Democrats, You Need to Respond More Creatively to the Abortion Issue

  At the moment, it appears that Democrats need the votes of pro-life Americans more than the pro-life movement needs the Democratic Party, but that could change, and you hope it does if you’re concerned to keep the ship of state from foundering on the rocks of one-party...
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Now Is the Time to Pray

  Allow me to refocus the conversation a bit. After what our nation has gone through these past few weeks, we all could use a little break from politics. Let’s celebrate that we now have Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court, but let’s maintain a...
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Unforgettable

In October, Christie’s will auction off a portrait of Edmond de Belamy, estimated to sell for between $8,000 and $11,500. Edmond de Who? If the name doesn’t sound familiar, that’s because Edmond de Belamy has never existed. Neither have the members of his extended “family,”...
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Archbishop Viganò Might Make a Good Pope

    After many years of sex scandals in the Catholic Church, someone finally blew the whistle in a way that could not be ignored. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a retired Vatican envoy to the United States, said on August 22nd that Pope Francis should resign because he...
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A Penitent Church Will Vanquish Abortion

  The scandals within the Catholic Church in the past months have had the effect of a neutron bomb. The buildings remain, but life within the Church has been irradiated. Priests continue to say Mass, and a remnant of the faithful still attend, but we are the walking dead....
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Can We Want a Baby Too Much?

Even good things—perhaps especially good things—can be desired too much, or in the wrong way, or potentially so. Take babies, for instance. To be specific, take Rose, the baby daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Devotees of the Little House on the Prairie series of frontier books...
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Sex Dolls and Pandemic Loneliness

  Casey Calvert is an adult-film actress in Los Angeles. She stars in pornographic movies which are shot at film studios, but half of her income, according to a recent BuzzFeed article, now comes from “personalized porn.” What is “personalized porn”? For anywhere from a...
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An Old Thomistic Joke

  Two followers of St. Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy walk into a bar to discuss the sad state of the world, trying to outdo one another in describing the greatest evils. They finally arrive at what seems like the worst person doing the most horrible deed, a Kermit Gosnell...
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Rediscovering that Rare, Beautiful Thing: The Summer Argument

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...
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Humanae Vitae At 50

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...
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