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  • The Ceremony of Innocence0

    The title is a line from a 1920 poem by W. B. Yeats. I’ve often quoted it before and applied its post WW1 angst to our day. But this phrase jumped out at me as I was listening to the news. The line, in full, goes like this: “And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is

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  • Moral Dystopia0

    The Handmaid’s Tale, extrapolating, as befits a dystopian novel, on the then-current trends in society when written in 1985, is even more a part of political discourse today than in the Reagan era. With the election of Donald Trump, feminists, many of whom were not even born when the novel was published, appeared at the

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  • Big Deal?0

    Five years ago Roman Catholic priest David Pettingill lamented, “Sometimes I think the Second Vatican Council is the church’s best-kept secret.” This church scholar could hardly have imagined that a year later a new pope would be elected and that his assessment might need to be revisited. Viewing the Roman Catholic Church today through the

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  • Aristotle and Darwin and First Causes0

    Santana Was Wrong: Those Who Remember History Can Still Be Doomed to Repeat It In contrast to his comparatively stick-in-the-mud predecessor, Benedict XVI, Pope 266, Pope Francis, is quite the progressive, at least as progressive as one could be as the head of an institution sitting on about 1,500 years of tradition. But whether dissing

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  • The State of the Union0

    Every now and then I feel bad about writing these editorials. For a very simple reason: I’m often the bearer of bad tidings. Of course, the undertow of almost every discussion is that in the United States and a good majority of developed countries the right to religious freedom is not questioned. Most of the

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  • The Other-ing0

    “I was . . . thinking, . . . I’m going to go crazy. And then I saw a Marine step on a Bouncing Betty mine [designed to launch upward when triggered and explode at chest level], and that’s when I made my deal with the devil and I said, ‘I will never kill another

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