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The Case Against the Abortion Pill

Here is how I buried the body of my fifth child: I took myself to the emergency room because I was in labor and bleeding. The baby on the ultrasound screen lay still in the curve of my belly, its heart silent. Fetal demise resulting from spontaneous abortion, the medical term for miscarriage. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Biden’s Collegiate Catholicism

Whereas John F. Kennedy encouraged Americans to view his Catholic faith as a private matter, Joe Biden has made his faith a defining element of his public identity. Biden wears a rosary bracelet, casually crosses himself during conversations with foreign dignitaries, and likes to conclude speeches . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

There’s a poem by John Donne that makes a presence of an absence; his absent love becomes as real to the speaker and more fully his than if she were present. This could illustrate what Katherine Rundell wants us to see in the work of John Donne, seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and preacher, . . . . Continue Reading »

Everyday Freedom

Something is wrong. Throughout the West, people are angry, anxious, and discontented. Paradoxically, the ill temper arises amid wealth unimaginable to our recent ancestors. (But perhaps this is not a paradox after all. Recall 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”) . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »

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