1. Maureen Ferguson: “Most women who abort say they would rather not; Congress can help them“
In the post-Roe era, the messy democratic process has begun to sort out abortion policy and politics across the country. But another important task also lies ahead. Support for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies has always been at the heart of the pro-life movement.
Those seeking to build a culture of life are right to prioritize support for women and keep it at the center of legislative policy debates and political strategy. Legislation that focuses on supporting mothers, connecting them to the vast network of pregnancy resource centers and other aid, will empower vulnerable women to choose life for their babies and avoid the tragedy of abortion.
Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) recently introduced just such a bill, and it deserves bipartisan support. The Iowa congresswoman’s Providing for Life Act is a comprehensive pro-family legislative package that values life at all stages, including after birth. It provides the support that mothers and children need through a public-private partnership that builds, block by block, a culture of life.
2. Armenian Christians trapped and facing genocide: an explainer
More here.
- On RealClearReligion: “Two Eritrean Christians Mark 7,000 Days in Prison“
One pastor I met in Eritrea said the first question Christian prisoners were asked was, “Will you deny Christ?” Another pastor showed me how he was bound in prison, lying on his stomach with his hands and feet tied together behind his back.
In meeting after meeting, I heard inspiring stories of how God had encouraged and empowered Eritreans who were arrested because of their Christian faith. “Persecution is not sweet,” one pastor said, “but it is useful.”
Affirming and expanding on that thought, another pastor said, “Nothing comes to us without the will of God. Through persecution — I don’t know why, but the church grows.”
4. “Remembering the Night the ‘City of Christians’ Fell to ISIS in Iraq“
5. In City Journal: “Religious Discrimination in California“
Three times in the past seven years, the Supreme Court has made clear that this sort of exclusion is a form of religious discrimination prohibited by the First Amendment. But California, like other jurisdictions, has failed to follow those instructions.
The present victims are special-needs families who wish to have their religious schools—willing and able to serve the special and secular needs of their children—become state-certified non-public schools. Doing so would allow those institutions, like other private schools certified by the state, to receive the necessary funding to provide services for children whose needs the public schools cannot meet. But California, contrary to prevailing First Amendment law, continues to defend its categorical rule: if you’re religious, don’t bother applying to serve the special-needs community. It’s time for courts—and legislators—to step in.
6. In Stars and Stripes: “Overseas and under the poverty line: The system that keeps so many military spouses abroad unemployed“
For thousands of U.S. military families, an overseas assignment means living on the edge of poverty.
In Europe, nearly 7,000 U.S. service members or their spouses or children were in danger in the past year of not having enough to eat, Defense Department data show.
Those military families qualified for a low-income program designed to ensure that pregnant women, babies and toddlers don’t go hungry.
The reason for that hardship after being sent to Europe is rooted in a loss of income resulting from U.S. and NATO country prohibitions that keep military spouses from working overseas, program administrators say.
But the harm to military families doesn’t end there. The rules have created a pipeline of highly skilled, cheap — and in many cases free — labor exploited by military hospitals and other base organizations, a yearlong Stars and Stripes investigation shows.
For example, military spouses who are nurses, physical therapists or other medical professionals told Stars and Stripes they were encouraged to give as much as 40 hours a week to the American Red Cross or other organizations in the hope that doing so could lead to an eventual paid position.
7. “Pro-life pushback prevents all-trimester abortion facility from opening“
While abortion advocates claim that abortions are only carried out this late in pregnancy for medical reasons, the truth is that many women have abortions in the third trimester for non-health related reasons, which DuPont Clinic’s patient director Karishma Oza calls “beautiful.”
She said, “I think abortion in all trimesters is beautiful. And you know, there is also a myth that abortion in the second and third trimester is only for people experiencing anomalies. That’s also not true. Of course, we serve people who have anomalies at our clinic, and we do it with a whole lot of heart and compassion. But there’s this misconception that there also has to be something wrong with the pregnancy in order to have an abortion, and that’s just not true.” (emphasis added)
While the DuPont Clinic has lost its Beverly Hills location for now, it is likely working to secure a new location in California. The abortion business continues to commit abortions into the third trimester at its location in Washington, D.C.
