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School Choice

October 22, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on School Choice

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK A recent Court of Appeals decision could cause some interesting reactions in the debate over school choice; perhaps some confusion, as well. Jacob Gershman in the August 31 edition of The Wall Street Journal writes: “The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected claims by a group of Arkansas parents that they had a right to transfer their kids out of a struggling school district in northeast Arkansas to neighboring districts where they thought the children could be better educated. School officials rejected the transfer applications because they said the children’s assigned district, which is predominantly African-American, is still subject to a desegregation order from more than 40 years ago. “The parents, who are white, sued…Continue Reading

Synod Intervention From Poland… We Have No Power To Change Church Doctrine

October 21, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Synod Intervention From Poland… We Have No Power To Change Church Doctrine

(Editor’s Note: Following is the intervention of Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan, the president of the Polish Episcopal Conference, at the Synod of Bishops, sixth general session, October 10. (ZENIT News Agency provided the text. All rights reserved.) + + + To begin, I want to emphasize that the following intervention reflects not only my personal opinion, but the opinion of the entire Polish Bishops Conference. 1. There is no doubt that the Church of our time must — in a spirit of mercy — help civilly remarried divorcees with special charity, so that they do not consider themselves separated from the Church, while they may indeed, as baptized, participate in Her life. Let us, therefore, encourage them to listen…Continue Reading

A Book Review . . . Capturing The Human Condition

October 20, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review . . . Capturing The Human Condition

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN One-and-Twenty Tales by William Baer (Mockingbird Lane Press, 2015), 168 pp.; $14.95. Available at www.amazon.com. This is a collection of short, intriguing short stories situated in the mainstream of ordinary life with true-to-life, believable characters that capture the human condition in its strange turn of events and unexpected ironies. Written in the first person, each story presents a different character narrating an incident in his life that bears retelling because of its illumination of some vital truth that comes alive in the hurly-burly of daily experience. In the first tale, The Story, a writer returns home to his family’s Nebraska farm to comfort his dying mother. Introducing himself as a writer and conversing with a friendly farmer…Continue Reading

A Book Review . . . Great Insight Into Cardinal Sarah’s Life And Work

October 19, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review . . . Great Insight Into Cardinal Sarah’s Life And Work

By REY FLORES Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith With Nicolas Diat, paperback, 285 pages; $17.95. Order from Ignatius Press at ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1531. His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, is one of the most respected cardinals in the Catholic Church today. A conversation with him via a book is a breath of fresh air and offers great hope for our Church in a time of much confusion, upheaval, and doubt. In his new book, Cardinal Sarah shares his thoughts about many things, including his own childhood in Africa and the primitive beliefs of his tribe in Guinea, the liturgy and the postmodern world, and how the Church must…Continue Reading

Diversity And Homeschooling

October 18, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Diversity And Homeschooling

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK I’m not being facetious: Sometimes the double-standard on the left is so blatant that it strikes me as a ploy, an attempt to get conservatives to overreact and come across as extremists. When I first read the comments of Stanford University political science professor Rob Reich about the need for tighter regulation on home-schoolers to ensure that “children are exposed to and engaged with ideas, values, and beliefs that are different from those of the parents,” I thought it might be a set-up along those lines. (From what I can tell, Reich is not related to former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.) I thought to myself that Reich’s double-standard was so obvious that he could…Continue Reading

The Allure Of Mass Murder

October 17, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on The Allure Of Mass Murder

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN “Seems the more people you kill, the more you are in the limelight.” That blog post on the email address of Oregon mass-murderer Christopher Harper-Mercer was made after Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed that Roanoke TV reporter and her cameraman. “I have noticed,” said the blog post, “that people like [Flanagan] are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who you are.” Harper-Mercer had found the key to his future, and given us a truism for our time. For the world now knows who Harper-Mercer is. We have seen his face on TV. We have read how he murdered eight students and a teacher at Umpqua Community…Continue Reading

A Book Review . . . Alfarabi On Civic Life And Happiness

October 16, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review . . . Alfarabi On Civic Life And Happiness

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Alfarabi. The Political Writings, Volume II: The Political Regime and Summary of Plato’s Laws. Translated and annotated by Charles E. Butterworth. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. Butterworth’s splendid introduction to the first of these two texts provides the best introduction to Alfarabi’s metaphysics that one is likely to find. In briefly sketching the life of Alfarabi, he also draws attention to the often forgotten major centers of learning in the ancient world. Known eventually in the Arabic world as “the Second Teacher,” after Aristotle, Alfarabi was born about AD 870, we are told, in either Farab, Kazakhstan or Faryab, Turkestan. As a young man he studied jurisprudence and music in Bukhara, and later Aristotle’s logical works…Continue Reading

Culture Of Life 101 . . . “To Polygamy — And Beyond!”

October 15, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Culture Of Life 101 . . . “To Polygamy — And Beyond!”

By BRIAN CLOWES (Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For the complete Culture of Life series on homosexuality [with footnotes], e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.) + + + “Demand the institution [of marriage] and then wreck it. James Dobson was right about our evil intentions. We just plan to be quicker than he thought” — homosexual activist and pornographer Clinton Fein. After every major cultural shift, I like to listen to people talk. Recently, I heard my fellow churchgoers at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church discuss the June Supreme Court decision forcing homosexual “marriage” on our nation. A few said that they have given up the fight, that this…Continue Reading

Selective Enforcement Is Persecution

October 14, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Selective Enforcement Is Persecution

By LAWRENCE P. GRAYSON Pope Francis, on his flight to Rome following his visit to the United States, was asked if he approved of government officials who refuse to obey laws that violate their consciences. He responded, “Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right.” The Pope thus gave clear support to the stance of Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Ky. After the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages, Davis refused to issue marriage licenses for such unions. Her faith holds that same-sex marriages violate God’s law. Even though religious freedom is the first of this nation’s explicitly stated constitutional rights and the Kentucky state constitution, which she swore to uphold, defines marriage as…Continue Reading

Santorum Urges Making Difference . . . CMP Videos Had Fast Impact, Pregnancy-Center Head Says

October 13, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Santorum Urges Making Difference . . . CMP Videos Had Fast Impact, Pregnancy-Center Head Says

By DEXTER DUGGAN PHOENIX — As GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum urged people to make a difference to save this nation, the leader of a pregnancy center here told an audience that the powerful Planned Parenthood videos from the Center for Medical Progress had an instant effect. Speaking at the annual fund-raising dinner of Phoenix’s First Way Pregnancy Center, Santorum said that if people only make an effort that’s easy for them to help the United States survive, the result is, “No pain, no gain.” Shortly before the former Pennsylvania senator spoke, Christine Accurso, executive director of the pregnancy center, told the packed dining room on October 2 that the CMP videos immediately made an impact, after they began to…Continue Reading