Home Run for Hispanic Humanist reviews the work of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa as “that rare specimen who is both an academic and a man of action, an artist and an activist, a complex, passionate personality and a hard-headed politician. In the dark days of tyranny, he stood for democracy; when the literary world was agog over the post-modern dissolution of the person, he stood for humanity.”
Beautiful Me! reports on the new fad in China for magazine-quality wedding photographs. The production “can cost from $450 to more than $15,000, a huge expense in a country where the average per capita income is roughly $3,000 (about $10,000 in Beijing). But it’s increasingly seen as a must-have for China’s image-conscious middle class, now some 430-million strong.”
The French Catholic bishops are taking a much greater role in political affairs . Having spoken “forcefully against a government crackdown on illegal immigration, and particularly the expulsion of the Roma (gypsy) migrants[,] now the bishops are gearing up for a national debate on bioethics.”
Though the gods described in The Illiad are “petty, lecherous, jealous, and venal,” writes Thomas Howard , “Nevertheless, sacrifice, which should bespeak the precincts of the holy, is required.” As is glory. But where are they found today?
Though on the other hand, The Onion reports that historians admit to inventing the ancient Greeks .
The contingent of Southern Baptists in Congress changed noticeably in the last election. For one thing, Congressmen John Boozman and Roy Blunt moved to the Senate, where Tom Coburn won reelection.
“We are mistaken if we think that the recent attack on Christians will be the last,” says an Iraqi priest serving in Mosul in a traditionally Christian area of Iraq. “The ‘nucleus of misunderstanding’ and ‘discrimination’ is contained in the very articles of the Constitution, he pointed out,” as the Constitution makes Islam the country’s religion and forbids laws that Islamic principles.
Although considerable evidence links abortion and hormonal contraception with increased rates of breast cancer, writes Jenn Giroux of HLI America, affiliates of the Susan G. Komen Foundation have given $3.3 million to Planned Parenthood .
