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Where Do We Begin?

September 27, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Where Do We Begin?

By DONALD DeMARCO It often happens that the statement of a perceptive writer becomes more true many years after he originally framed it. Such is the case with George Orwell. The author of 1984, which he penned in 1948, stated: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” The following obviosities do not seem very obvious in today’s society: Abortion kills a human being. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Tolerance has limitations. Freedom is not absolute. Man’s mind was made for truth. Contradictories cannot be reconciled. Virtue is more beneficial than vice. The problem, however, is more dire than what Orwell’s statement implies. If the…Continue Reading

Reconnecting With Mary… Our Lady Of La Salette

September 26, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Reconnecting With Mary… Our Lady Of La Salette

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Part 2 The previous article detailed how our Lady appeared to Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Mathieu on Saturday, September 19, and now we can see what happened to them afterward. It was only when the Blessed Virgin had disappeared that the children fully realized that the Lady they had seen was more than an ordinary human being, and they began to wonder if she was some great saint. This conviction was strengthened, when on returning to pick up their belongings, they realized that Maximin’s dog Loulou was still asleep and had not barked at the Lady; this would certainly have happened had she been an ordinary person. The children spoke to each other about her and…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Phenomenology And The Sources Of John Paul’s Thought

September 25, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Phenomenology And The Sources Of John Paul’s Thought

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Gubser, Michael. The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii +335. Professor Gubser opens his narrative with the statement: “The history of phenomenology is partly the history of friendships among the early disciples of Husserl in Munich and Göttingen, among East European dissidents who joined together against their regimes, and among scholars who study philosophy today.” Given Gubser’s extensive tracking, it seems clear that over the course of a century Husserl’s school not only gave birth to an extensive body of academic phenomenological research, but has produced a valuable body of social and ethical thought that proved useful to Eastern Europeans as they defended their personal…Continue Reading

More Unlawful Presidential Killing

September 24, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on More Unlawful Presidential Killing

By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO As the debate rages over whether the president needs congressional authorization for war prior to his deployment of the military to degrade or destroy ISIS, the terrorist organization that none of us had heard about until a few months ago, the nation has lost sight of the more fundamental issue of President Obama’s infidelity to the rule of law. On the lawfulness of his proposed war, the president has painted himself into a corner. Last year, he quite properly recognized that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a statute enacted by Congress in 2002 to permit President George W. Bush to use the military to track down, capture, degrade or kill all persons or…Continue Reading

The Logic Of Birth Control Vs. The Logic Of Human Nature

September 23, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on The Logic Of Birth Control Vs. The Logic Of Human Nature

By JOHN F. KIPPLEY (Editor’s Note: John F. Kippley is the author of Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality and other books and articles. With his wife Sheila, he is a coauthor of Natural Family Planning: The Complete Approach and cofounder of NFP International.) + + + Peggy Noonan recently wrote two articles in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal that look at World War I from the hindsight of 100 years. Her second focused on some of that war’s tragic consequences that still affect us today. She ignored, however, another war that started a bit earlier in 1914 but which had a horribly significant milestone that same August in which the big guns of…Continue Reading

The Forever War

September 22, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on The Forever War

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN The strategy that President Obama laid out September 10 to “degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,” is incoherent, inconsistent, and, ultimately, non-credible. A year ago, Obama and John Kerry were straining at the leash to launch air strikes on Syrian President Bashar Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in “killing his own people.” But when Americans rose as one to demand that we stay out of Syria, Obama hastily erased his “red line” and announced a new policy of not getting involved in “somebody else’s civil war.” Now, after videos of the beheadings of two U.S. journalists have set the nation on fire, the president, reading the polls, has flipped…Continue Reading

Marriage Is Not A Metaphor

September 21, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Marriage Is Not A Metaphor

By DONALD DeMARCO I passed through the metal detector at the Las Vegas Airport easily and uneventfully. While waiting for my wife, who was the inconvenient recipient of a more thorough random check, I turned to the attendant and told her that I was surprised to pass through the metal detector so quietly since I have entered the “metallic age” of life: gold in my teeth, silver in my hair, and lead in my pants. She allowed herself a controlled chuckle and said, softly, “That’s good.” Security personnel are not allowed to laugh audibly on the job. Then, I added, “Apparently the metal detector is not sensitive to metaphors.” Her smile told me that she understood what I meant, but…Continue Reading

Reconnecting With Mary… Our Lady Of La Salette

September 20, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Reconnecting With Mary… Our Lady Of La Salette

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Part 1 This is the first of two articles on the apparition of our Lady at La Salette in September 1846, which has a lot to teach us in our own day. At that time, the small nearby town of Corps, in the Grenoble region in southeastern France, was a poor place, whose inhabitants were mostly indifferent to religion, and the two children privileged to see our Lady, Maximin and Mélanie, shared in this general poverty. Maximin Giraud was 11 years old in 1846 but was unable to read or write, and knew virtually nothing of religious matters; he had barely managed to learn the Our Father or Hail Mary. Mélanie Mathieu (or Calvat) was 14…Continue Reading

The Saint Who Was Never Born

September 19, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on The Saint Who Was Never Born

By DONALD DeMARCO St. Raymond Nonnatus came into the world in the early 13th century (1200 or 1204 according to scholars) in Portello, Catalonia (Spain). His appended name, in Latin, means “not born.” He was taken from the womb of his mother by caesarean section after her death. Shakespeare used this notion of not being born as an important dramatic device in Macbeth. In act IV, an Apparition tells the play’s principal character that “none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.” Not mindful of caesarean section, Macbeth takes false security in this prophecy. In the last act, before he meets his doom, his nemesis informs him that “Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d.” If Macbeth had much to fear from…Continue Reading

Bluster And Bluff In The Baltic

September 18, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Bluster And Bluff In The Baltic

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN “I say to the people of Estonia and the people of the Baltics, today we are bound by our treaty alliance. . . . Article 5 is crystal clear: An attack on one is an attack on all. So if . . . you ever ask again, ‘who’ll come to help,’ you’ll know the answer — the NATO alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America.” That was Barack Obama in Tallinn, Estonia, last week, reissuing a U.S. war guarantee to the tiniest of the Baltic republics — which his Cold War predecessors would have regarded as certifiable madness. From 1945 to 1989, no president would have dreamed of issuing a blank check…Continue Reading