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Heaven: The Lost Weekend that Lasts Forever

Over on Postmodern Conservative, Helen Rittelmeyer provides a reply to my criticisms of her proposal for a bioethics of love. In her original essay I was in agreement (mostly) with her basic premise—love should be the foundational principle of bioethics—but disagreed with her conclusion. . . . . Continue Reading »

Suicide as “a Gift”

The media push suicide as an acceptable answer to human difficulty. The latest example is a column by St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan, who extols the suicide of an elderly man as a “gift” because of the discussion about mortality it inspired.  Think of the message . . . . Continue Reading »

Suicide as a “Gift”

The media are suicide promoters—in the way some journalists report stories about assisted suicide, and especially among the punditry, so many of whom extol suicide in their columns.Case in point, St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan, who extols an elderly man’s suicide . . . . Continue Reading »

Are We All Baptists Now?

That’s the question blogger Camassia asks in an intriguing post about why the Baptist-style ecclesiology and voluntarism came to be a dominant form of religion in America: When the Baptists came into being in England in the early 1600s, there were several church-state models around Europe: . . . . Continue Reading »

The Rhetoric of Gay Rights

There has been some discussion here on First Thoughs on the use of the term anti-abortion instead of pro-life in the mainstream media to refer to the view that abortion is murder. Terms are important. However, while Ryan Sayre Patrico and Nicholas Frankovich disagree as to whether we should fight . . . . Continue Reading »

Extraordinarily Enlightened Conservatives

At first glance, today’s “On the Square” feature by Carson Holloway ( Same-Sex Marriage and the Death of Tradition ) seems to rehash well-trodden ground in the debate over same-sex marriage. But a closer inspection reveals that Holloway is addressing not only the danger to . . . . Continue Reading »

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