Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid died Thursday, apparently from an asthma attack. He was 43. Shadid was a terrific reporter who displayed enormous intelligence, empathy and curiosity — traits that amplified and enhanced one another in his courageous reporting. Shadid was a frequent guest on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, someone host Terry Gross often turned to for a deeper and broader examination of developments in the Middle East. The following is from “Fresh Air Remembers War... Read more

Scientists say global warming isn’t happening. Scientists say human activities are unrelated to climate change. We hear that all the time, but we push back against it because it’s bad science. Yet it is also true, at least nominally. Scientists do say these things. Actual terminal-degree scientists. They may be scientists whose field of study has nothing to do with climate, and who thus aren’t any more qualified to discuss the topic than someone with a Ph.D. in literature, but... Read more

Who in 1965 would have dreamed that the stuff of Griswold v. Connecticut would be coming back to haunt us almost 50 years later, in a time when the parties to the original lawsuit probably imagined we would be wearing rocket belts and commuting to Mars? — Arthur Goldwag Yesterday, Congressional Republicans organized a public hearing on women’s reproductive health. No women were called on to testify. No doctors were called on to testify. And one of the old men... Read more

Go read Dahlia Lithwick, “Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination“: This week, the Virginia state Legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure, in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced. Since a proposed... Read more

Is there something in the water in Concord? Even by the 21st-century standards of weird, offensive state legislative wackiness, New Hampshire’s Republican delegation stands out. First you had Republican state Rep. Harry Accornero and Republican state Rep. Susan DeLemus going full-birther, demanding that President Barack Obama be removed from the state ballot because they have secret knowledge that his birth certificate is fake — throwing a crazy tantrum when the state’s election commission rejected their proposal. Then you had Republicans... Read more

“Pusillanimus” means “lacking courage and resolution; marked by contemptible timidity.” I had to look that up. So Garry Wills has expanded my vocabulary. The rest of his New York Review of Books essay, “Contraception’s Con Men” is also educational: Pusillanimous Catholics — Mark Shields and even, to a degree, the admirable E. J. Dionne — are saying that Catholics understandably resent an attack on “their” doctrine (even though they do not personally believe in it). Omnidirectional bad-faith arguments have clustered... Read more

OK, third try. I’ve collected a bunch of bookmarks and links to various items on “women in the church.” But twice today I’ve sat down to type those in here as a kind of thematic link-dump, and then gotten angry thinking about how this whole “controversial” topic shouldn’t be controversial at all. And then I started writing an intro to the link-dump that turned into a post of its own and never got around to the link-dump. This is an... Read more

That’s the title of a post from Left Cheek: “Gender apartheid in the body of Christ,” in which he writes: You want to see a masculine Christianity? That’s easy! It’s all around us. It’s the current state of the American Church — a gender apartheid in the body of Christ. If that language sounds too harsh, consider that Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently said something just as blunt. “We have been excluding women,” Tutu told the world’s elite gathered in Davos,... Read more