One of the most remarkable things about President Obama’s race is the difference it made both before and after the election. It made some difference before the election. It has made little difference since. I take this as a sign. A mere 143 years from the abolition of slavery, an African . . . . Continue Reading »
Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel, who has written that mentally ill people should not be denied the “opportunities” to commit assisted suicide, now pushes mandatory pre-implatation genetic testing in all IVF fertility treatments in order to weed out the unfit (my term) and for whom care would . . . . Continue Reading »
The remarkable advances of IPSCs are beginning to subsume ESCR, even among some within the science community. Thus the former head of the NIH and American Red Cross, Bernadine Healy, wrote in U.S News and World Report that IPSC and adult stem cell research successes have “diminished” the . . . . Continue Reading »
That’s what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today in Brussels, adding “don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.” A good crisis. I don’t think they agree. . . . . Continue Reading »
Relativism is the bane of our times, although it is still selectively applied. We tell teenagers to try not to have sexual intercourse, but if you do—which we know you will—then please use a condom. Yet, we still know how to be unequivocal in some areas: We tell kids, “Don’t smoke!,” not, . . . . Continue Reading »
In a fine article at the Wall Street Journal about the emphasis Archbishop Dolan is placing on increasing vocations, Christopher Willcox writes: Advocates for married priests and the ordination of women have not gone away, and they have made it an article of their particular faith that celibacy and . . . . Continue Reading »
There were three things I wanted to get done before I left Kansas City for twelve weeks in New York for work at First Things . I wanted my sixteen-year-old daughter, Joanie, to get her driver’s license. That would be a help to her mother in my absence and insure getting the younger girl . . . . Continue Reading »
As we clean up formatting errors in the archives, occasionally we find amusing tidbits. Here’s another one, this time from the August/September 2006 Public Square : This is, I suppose, a Louisiana turn on Hilaire Belloc’s little rhyme: “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, / . . . . Continue Reading »
What do you know. Dr. Steinberg has changed his mind: “Though well intended, we remain sensitive to public perception and feel that any benefit the diagnostic studies may offer are far outweighed by the apparent negative societal impacts involved.” In other words, he’s nixing the . . . . Continue Reading »
Relativism is the bane of our times, although it is still selectively applied. We tell teenagers to try not to have sexual intercourse, but if you do—which we know you will—then please use a condom. Yet, we still know how to be unequivocal in some areas: We tell kids, “Don’t smoke,!”, not, . . . . Continue Reading »
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