Editor’s note: The following essay by Dennis Prager first appeared in the September 1993 print edition of Crisis Magazine. When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah’s prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries … Read more
A little more than a week after the March for Life once again drew so many people to our nation’s capital in support of a culture of life that the mainstream media had no choice but to largely ignore it, the Senate considered a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, the point at which … Read more
“I was expecting a bearded Dan Rattelle,” said Lee Oser, professor at Holy Cross and author of three novels: Out of What Chaos, The Oracles Fell Silent, and most recently Oregon Confetti, out last fall from Wiseblood Books. I had recently shaved and he had done his homework. After offering me coffee and chocolates, which … Read more
“The Catholic apologist,” says Arnold Lunn, in Now I See, an account of his intellectual and personal conversion to the faith, “bases his argument on the appeal to external facts.” The apologist’s opponents, then (1938) as now, “agree only in their appeal from objective truth to subjective prejudice, from external facts to personal intuition.” Yet we … Read more
Pope Francis’ pre-Christmas call for a better translation of the Lord’s Prayer was met by a number of defenses of the English translation which we all know by heart. Anthony Esolen, Lionel Yaceckzo and Charlotte Allen, for example, have made it abundantly clear that, “and lead us not into temptation,” is a correct English translation … Read more
If you’ve seen the movie version of Porgy and Bess, you might recall Sammy Davis Jr.’s rendition of “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” At a church picnic, Sportin’ Life, a somewhat disreputable character, tries to convince the others that “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, It ain’t necessarily so.” He then proceeds … Read more
One thing I have learned interrogating, in Socratic fashion, the so-called atheists, agnostics, and skeptics who are thick on the ground and on-line these days is that the Christianity they reject is not any Christianity I would claim as my own, but a false Christianity fashioned for them by bigots. Rarely, it soon becomes clear, … Read more
“The Knight’s Tale” introduces four knightly figures who epitomize the ideals of their moral code. The narrator, one of the pilgrims traveling on the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas a Becket, and introduced by Chaucer as “a worthy man,/ Who from the very moment he first began/ To ride, searching adventure, held chivalry/ In … Read more
Ryan Anderson has published a nuanced, reasoned, and thoughtful book-length argument against the transgender moment and ideology. Within this reasoned and thoughtful argument, he has also written a blistering condemnation of complicit doctors and therapists that reads somewhat like a legal brief. There is a great deal to commend in the book When Harry Became … Read more
I have this weirdly clear childhood memory of an old lady sitting a few rows up from my family at Mass. She was wearing a doily on her head. I had just learned the word doily—I think—because I had seen them for sale at a home decorating store just a few days before. I asked … Read more
The German bishops pushed hard for “accompaniment” of the divorced and “remarried” at the Synods of 2014-15. The new idea percolating in the German Bishops Conference is whether the Church should have a “blessing” for homosexuals who “marry” or have civil partnerships. Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück, the Conference’s Vice President and chair of its … Read more
Over Christmas break, the family and I found ourselves with a detailed 3-D jigsaw puzzle of Paris’s famous Notre Dame. While it did not take as long to complete the puzzle as it took to build the medieval cathedral (182 years, according to Wikipedia), it did present challenges. Our son-in-law, now completing a doctorate in … Read more
Liberation theology, which was out of favor under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, seems to have made a comeback under Pope Francis. Francis has rehabilitated several liberation theologians and even appointed some to advisory positions. Meanwhile, high ranking prelates in the Middle East support Palestinian efforts to liberate themselves from the supposedly oppressive rule … Read more
On June 27, 2017 there came an announcement that was remarked upon for all the wrong reasons. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, proclaimed to the world that the social network had 2 billion users online. Simply a sign of a successful business venture? Merely also a sign of the times in which we live? To … Read more
Catholics and pro-lifers who were shocked at the “knighthood” of Dutch politician and abortion activist Lilianne Ploumen into the Vatican’s Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope Francis, shouldn’t have been. True, Ploumen’s militant support of abortion and homosexual rights (which includes raising $400 million for a “reproductive health” NGO she helped launch) is … Read more
Among the three branches of American government, there is supposed to be a system of checks and balances to curb any abuse of power. That is at least the theory. In practice, the judicial branch is now engaged in a campaign of checks without balances or precedent. Judges are becoming tyrants without restraint. It is … Read more
To have been the proverbial fly on the wall during a conversation, one good time would have been during dinner in the White House on September 2, 1943 when Franklin Roosevelt was hosting Winston and Clementine Churchill with their daughter Mary and the newly appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averill Harriman. The other dinner … Read more
Early on the morning of January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI heard his last Mass. Following Mass, the king was taken from his prison to the Palace Louis XV, where he would suffer the same fate on the same date as Agnes of Rome, the ancient martyr commemorated in the Mass of the day. This … Read more
Darwin was always unsettled by the implications of his theory, and his growing agnosticism, along with his eventual belief that there was no soul, no eternity, just blind matter and its inexorable laws, troubled his pious, Unitarian wife, Emma, who wanted to be with him in heaven. Unsettled Darwin should have been; for all the … Read more
Last month, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons published the qualitative results of a survey that sought to increase understanding of the emotional toll of abortion. The survey was lead by Dr. Priscilla Coleman, one of the world’s foremost researchers on post-abortion sequelae, and included responses from almost one thousand women. The survey was … Read more