Chris Mitchell, Wheaton and then Biola professor, C. S. Lewis scholar, and a friend to many, including me, died unexpectedly Thursday. Here’s a moving memorial to him from Wesley Hill. I would quote Chris’s words of comfort and wisdom to Wes, but you should read them for yourself in the story Wes tells. Read more
The essay’s a little over-wrought, especially at the end, but offers a needed defense of the much put-upon Pit Bull. Writing in Esquire, Tom Junod explains that Pit Bulls are not a breed, more a broad category, which is one reason they get blamed so often. The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt. A few generations... Read more
“An embryo has no rights,” declared Ayn Rand, as quoted by William Luse, responding to To a Gas Chamber, Go!. She continues: Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right — which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter... Read more
“I aspire to put ‘Catholic’ before ‘conservative’ in my life,” explains Ramesh Ponnuru, interviewed in America. What this means for his politics he explains at another point in the interview: I would say that Catholicism has made me a little softer in my politics. Since becoming Christian, I’ve tried harder to be charitable, deleting first drafts that aren’t charitable. I don’t know if I always succeed, but I didn’t do much of that at all before my conversion. I think Catholicism... Read more
It must be Anglicans for Helping People Kill Themselves week around the world. South African archbishop Desmond Tutu now favors assisted suicide, as I reported earlier in The suicide tar pit. English archbishop George Carey has done the same thing. Keeping such killing illegal “undermin[es] the principle of human concern which should lie at the heart of our society,” he wrote in the Daily Mail. He said he’d changed his mind because “The old philosophical certainties have collapsed in the... Read more
“Legalizing doctor-prescribed death is mostly a cause of the well off, for whom access to quality health care is not a problem,” writes my friend Wesley Smith in National Review Online. To be blunt, these folks know what they want for themselves and don’t care who else gets hurt. But for the destitute, the elderly, people with disabilities – the multitude who can’t access quality care – it is a tar pit. That is why advocates for the poor, disability rights activists, and... Read more
Rachel Maddow is right about buffer zones, whose imposition around abortionists the Supreme Court recently struck down nine to nothing, but not in the way she intends, Alasdair Riggs writes in Spiked!. Since the Supreme Court has one abortionists should have one, she argues. Riggs asks “How about – in perhaps the only country that still takes freedom of speech seriously – allowing everyone to protest wherever they like?” And then: The word of the day is ‘safety’, which is increasingly... Read more
Australian judge says incest may no longer be a taboo, reports the Daily Telegraph, and the judge argued the sexual relation of a brother and sister wasn’t unnatural because: “If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone.” I would have thought that a... Read more
Her brother, says Masha Gessen, former head of the Moscow office of US Radio Liberty, a work of our State Department, is the father of her second wife’s daughter. In her current arrangement, as reported by Breitbart, “We have three kids and five parents . . . more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally.” She had earlier said that “we [homosexual people] should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it... Read more
The papers from the 2014 Orientale Lumen conference, by Kallistos Ware, Father Robert Taft, S.J., and others. A conference sponsored by the Society of St. John Chrysostom giving (according to the conference website) “an opportunity for Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Eastern Catholics to gather, discuss and learn about their respective traditions.” The Theology of ‘Jurassic Park’, by Gabriel Sanders, from The Tablet. Despite their obvious differences, “the film and Chabad [the Lubavitcher movement] nonetheless share a number of preoccupations: messianic figures,... Read more
David Mills
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