The little boy is playing happily on the kitchen floor. Mommy is busy above, at the counter, far over his head. Things are being retrieved from the cupboards and fridge, but the little boy pays scant attention for he has lately become fascinated with tracing the design on the vinyl floor with his toy car. […]
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) drew international headlines this past week for claiming a new human right to contraception. Contraception as a human right is a centerpiece of UNFPA’s annual state of world population report “By Choice, Not By Chance: Family Planning, Human Rights, and Development”. Borrowing from the language of natural law, the executive summary […]
A particular “hot-button” issue facing contemporary American culture concerns homosexuality and the Catholic Church. The general position of the Catholic Church on homosexuality is fairly well-known: homosexual acts are a sin and the inclination to these acts is intrinsically disordered. Despite the above formulation, many people do not understand why the Church has taken the […]
Drat! I’m bummed—saddened by the news that the Hostess company, home of the Twinkie and other venerable sugary snacks, is shutting down. I’ll bet I haven’t eaten more than three or four Twinkies in the last 30 years, so the demise of Hostess doesn’t adversely impact my lifestyle. It’s just that, for baby boomers like […]
From the time they were very young, my kids have been drawn to soft fabrics. Christopher wears his footie pajamas on the hottest summer nights. Sarah’s retinue of stuffed animals requires so much space I often find her hanging off the bed at night. (Getting her to sleep under the covers is a chore because, […]
Meditation and Questions for Reflection or Group Discussion (Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:4-5,8-10,141; 1 Thessalonians 3:12–4:2; Luke 21:25-28,34-36) Advent, A Time to Prepare for His Coming “They will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud.” (Luke 21:27) Don’t you find it strange that today’s Gospel reading would focus on the end times and not […]
Having offered my initial response to the election of 2012, I promised a more positive column, and that promise is easy to fulfill—Christ is risen, and faith in him is stronger than death. Although I missed living in the 1950’s by a hair’s breadth, that decades’s culture was long celebrated in movies, books, and music. […]
Lack of communication is one of the leading causes of marital breakdown. For the NFP-using couple, communication is essential. Procrastination isn’t an option. The NFP couple discusses whether or not they will be avoiding or planning pregnancy. In order to be successful at this, it’s necessary to discuss the woman’s signs of fertility and infertility. […]
There are literally millions of blogs floating around in cyberspace, all competing for followers, likes, maybe even ad space. Why do we blog? Why do I blog? Why do we bother? I started blogging on New Year’s Eve, 2011, but not at 8kidsandabusiness. I set up a business website on the advice of my business […]
“Absolute power,” Lord Acton wrote, “corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Good and bad can be a matter of degree, something that can be adjusted like the volume dial on a radio. If power is relative then that it means different things to different people, and its abuse becomes a matter […]
“Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” Matthew 18:3-4. These words of Jesus resonate in the movie The Miracle of Marcelino. Set in the time of the Mexican Revolution, The Miracle of Marcelino tells the story of a young Mexican boy named Marcelino (Mark Hernandez Mosqueda) who […]
He’s a business owner, a basketball player, a biography reader, and a nap lover. He grew up playing on his grandparents’ farm and climbing fences in the backyards of Bexley, Ohio. As a young man, he worked his way through Harvard, eating 11-cent boxes of macaroni and cheese and mooching off tea sandwiches at business […]
Everyone agrees that too many of us professing to be Catholic do not know, live, or share our Faith as we should. In this “Year of Faith” we are being challenged to do something about this tragic situation – to learn or relearn the fundamental Truths of our Faith, and to share those Truths with […]
When you were a teen, did your dad ever talk to you about what it is to be a man? Probably not. And if he did, did you listen? Probably not. When I was growing up I found that my dad was hardly ever there for me. He was a ‘good father’ by being at […]
Determined to have a real Thanksgiving this year (the thought of cooking a full turkey dinner for three people depressed me), I invited a couple of families to join us. Eagerly I began planning the menu and polishing the silver, and began looking around the home with a critical eye, making mental note of all […]
No family really lives a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving. Life is easier once you accept that. Then the unbearable happens. We lose someone in our family’s holiday portrait. The first year is the hardest. The bigger the presence, the bigger the gap. Sometimes at that first holiday we feel as though we will never laugh again. Joy […]
For Part I of this series, go here; for Part II, here; for Part III, here. This is the final installment. “And nothing you can say or do will stop me, And a thousand dead friends can’t stop me…” –Mountain Goats, “All Up the Seething Coast” Dan Barden, author of the excellent noir tragicomedy The Next Right […]
Dr. Mark Hickman would try to talk any man out of having a vasectomy any day. He would begin by telling them all the horror stories that he has heard from the many men who have undergone the invasive procedure that unnaturally blocks tubes that are designed to carry sperm out of a man’s body. […]
You know a contraceptive drug or device is in trouble when the lawsuits begin to multiply. A growing number of American women are turning to intrauterine devices (IUDs), reports Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute. Of all American women using birth control, some 7.5 percent had IUDs implanted by 2009. These numbers were double what […]
At this point, the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar is “old” news, in that most people have been at least somewhat aware of of it. Most people in the Catholic and pro-life blogsopheres—to say nothing of the ideologues who oppose us—who will comment on it have already posted their preliminary thoughts. The forces at work […]
“As for me and my household, we shall serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15 “What does it mean to be a holy family?” I asked my second grade First Communion class. Most of the eager young hands in the room went up. “Be nice.” “Obey your parents.” “Do the 10 Commandments.” “Pray.” “Good answers,” I encouraged […]
I spent many, many, many hours in the lab testing people for mutations known to cause cystic fibrosis (CF). CF is a genetic disease caused by mutations in a gene called the CFTR gene. If a person has a deleterious mutation in both copies of his or her CFTR gene (one mutation inherited from dad, […]
Tune in for the latest episode of As the Military World Turns… In a scandalous story with more twists and turns than the road to Hana, we see a married CIA director who resigned after an affair with his Harvard-educated biographer, discovered because of her harassing emails targeting a doctor’s wife who was the CIA […]
A new manual by the World Health Organization (WHO) on how to do abortions is facing criticism for advocating substandard medical care and a ban on all limits to abortion. Aimed particularly at poor women in developing countries, the manual downplays medical oversight and recommends disposing of the “waste,” including babies’ remains, in sewers or latrines. A […]
