It’s good to watch your blog, you know it’s been so long

If I don’t watch your blog then everything goes wrong…

The Edge of England’s Sword: Worrying round-up of bad news from Italy.

Amy Langfield: Why do people think they’re entitled to have sex on my stoop? Via Matt Welch.

Brink Lindsey: Interesting posts on slippery-slope arguments; a tragic and terrible euthanasia case; and more on the slippery slope. In general I agree with Lindsey’s position on the use and abuse of slippery-slope arguments (summary: the slope only works if there are good “analytical and empirical,” i.e. what I’d call philosophical and historical, reasons to think we’ll slide). I think he’s misconstruing the pro-life position, though. The claim is not “it’s OK to destroy a very young embryo, but if you let people destroy that embryo they’ll eventually be sucking babies’ brains out.” As it turns out, that prediction would have been vindicated (and so it seems like an example of a good slippery-slope argument by Lindsey’s own criteria, no?–at least as far as “empirical” evidence goes…), but it’s not, in fact, the sole source of the pro-life position. The claim is that there’s no valid distinction between destroying an embryo and performing a partial-birth abortion. (“It doesn’t look like a baby” or “I don’t feel bad about it” aren’t good enough, for reasons that I hope are obvious–one being that so many of our moral advances as a civilization have involved extending our empathy to humans we once despised or neglected.) I also wonder whether Lindsey considers the slippery-slope claims made in Humanae Vitae to have been vindicated. …As for euthanasia, I wrote a Register article on a related case, but it doesn’t seem to be online; sorry.

Sursum Corda: Recent martyrs; lady priests (and responses); and being sent out into the world. My only comment on the lady priest thing is that if you reject Church teachings you don’t fully understand (and I know “reject” is much too strong a word for what Nixon’s doing; sorry; not sure what the right word would be), how can you ask others to adhere to teachings they don’t fully understand? If someone just doesn’t buy the arguments for the Church’s position on, say, the death penalty, or papal infallibility, or the Real Presence, or extramarital sex–can Nixon ask that person to accept the Church’s teaching because Church authority backs it?

Volokh-Mania: Interesting debate about an environmentalist campaign against ExxonMobil. Here’s the pro-Green (sorta) side; here’s the anti-Green (sorta) side. And eminent domain, the boring face of socialism; and an Israeli peace proposal that is getting no press attention.

Amy Welborn: A nifty list of pro-life orgs; and “Six Feet Under”‘s post-abortion storyline.

And the obligatory (almost typed “oblogatory”) new Catholic blogs: Heart, Mind and Strength, a group blog featuring scads of Papist worthies; and In Formation, a blog by a seminarian. The latter looks esp. cool.

And much of the awesome Eutopia issue on contraception is online now. Yay! This magazine, combined with Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility, helped convince me that the Church’s position was rational. Despite some patches of philosophy-major prose, the articles are richly rewarding.