State of the Culture
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Culture War, or Holland With Nukes? It’s being said, quite rightly, that the Terri Schiavo case is forcing us to face fundamental questions about the value of human life and the conditions under which positive action may be taken to end it. When I emailed several of my children this excellent piece by Fr. Rob…
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Local Heroes I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard…
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Self-Anointed Solomons Always ready to detect any alarming trend, I must say that one of the more alarming was in evidence this past week, in the form of the Supreme Court’s decision finding it impermissible to impose capital punishment for crimes committed when the perpetrator was under the age of eighteen. I have no quarrel…
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Inhumanism and the End of Ethics I once said to my boss, by way of making an excuse for a long and rambling email I had just sent her, that sometimes I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written it down. Sometimes the act of writing takes me a step beyond that, to…
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Invasion of the Old Fools On my way to work one recent morning, late as usual and trying to hurry, I found myself behind a car going very slowly in the left lane on Highway 98. This road has grown steadily more congested over the twelve years during which I’ve driven it to and from…
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Ronald Reagan and D-Day To judge by most of the news reports I’ve seen over the past couple of days, one would think that Ronald Reagan had been a far more universally admired president than he was. But while he was president anyone who was at all left of center politically and culturally viewed him…
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The Progressive Steamroller Once the bandwagon for homosexual marriage got rolling at a really good clip, it occurred to me that if it became thoroughly established the result would be bad for heterosexual women. Why? (A): most women want to marry and have children, while most men are at least hesitant about, and at worst…
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Writing Division Into Law It appears that tomorrow will see the beginning of legally recognized “marriage” between persons of the same sex. If this arrangement is given the force of law throughout the country, it may very well be seen by history as the point where the deep and bitter division in American society which…
Light On Dark Water 