End-of-life Issues
The Last Word: Skull & Bones
We moderns pay advanced planning counselors to avoid the fate of St. John of the Cross and to get us to our burial on time, but can we ever be sure it will work out?
Looking Away
Why have final rituals, some of which go back two millennia, changed so markedly in the past fifty years?
‘Intrinsic Evil’ & Public Policy
Everyone knows what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion, right? It is an “intrinsically evil act.” Yet the answers of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in the recent...
Care Package
In current battles between church and state about health care and health insurance, it is often the poor and uninsured who end up as unintended casualties. A recent...
The Cost of an Obsession
The unseemly love affair of some American politicians with the death penalty is bad for justice and bad for our country's standing in the world. It inflicts a...
Tormented Witness
The life of faith finds an enduring metaphor in the notion of the soul’s journey to God. Consider the pilgrim-poet of Dante’s Divine Comedy, who successfully...
Dignity & the End of Life
Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia have long been the redheaded stepchildren of the prolife movement. They are dutifully included in the litany of life...
A Kind of Justice
“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama told the world in announcing that U.S. commandos had raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden,...
A Death to Celebrate?
During the Middle Ages—the historical context for the rise of what would come to be known as the “just war” tradition—violence under any circumstance was deemed a...
Channeling History
If you’re a fan of the History Channel, you’ll feel right at home watching Robert Redford’s recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s murder near the beginning of The...
Pass the Cudgel
We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s...
Fetal Positions
Americans living in the mid-nineteenth century knew almost nothing about the human fetus, at least in a biological sense. Prior to a mother’s perception of fetal...
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