Leads to Rise in Back Alley Lethal Injections It’s an Onion headline–for now. I’m waiting for the “Hey! Kids are going to shoot each other anyway. So we might as well have the school nurse issue them guns and have the gang wars in a safe-controlled environment” editorials. Read more

…making Catholics feel better about themselves for over 40 years! Read more

…to make my left rail narrower and my blog entry field wider? If so, can you explain it in terms a techno-fool like me can understand? Update: I’m mostly there, but I still need to make the left margin narrower. Anybody know how? Thanks for the help! Read more

Here’s the short version of my story: I was a proposal writer for a non-profit in Alexandria, VA until early December ’08. Thanks to the recession, some of our top donors were unable to come through with some pretty significant donations. Layoffs began in earnest, and about ten of us lost our jobs in the first round. Obviously this was “inconvenient,” but it wasn’t the end of the world because I already had a small side business in place. When... Read more

…on Fr. Damien and the New Atheists. Read more

More often wrong than right. Yeah, ocassionally some technological development is (sort of) foreseen by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells or Arthur C. Clarke. Even a blind pig can find truffles. But what’s really stunning is how extremely and incredibly wrong these guys are about so many things while (ahem) guys like Chesterton are amazingly prescient about everything from eugenics to the destruction of the family, to the certainty of WWII (which Chesterton predicted in 1934). The reason is not far... Read more

It is not patriotism to ignore the fact that we now live in a culture where a central tenet of “Western values” is the notion that fertility is an affliction and children are a curse. A civilization like ours, which has embraced such a suicidal and evil ideas not only is doomed to die but, if Scripture is any measure of things, deserves death richly. That’s not to say, “I hope our civilization dies”. It is to point out, once... Read more

Northwest Jesuits file for bankruptcy. Sometimes I have this fantasy of Seattle University being bought out by Opus Dei. Probably, however, it will be snapped up Microsoft or the Chinese one of these days. Of course, if the Chinese keep Christianizing at the rate they are, that could be a *good* thing. It might even become a Catholic school! Read more

A vital component of salvation history. I’ve always thought it a shame and (probably) a serious defect in my character that I just don’t like it. Read more

As an apt counterpoint to my jeremiads, she reminds us that God has the final word and it is not No but Yes. The last reality we will ever face is not economics or human stupidity and evil. It is Christ. It is he, not the worst human sinner who is the truth about who we are and who God is. Read more