thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The American Law Institute has urged states to update their family law by abolishing the family. Basically, what they propose is to abolish marriage by treating all “living together” arrangements the same, and to redistribute wealth by treating the breakup of such arrangements as an occasion for equalizing the wealth of the parties. The first … More ...
International politics as therapy: U.S. Pledges to Push Democracy in Muslim World. We’re going to work with the regimes in Muslim countries to help them work through their problems. Am I the only one who finds the language in this article bizarre?
In the course of writing an article on the “human rights” movement I ran into this report from the good folks at Human Rights Watch, a prominent “watchdog” organization: Ignorance Only: HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Programs in the United States. The conclusion of the report: “Federally funded abstinence-only programs interfere … More ...
The Italian publisher of Mother Theresa’s letters and diaries seems to be putting out some teasers: Mother Teresa’s diary reveals her crisis of faith. Still, she became such a symbol that it does seem doubtful she was exactly as portrayed and as people wanted her to be. It will be interesting to find out … More ...
The Pope’s message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees (“To Overcome Racism, Xenophobia and Exaggerated Nationalism”) is in one sense typical—it follows the line all respectable Christian religious leaders now follow—but in another sense quite extraordinary:
I’m dubious too about the projected war with Iraq, although the reason may be that I know so little about the situation. Still, it’s important to sort through the issues rationally. With that in mind, it seems to me that the definition of “just cause” as a case in which “the damage inflicted by the … More ...
Is the EU a threat or a fantasy? One sometimes wonders: A pair of meteors head for Brussels, both called Fraud. It’s not clear from the article how big the problem of corruption is at present, but it’s structural and seems likely to get far worse with the expansion of the EU to Eastern … More ...
“The question of whether God exists is less important than whether he is love.”
I’ve run into this a couple of times now on Catholic blogs and it really seems wrong to me. If we talk about God while putting his existence to one side a statement about his nature becomes a statement about our … More ...
Dogma, the question of what we can know and what is real, is essential to religion. We can’t commit ourselves to what is nonexistent or utterly unknowable. We need God because we lack something, and what we lack must be supplied by something not ourselves. The God we need is therefore one who is real, … More ...
I’ve been reading or paging through a couple of books critical of antiliberal Catholics: Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, by Robert A. Hutchison, and Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism, by Michael W. Cuneo. Both give some interesting background info, although the first … More ...