Prophetic Editorial: Fifty Years since “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society”

  This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,”  a remarkably foresighted editorial published in the September 1970 issue of the professional journal California Medicine.  The editorial, which has been reprinted many times over the...
Read More →

Perpetuating Castes through Special Hate Crimes Penalties

If my act of blind anger against my declassed neighbor will be punished less severely than the same act against the specially classed neighbor, then this “hate crime” law invites me to attack one victim in the other’s place. This, indeed, is raw and ruthless discrimination!
Read More →