On the Square Today

Jon A. Shields on abortion coverage at the New York Times :

Nearly twenty years ago, the judicious James Davison Hunter noted that journalistic reporting on abortion is “remarkable for its superficiality” since it rarely explores the “deeper issues and implications of the abortion controversy.” Maybe it is simply the partisan heat generated by a close presidential contest, but abortion coverage appears to be getting worse, not better. Just consider the mendacious, slash-and-burn New York Times Magazine story by Emily Bazelon on Charmaine Yoest, the director of Americans United for Life.

Also today, James R. Rogers on voting, polling, and elections :

I’m a political scientist, but I don’t study elections. At least not real elections. So I disappoint folks—particularly reporters—who think that, as a political scientist, I should have a keen interest in, and insights into, presidential races. But just because I’m more interested in the votes that took place at the constitutional convention in 1787 than I am in the most recent poll doesn’t mean that I’m entirely oblivious to the presidential election. So let me serve up a few thoughts prompted by the election.

And in our third feature, Elizabeth Scalia on offices executive and divine :

[W]hen I cast my vote today, I will do so while pondering ten years worth of praying the Divine Office and those psalms that so perfectly reflect the human condition. As we read them, pray them, we encounter ourselves and the world around us, over and over again. We come to see that while everything seems fresh and fiendishly important to us, there is truly “nothing new under the sun”. Everything happening around us has happened before. Civilizations have come and gone and yet this relationship with what is divine continues, and God’s hand is always present within all that occurs, if we stay alert to it.