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11. Charles Fain Lehman in City Journal: “This Is Your City on Fentanyl“
Large parts of Portland’s downtown and Chinatown districts are now open-air drug markets. One outpost of the city’s famed Voodoo Donuts, for example, is an island in a sea of drug use and camping. The city’s bridges now offer not only a beautiful vista of the Willamette River but also the ugly sight of people living in their own filth. The criminal-justice system can’t do anything about it. And the nonprofits seem either unable or unwilling to do anything, either.
12. Live Action: “Pregnant golfer competes at US Open: ‘So much bigger than golf’“
“Women do this all the time,” [Amy Olson] said. “I want other women who have gone through this that don’t get the cameras on them as they go about their job, as they go about what they do every single day while pregnant, I just want pregnancy and life to be celebrated. I love that people are acknowledging that it’s hard but it’s possible. I hope that when other women see me they feel like, ‘you know what, I can do it too.’”
13. In the New Atlantis: The Speech of the Dead: Against AI necromancy
14. “The Story of One Crime: A forceful look at a martyred family“
The notorious barbarity of the Nazi regime was on full display in the occupied Polish town of Markowa on March 24, 1944. Early that morning, German-led police surrounded the home of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, Poles who had been denounced for sheltering Jews from the Holocaust.
Under the command of Lt. Eilert Dieken, the detachment proceeded to slaughter not only the eight people the Ulmas had been hiding for almost two years, but the couple themselves, their six children and the unborn baby Wiktoria was carrying. All nine martyred members of the Ulma family will be beatified on Sept. 10.
15. “Body of saint, patron of African Americans, significantly damaged in Sicilian church fire“
16. In Plough: “The Teacher Who Never Spoke“
Nobody knows how much Duane could understand. In one aptitude test, he showed no interest in differentiating a red square from a yellow triangle, and the neurologists told us that he had the cognition of a three-month-old. We were amused. How do you measure intelligence in someone so full of life, whose constant seizures played havoc with his memory and situational awareness? Snapshot neurological tests can’t capture the reality of his life.
Can [Australian philosopher Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University,] or other utilitarians do any better than the neurologists? For many in this camp, not all members of the human species are considered persons. Personhood, they argue, requires self-awareness and the ability to conceive of future goals and plans: to experience oneself as having interests. Duane would not have qualified. In his case, utilitarianism would say that another good – reducing suffering – should have kicked in. No doubt Singer would allow that my parents’ preference to keep Duane alive should have weight (after all, they are “persons,” even if he supposedly wasn’t). But still, by Singer’s account, there was nothing in Duane himself that could have made it wrong to kill him.
Christians do not think like this. In Christian terms, an action is good not only because it has beneficial consequences, but because it is good in itself. What’s more, good actions have the power to change for the better those who do them. We seek to love like God – to be merciful, honorable, and just – because we want to reflect his character: to “become like Christ,” to grow into “the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” as Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians. It is this becoming that guides our decisions, because all choices change us – in one direction or another.
19. Andrew Doran: “Christians should approach the Western Wall with humility, not demands“
- Gabrielle Girgis: “Rights Talk in a Post-Liberal Age: Mary Ann Glendon’s Enduring Insight Into the American Rights Tradition“
21. Elliott Kaufman: “Of Making Many Books There Is No End“
What makes a book Jewish? I am dogged by the question as my wife and I merge our collections. We set aside one bookcase for fiction and two for seforim, the beautifully bound codes of law, volumes of Talmud and selection of commentaries by which a knowledgeable observer could identify precisely what kind of Jews we are. Finally, we devoted two large bookcases to nonfiction, split up between the Jewish and non-Jewish. That is where the trouble set in.
22. “Ukraine officially moves Christmas observance to Dec. 25“
23. “‘SABBATH’ invites us to reclaim a countercultural good“
Looking back, I appreciate the guidance but I focus more on the underlying “spirit” of Sabbath. In his 1998 apostolic letter “Dies Domini,” Pope John Paul II invited the faithful to “rediscover with new intensity” the meaning of the day with all its mystery, “its celebration, its significance for Christian and human life.”
That is what I tried to do with this film, “SABBATH” — to rediscover Sabbath. I came to see it more as a gift than a burden, one that ties together all the dimensions of our love of God, our care for ourselves and others, and our reverence for all of God’s creation.
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25. The Lila Rose Podcast: You Probably Need Therapy, w/Dr. Bob Schuchts
26. Father Peter John Cameron, O.P.: “How to escape the squalid sameness of everyday life”
28. Pure fun:
29. Delightful love: