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It was the perfect mid-summer headline: “Terror as Amusement Park Ride Unable to Stop.” Our worst nightmare is not strange aliens, nuclear annihilation, the bizarre, or the fantastical. It is that we are doomed to live in the small space of our own vision; condemned to remain... Read More →

On July 25, Catholics worldwide marked the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae (Of Human Life). Written in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Humanae vitae was intended to consider whether the “Pill”—a newly developed contraceptive that suppressed... Read More →

On June 9th, at the end of the week in which both designer Kate Spade and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain died by suicide, I wrote a Facebook post: It’s been an emotionally wrenching week in many ways. As a woman who struggles with anxiety, phobias, and once (blessedly only once... Read More →

  My community is among those in Appalachia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania hit hard by opioid abuse. The emergency medical technicians tell me they get from one to three overdose calls daily. Rarely does a month go by without a funeral for some young or middle-aged man, or... Read More →

Several years ago, I used to spend a couple of hours on Friday afternoons praying outside the main Planned Parenthood facility in Madison, Wisconsin. There were usually just two or three of us on the sidewalk: myself, and one or two counselors trained to approach at-risk women as... Read More →

After much travail a new coalition government in Italy was sworn in on June 1st. The two new parties that garnered the most votes will rule in a coalition that also includes a few nonparty members. The new Prime Minister is Giuseppe Conte, a law professor from the University of... Read More →

Questioning the pro-choice orthodoxy unleashes howls of empty rhetoric, because indoctrinated people cannot listen anymore. “Don’t tell me what your religion demands I do with my life!” “You and your ilk . . .” (My ilk?) “Abortion does not murder women’s souls!” Yes, it does.... Read More →

  Most editors would have let it go. The young writer had described a law “allowing abortion up to 12 weeks.” She believed strongly in the right to life, but she was writing with journalistic efficiency, and her editors evaluated her work by a readability score. She used the... Read More →

  Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Hate Them is a no-nonsense chapter title from Jordan Peterson’s recent bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. And it exemplifies the sort of clear-eyed truth-telling that has earned Peterson the reputation... Read More →

. . . the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.—Mt 13:45-46 Misery loves company. A cynic might say that’s why I became obsessed with Eric Brown’s social... Read More →