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How I Saved Two Cents

June 13, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on How I Saved Two Cents

By DONALD DeMARCO Banking can be an educational experience. In my most recent adventure, I requested cash for a small check. The teller informed me that she must first deposit the check into one of my accounts before she could withdraw it and hand me the cash. If she deposited the check into one particular account which pays a minuscule interest rate rather than another which pays virtually nothing, I would be charged $5.00 if I made a second withdrawal from that account before the month was over. I wisely chose the account with the pauper’s interest. It all seems so terribly arbitrary! The check included 37 cents, which, since Canada has taken the penny out of circulation, could not…Continue Reading

Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic . . . Donald Trump And The 2016 Election: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

June 12, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic . . . Donald Trump And The 2016 Election: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

By STEPHEN M. KRASON Part 1 (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Among his books is The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, and two recent edited volumes: The Crisis of Religious Liberty and Challenging the Secular Culture: A Call to Christians. He recently completed a book that critically examines and evaluates current American liberalism and conservatism in light of Catholic social teaching. (This column is reprinted with permission.…Continue Reading

Restoring The Sacred… The Fiftieth Anniversary Of A Film Classic

June 11, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Restoring The Sacred… The Fiftieth Anniversary Of A Film Classic

By JAMES MONTI As many of our readers are already aware, relics of the English martyrs St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher are soon to begin a nine-city tour of the United States as part of the U.S. bishops’ 2016 June 21 to July 4 Fortnight for Freedom observance. (See “Fortnight for Freedom” at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, www.usccb.org.) Specifically, there will be a small silver and crystal reliquary on loan from England’s Stonyhurst College containing a bone fragment of St. Thomas More (probably from his jaw). One description of the reliquary asserts that there is also a tooth of More within it. As for St. John Fisher, it is a second-class relic…Continue Reading

Culture Of Life 101 . . . “An Introduction To The Problem Of Euthanasia”

June 9, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Culture Of Life 101 . . . “An Introduction To The Problem Of Euthanasia”

By BRIAN CLOWES Part 2 (Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, a 150-page treatise on all of the aspects of euthanasia, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.) + + + We have covered the definitions of the varieties of euthanasia (active and passive, voluntary, non-voluntary, and involuntary), the types of suicide, and the scientific definition of death. It is important to know terms relating to the natural end of a human life, and we should also be familiar with the soothing and deceptive terms often used by pro-euthanasia groups. Natural death means allowing a person to die in comfort…Continue Reading

On Question Of Homosexuality . . . Swiss Bishop Receives Justice From Swiss Court

June 8, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on On Question Of Homosexuality . . . Swiss Bishop Receives Justice From Swiss Court

By MAIKE HICKSON As I reported on August 11, 2015, Bishop Vitus Huonder of Chur, Switzerland, had been sued by the homosexual organization Pink Cross, and by several other individuals, because of a few quotations from the Old Testament on homosexuality that he had presented at a conference in Fulda, Germany. Pink Cross claimed that Huonder had stated that homosexuals should be killed, whereas he merely took some biblical quotations in order to present the biblical teaching on the matter of homosexuality. As I said at the time: “Bishop Huonder, in his own contribution to the conference on July 31 [in Fulda], had presented essential parts of Holy Scripture — Old and New Testaments — in order to show God’s…Continue Reading

Hillary On The Ropes

June 7, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Hillary On The Ropes

By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO At the end of the past week, the inspector general of the State Department completed a yearlong investigation into the use by Hillary Clinton of a private email server for all of her official government email as secretary of state. The investigation was launched when information technology officials at the State Department under Secretary of State John Kerry learned that Clinton paid an aide to migrate her public and secret State Department email streams away from their secured government venues and onto her own, non-secure server, which was stored in her home. The migration of the secret email stream most likely constituted the crime of espionage — the failure to secure and preserve the secrecy of…Continue Reading

Even The Stars Perish

June 6, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Even The Stars Perish

By DONALD DeMARCO We now know, thanks to the science of physics, that stars do perish. A star can exist in relative stability for billions of years, but eventually runs out of hydrogen. After that, when it exhausts its supply of the helium it has concocted through fusion, it runs out of fuel and “dies.” One can hardly fault the ancients for believing that stars were imperishable. To the ancient Egyptians, the imperishable stars suggested a link between this world of mortality and a world of eternality. They seemingly offered evidence of life after death. Aristotle held that the stars were composed of a fifth element that was essentially different from air, earth, fire, and water. This fifth element, from…Continue Reading

Will There Always Be An England?

June 5, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Will There Always Be An England?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN In his op-ed in The Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union — in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United States, and a high court whose decisions overruled those of the U.S. Supreme Court? Would you accept an American Union that granted all the peoples of Central and South America and Mexico the right to move to, work in, and live in any U.S. state or city, and receive all the taxpayer-provided benefits that U.S. citizens receive? This is…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Pointing Out Faces And Philosophies Fighting To Force Us Into Decline

June 4, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Pointing Out Faces And Philosophies Fighting To Force Us Into Decline

By DEXTER DUGGAN Deadly Progressivism: The Political and Scientific Threat to Humanity in 21st Century America, by Christopher M. Reilly, copyright 2016 Christopher M. Reilly, ISBN 978-1530742424, 159 pages soft cover, $14.99, to be available July 12 at Amazon.com. The summer issue of a devotional magazine, Marian Helper, includes the story of a young U.S. soldier sent to the Vietnam War at its height in 1968. According to this account, he was seriously wounded 18 days after he arrived, and a young staff doctor quickly dismissed his chances of survival. When the soldier screamed out in protest against his life being triaged away, the surgeon in charge overheard him and arranged for surgery that lasted about 20 hours. The young…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Embattled Jesuits And The World

June 3, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Embattled Jesuits And The World

By JUDE DOUGHERTY McGreevy, John T. American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. vii + 315 pp. Dissolved as a religious order by Pope Clement in 1773, the Society of Jesus was restored 41 years later by Pius VII. At the time of the restoration the order had only 600 aged members, yet a century later, the Jesuits numbered 17,000 men who were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s expansion around the world. The story is admirably told by John T. McGreevy, dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. In telling the story of how…Continue Reading