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  It’s the language we use for diseases. Polio, we say, has been eradicated from the earth. Last week many pro-lifers jumped on the moral carelessness of a CBS story which declared giddily that Down syndrome had been “basically eradicated from Iceland”— as if someone in... Read More →

  The shocking headline seemed to jump out at me from the computer screen: “Brit scientist could be about to CURE multiple sclerosis and provide hope for millions.”[1] Really? Did I dare hope for a cure after living with aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS) for more than 30... Read More →

  The name Clare Boothe Luce should not be absent from the minds of contemporary Catholics. While she may not have been a saint, she understood well that in times of crisis saints are what we need. In 1952, Luce edited a classic anthology of essays entitled Saints for Now. Twenty... Read More →

“Facts are the background noise of debate and analysis,” former Reagan media expert Merrie Spaeth explained in The Wall Street Journal. “Anecdotes are a message’s most powerful anchors. In the battle for public opinion, personal stories win.” Stories decide whose claims feel more... Read More →

Just like their male counterparts, elite women athletes receive cutting-edge advice regarding diet, training, medicine, and sports psychology. It’s an approach meant to fine-tune game-day performance using the most up-to-date research. With competition for Olympic medals,... Read More →

  Obsculta O fili – Listen, O son. These first words of the Rule of St. Benedict mark the opening of a new world in the West. An abbot (father figure) firmly yet tenderly calling for the attention of his spiritual son stands as a defining point for what would become... Read More →

  Health and wealth rhyme, and not just the words, although those tell a story too. The word health comes from whole, what an organism is when its gears are humming as they ought, everything in its place, each part in sync with the others, none missing or broken or... Read More →

  In The Story of a Soul, St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote that God  “set before me a book of nature; I understood that all the flowers He has created are beautiful, how the splendour of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or... Read More →

  The majority of people don’t have to go all in for evil for a society to turn to evil. They need only go one-third or half-way. That’s one lesson to be taken from the work of the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, most famous as the author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing... Read More →

  2016 was a banner year for earthquakes in Italy. More than 300 people lost their lives in two series of shocks that hit the center of the country—especially the region of Umbria—destroying small towns and their treasures. Nearly a year later, authorities are still removing... Read More →