Ghosts on the Great Lawn

  You know Erma Bombeck, and how funny she can be. Millions read her syndicated newspaper column regularly. But sometimes she’s not funny. One of her own favorite columns is reprinted from time to time, when she’s on vacation. Thus, last summer, her fans saw again her sober...
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Human Heart and Brain Development

    From its inception when sperm and egg fuse to the pinnacle of adulthood, human life develops according to the intricate craftsmanship of a divine Creator. The unfolding of cells into diverse tissues and the orchestration of complex structures into their correct...
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Personalism as the Fullest Response to the Flawed Anthropology of the Sexual Revolution and Identity Politics

    Two of the most pervasive cultural ills of our time, identity politics and the fallout from the sexual revolution, are best understood if we consider them deeply intertwined. Both of these problems flow from the same disordered font, a flawed anthropology that views...
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A Makeover in Human Understanding?

They got me, they got me—and dead to rights, I must acknowledge. I am identified by the management as a Human Life Review friend and contributor of goodness-knows-how-many-years’ standing: grateful to be standing anywhere at this stage of life, in which the competence of people...
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The Road Uphill After Dobbs

  “Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end.” —Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill” Since I first encountered the poem “Up-Hill” in my teens, these lines never fail to come to mind when life hits a rough patch. In the post-Dobbs, postmodernist, and increasingly...
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Letter from a Friend

    “Sir William.” That’s how my late husband often began memos to Bill Buckley, and scads of memos there were, after Jim McFadden’s cancer took his voice in 1996. Most though began “Dear Bill,” and dear he was to our family—godfather to one of our daughters—and to all...
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RETRO-DUCTION

    “In our nation, certainly, the rule has been that even the most unpopular court decisions are, in due course, accepted. (The great exception was Dred Scott.) The proximate reason why is, we’d say, that Americans have granted their judges moral as well as legal...
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Preface: Summer Fall 2024

“You have raised the ethical question,” wrote William Buckley to J.P. Mc- Fadden in 1980, “whether we have sublimated privacy into the license to take life. I cannot imagine that anyone is engaged in a sustained endeavor of moral introspection more important than yours; nor...
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INTRODUCTION Spring 2024

    “The problems of our world,” says William Murchison, “have edges, angles, pull-outs, protrusions, and rusty nails sticking out everywhere.” In “IVF: The Next Battlefield,” our senior editor ponders the Alabama Supreme Court’s “out-of-nowhere” pronouncement last...
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A Letter to the Women’s Lobby

  [First reprinted in our Spring 1978 issue, Clare Boothe Luce’s “Letter to the Women’s Lobby” was an explanation as to why, after decades advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, she was dismayed that its passage was being jeopardized by the abortion lobby. This letter...
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