The Narthex

I’ve just reconnoitered a website that lays out seventeen well-argued essays on whether capital punishment is inherently wrong. Their authors don’t reach a consensus, nor is one likely to emerge any time soon. So what are we to do? As always with controverted questions, we should pray for clarity and…

Two of my old friends are in the same nursing home, so visiting them each month is a two-for-one event for me. As I walked into the entryway, a middle-aged man in a wheelchair sat with his head hung low. My friends often complain of my coming and going like…

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki obviously resulted in widespread civil chaos from which there was no rapid recovery. Fast-forward to 1960, when scientists unleashed another kind of bomb, The Pill. Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood funded the research leading to its commercial development. One…

Parish life begins in the parking lot. My wife saw her first, Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Well, yes, politicians come and fortunately they go. But our current representative has yet to go, and we are in possession of a letter from her with the bland assurance that partial birth abortion is…

Last year the state of Washington began requiring all health plans that cover maternity care to cover abortion procedures also. This year the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Cedar Park Church challenging the statute as unconstitutional on religious-freedom grounds. No doubt the lawsuit will run…

A cousin emailed me a news clip about the latest research on reviving dead pig brains. Yale’s BrainEx experiments offer the possibility of keeping much of the brain alive separate from the body. That drastic procedure performed on humans ― which no scientific review board would currently approve ― is…

After a prolonged campaign against smoking, the culture at large mostly agrees that cigarette smoking is evil.  Setting aside whether that is true or not, at no time during the debate did anyone accuse other people of being tobaccophobic or call them haters.  That was because it was quite clear…

Every age has its own set of moral contradictions.  Fallen man’s creativity never ceases to find ways to feign moral blindness.  In this regard our age is no different.  Living in an age marked by an exaggerated reliance on the empirical, morality seems to take a back seat to biology. …

Over the last few years there have been a number of high-profile cases of patients in a vegetative state dying after they had their feeding and hydration tubes removed. The most recent case was in France, where a brain-damaged and crippled man named Vincent Lambert had his feeding tube removed…

I was a friend of the family for 40 years and was visiting Minola, its matriarch. Minola was dying of cancer, and she lay on a hospital bed in her living room, too nauseated to eat. She’d refused the prescribed radiation and chemical cocktails because she knew her life was…

A suburban New York county has banned all unvaccinated minors from public places in hopes of staving off a recent measles outbreak in the area. This comes on the heels of a Northern Kentucky Health Department decision to ban unvaccinated students from school after a chickenpox outbreak there. Parents cite…

As I stood in the entry of an Assisted Living dining hall, hoping to join my friend after lunch, I overheard this comment: “She’s no angel. I heard she shacked up with George last night.” The speaker nodded toward another woman two tables over with coiffed hair and Fifth Avenue…

A group of fearless movie-makers is about to release Unplanned, a film based on Abby Johnson's story of going from being manager of a Planned Parenthood clinic to becoming a highly effective pro-life activist. You can bet that the entertainment industry is dead-set against this film. Check out these quotes…

It is the Ides of March. I’m at the San Marcos Cemetery. Its flat headstones, aligned between scraggly trees on acres of fresh-cut green grass, can’t compete with cemeteries back east. Richmond, Virginia, has historic statues 20 feet tall and Romanesque tombs inscribed with inspirational poetry and sculpted battle scenes.…

The Vatican News website recently printed an interview with a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life discussing the current standard of care for pubescent age children suffering from gender dysphoria.  During the course of the questioning, the member, Dr. Laura Palazzani, said that in order to “accompany” children battling…