[This article was posted today at Catholic Advocate.] Four Things the President and Congress Can Do Right Away On Health Care Reform By Matt Smith Congress returns to work today to begin the second session of the 111th Congress. Here are four things the president and Congress need to do this week on health care reform. President … Read more
Another amusing entry for the “Same, Yet Different” file: A new species of crab that looks like a strawberry has been discovered in Taiwan. Marine biologist Professor Ho Ping-ho found two of the creatures while researching the environmental impact of a shipwreck on Kenting National Park. There is already a Strawberry Crab, apparently. Sometimes known as … Read more
When I think of the Vatican Secret Archives, I pretty much have in mind the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark. (If anyone has the Ark of the Covenant hidden away in a box in the basement, it’s going to be them.) So when news came that the Archives has recently published a book … Read more
BBC News published a heart-breaking piece just before Christmas about what has become of Romania’s orphans. You may remember reports from the early 1990s detailing the horrific orphanage conditions there. (Deal and his family can attest to this first-hand, from the experience of adopting their son.) Tragically, most of the children from that period went … Read more
Culturally deprived and TV-less laggard that I am, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD lately — for the very first time. First impressions: Joss Whedon can write rings around everybody else. Second impression: Dickens lives! By that, I mean that Whedon seems to have hit on Dickens’s formula: Create a character … Read more
This TimesOnline (UK) story — detailing a recently-completed parent survey on the ages at which their children learned to speak — caught my attention for several reasons. Firstly, because the “raw numbers” themselves are quite interesting — 3 seems disconcertingly late for speech to me, though that was a relatively small percentage of responders. And the gender splits … Read more
I have found myself in a brisk correspondence in recent weeks with a Calvinist friend from my school days 60 years ago. The topic touched on in our correspondence entails the redrawing of the moral map of the universe, which has been undertaken in the West since the 1960s. That redrawing arrived on the crest … Read more
Tony Judt writes in the latest New York Review of Books about his struggles with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the motor neuron disorder that results in the eventual loss of voluntary muscle movement. At this stage, Judt is effectively a paraplegic, a state he has come to manage (with help) during the day — but being … Read more
It’s almost as if WholeFood’s CEO John Mackey enjoys ticking off a large percentage of his customers. He was recently profiled in The New Yorker and said plainly that there was no consensus that climate change is mostly man-made: …One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming–the Missing Science,” a … Read more
The present standoff over abortion funding in health-care reform pits two sets of Catholics against each other: The bishops, supported by pro-life leaders, zealously oppose abortion funding, while prominent Catholic members of Congress just as zealously promote it. Â Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi leads the pro-abortion Catholic pack pushing hard for abortion funding … Read more
This final installment of “The Jumble Shop” has a unique idea: making your own marionette! That project looks amazingly fun! It’s easy to see how one could build a whole troupe of marionette actors and actresses this way. (And it sure beats paying $80+ for a single puppet!) Next week: The start of a new … Read more
The staff here at InsideCatholic stayed up a little late last night watching fireworks and quaffing champagne, so today will be a day of rest for us — but be sure to check out the home page for our Predictions for 2010. Place bets and add your own prognostications in the comments. Â All best … Read more
With 2009 in the books, we asked the staff and friends of InsideCatholic to offer their predictions for the new year. Here’s what they told us… ♦♦♦ Congress will take another stab at comprehensive immigration reform and will pass a less-than-perfect bill before May and the run-up to the midterm … Read more
Over at The Boston Globe’s Boston.com website, the paper’s photography blog (The Big Picture) has a three-part Year In Review, featuring over 120 visually arresting photographs: The year 2009 is now coming to a close, and it’s time to take a look back over the past 12 months through photographs. Historic elections were held in Iran, India … Read more
Here’s a piece from the New York Times about the problems we still have treating industrially processed ground beef… That would be the same beef purchased by fast food joints, many restaurants, school lunch programs, and the majority of American food shoppers. Michael Moss reports that eight years ago, federal officials were looking for ways … Read more
Father Tim Jones, the Anglican priest who suggested recently in a homily that the poor ought to take up shoplifting to feed themselves, has received some memorable feedback on his idea. A Yorkshire priest who caused controversy this month by preaching that shoplifting could sometimes be justified has had a bucket of pasta thrown over … Read more
Bryan Cones, the managing editor at U.S. Catholic, is upset that I used the word “fake” to describe Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. Two weeks ago, I criticized those organizations for supporting the Senate health-care bill containing abortion funding. At the Huffington Post, Cones calls me out: Hudson appoints himself … Read more
When I was in DC this past September for InsideCatholic’s 14th Annual Partnership dinner, Deal introduced me to a truly extraordinary collection of music: Haydn’s Baryton Trios. (The baryton, a large viol-like bowed instrument, seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years — a fact attributed by some to the “immense difficult” required in playing it … Read more
Readers here may be interested in this personal account of a Jewish woman’s first encounter with the Catholic Mass on Christmas eve. American Thinker contributor “Robyn of Berkeley” became a political conservative, and her experience of religious people drew her to church. (Certainly the reverse of the stories we typically hear.) Here’s an excerpt from … Read more
Not every villain in history can be confined to a single vice. In pointing out, for instance, the Gluttony of François Mitterand, I didn’t mean to clear this polygamous socialist of any suspicion of Lust or Envy. Quite the contrary: As St. Francis de Sales implied when he suggested that giving way to Lust made … Read more
