Someone should take a poll asking Americans how they feel about polling. I’m pretty sure our shared distaste for it is one thing about which nearly all of us would agree. Of all the polling data released in the week leading up to Tuesday’s election, the one that struck me as most revealing came from […]
File this one under rank hypocrisy. By Baptist Press, Wed, October 24, 2012 WASHINGTON (BP) — Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, has spent $12 million on this year’s presidential election through its political action committees. That is more than it has ever spent in an election, and about half of it has gone for […]
My parish in northern Virginia has [been engaged in] 55 hours of continuous Eucharistic Adoration and Prayer-including Benediction — “in anticipation of the General Election,” [starting] Sunday, November 4, ending today, Election Day, about the time the polls will close. Catholics never, never endorse any candidate from the pulpit as happens in some Protestant churches. Yet, […]
Meditation and Questions for Reflection or Group Discussion (1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44) The Extravagant Love of God “This poor widow put in more than all the other contributors.” (Mark 12:43) Today’s readings give us two illustrations of extravagant love. First, we have the widow who cared for Elijah, and in […]
When Election Day arrives, so do the traps that come with it. In my previous column I examined four of them, and here I present five more. Be sure you avoid these pitfalls, and help others avoid them, too! 5. I’ll show them! — using the election to vent our anger. Sometimes individuals or groups […]
Homosexual advocates never want to make the debate about homosexual rights overseas strictly about violence against homosexuals. Oh, they say they do. They insist that they do. But do they really? They flat out deny that their advocacy for homosexual rights overseas has anything to do with marriage, adoption, or any thing other than violence […]
The highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar,features a giant willow-like tree that represents the center of culture and religion for the Na’vi inhabitants of the planet Pandora. The tree has extreme spiritual significance because it allows the Na’vi to communicate directly with their Mother Goddess, Eywa. It also allows them to connect at the same […]
(Warning: The following contains disturbing information of a sexual nature.) My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson My dear friend and colleague Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting law professor at Liberty University School of Law, recently guest lectured during “Sexual Behavior and the Law,” a […]
On the 6th of November, citizens of Massachusetts will face a critical vote. The choice people make on Question 2 is a choice that literally involves a life or death decision. The so-called “Death with Dignity Act” brings with it a dark deception. The citizens of Massachusetts are being asked to vote for or against the […]
This week I’ve been reading about the “back stories” of the saints. It can be easy, sometimes, to think of holy people in two-dimensional, sanitized terms. Earthbound angels who floated through life, never contradicting, never offending . . . warm and appealing and endlessly agreeable. Yet “niceness” is not a theological virtue, and those who […]
Author Janette Oke’s characters come to life again, in Love’s Christmas Journey. I remember that when I found out that my local library had The Love Comes Softly Series, I quickly began reading all of them. They are wonderful books that provide not only enjoyment, but also present people responding to the ups and downs […]
On October 31, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI observed the 500th anniversary of the Sistine Chapel by offering a prayer—celebrating Vespers beneath Michelangelo’s famed frescoes of biblical stories including, most famously, the Creation of Adam. The Holy Father called the chapel a “liturgical classroom,” explaining that “It is as if during the liturgical action, the entire […]
Never before in the history of our country have we faced such a monumental and critical decision as in the 2012 Presidential election. The transformation we face is something that may very well permanently alter the very structure and freedoms our nation has enjoyed for over 200 years to the point where we may never […]
Tired of all the political advertisements? I can profess some sympathy, yet I think we had better stand up, look around, and thank God for them. I mean, what are the alternatives? Would we rather live in a country where they don’t bother with elections? That seems to me to be the only realistic alternative. […]
40 Days for Life ends on November 4, 2012. Since the first 40 Days for Life 4 years ago in my city, my family and I have participated in the prayer vigil. We haven’t been as dedicated as the daily prayer warriors but we have committed to praying at the vigil site once or twice […]
News last week from AP that a research team at Oregon Health and Sciences University has replicated work done a few years ago in Britain, constructing a human embryo by using the eggs of two mothers and a father’s sperm. Read it at FoxNews The goal here is to prevent diseases that arise from genetic […]
Judge me if you will, but I’m completely unimpressed by celebrity culture. While I’m sure that these are all perfectly lovely people in real life, I just can’t fathom why I should care about who is in/out of rehab (again), or what the Kardashians are wearing. If you wanted to torture me, you’d force me […]
A group of pro-life physicians and other professionals, as well as the Catholic archbishop of Southwark, and innumerable patient’s families, are now being joined by the UK Health Secretary in calling for a thorough, independent review of the reported abuses of the Liverpool Care Pathway, a controversial end-of-life medical care protocol. A public outcry is […]
Like most women in my post-feminist generation, I grew up knowing exactly what I did not want when it came to love and work. I did not want to sacrifice my personal life at the altar of the all-consuming career. Nor did I want to surrender professional success in a fit of passion or panic […]
There is a great deal of debate over the economy in the current Presidential election. Indeed, the Republican ticket has focused the election on economic issues, and particularly on government spending, by adding Paul Ryan as its Vice Presidential candidate. This enables the Democratic Party to take shots at Republican economic ideas, in the hope […]
If you do an Internet search for “Catholic Fatherhood” how much data would you find in comparison to Panda Bears, Applied Linear Algebra, and Welding Theory? According to John Clark, author of Who’s Got You, Catholic Fatherhood comes in last. The results respectively were 1,914, 1,706, and 284. Catholic Fatherhood netted 270 results. Clark surmised […]
This year’s FIAPAC Congress, in October in Edinburgh, Scotland, brought together 460 delegates from 45 countries. Most were front-line abortion “providers”, that is, abortionists, clinic administrators and counsellors, and three quarters were women, feminists all. Many of them wore shaved heads and work boots. The male minority were mostly abortionists. One South American attendee wore […]
As the 2012 campaign passes into history, it’s not too soon to note some of the genuine horrors of this increasingly strange way of choosing a president. First, though, let me repeat a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America that I cited many months ago when the campaign was heating up. The […]
I’ll never forget that bleak January day when my father died. It was very hard to believe in the resurrection as I watched the undertakers carry away his lifeless corpse in a body bag. But imagine this scene. You are an unborn child who has lived in cozy but cramped quarters with your twin for […]
