1, ‘My parishioners shot dead in cold blood’: Priests, lay faithful describe attacks in Nigeria
- Kevin Clarke in America: ‘Do not forget us’: Catholics in Ukraine mark a year of war
A year later her hometown has become “the biggest humanitarian hub in Ukraine,” the first destination “between the war area and a safe area,” Ms. Leonova says. Officially the region is hosting 400,000 displaced people, but she thinks the actual number is closer to twice that figure.
- Evelyn Gordon in Mosaic: Israel’s Judicial Reckoning:
As someone who has written about the need to restrain the court’s excessive activism for three decades now—long before this became a partisan voting issue for many Israelis—in several major essays and dozens of shorter pieces, I consider most of these reforms not only within the bounds of normal democratic practice but in fact essential to bolstering Israel’s democracy. The current situation, in which half the public profoundly distrusts the Supreme Court, is clearly untenable for any country that wants to remain a democracy; because courts are a crucial mechanism for resolving disputes peacefully rather than through force, if they are widely distrusted, resorting to force becomes more likely. Yet at the same time, some of the concerns raised by opponents are valid and deserve to be taken seriously. Given the universal conviction that Israeli society is at a breaking point, balancing these two imperatives is an urgent task.
I truly empathize with anyone who requests assisted suicide drugs. But we cannot allow suicide to be the solution to struggles and fears.
Instead, we need to fix the lack of support and love that leads to this tragic decision.
Too often in our society, we measure a person’s value based on their success, influence, ability to contribute to society, and freedom to choose their lifestyle. These ideas are badly flawed. Human dignity is an innate part of being human.
- Karen Swallow Prior: Replacing vengeance with mercy in our death penalty policy:
(RNS) — Last week, attorneys for a man considered to be “one of the most mentally ill prisoners in Texas history” — sought a stay of his execution, scheduled to take place April 5.
While the crimes Andre Thomas committed are horrific, his case is not a typical death penalty case. It is marked by failures for Thomas and for his victims from the beginning of Thomas’ difficult life to its appointed end.
In 2004, Thomas murdered and mutilated his estranged wife, Laura Boren; their son Andre; and her infant daughter, Leyha Hughes, before stabbing himself in the chest.
When the attempt to kill himself failed, he turned himself in to the police. He told authorities he had committed these acts in order to slay the demons that voices had told him were inside his loved ones. While in jail a few days later, he removed his own eye with his bare hand. Following his conviction in one of the killings, he removed his other eye in a similar fashion.
Raised in extreme poverty by an alcoholic mother, Thomas has experienced hallucinations, delusions and suicidal ideations from childhood until today, and his extreme mental illness can hardly be debated. At trial Thomas was indeed determined to be schizophrenic, but the court invalidated his insanity defense, accepting the argument that his mental condition was caused by voluntary intoxication — in other words, his own fault.
In October, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Thomas’ claim that race bias played a part in his case’s outcome.
Thomas’ situation is a tragic illustration of how, first, social support systems and then the legal system can fail the most mentally ill, and, consequently, those they hurt. What constitutes justice in a case when someone is suffering such extreme mental illness? What constitutes mercy when someone is so obviously in need of care — help that, had it come earlier in his life, may have resulted in entirely different outcomes for so many people? These are questions Thomas’ case compels us to answer.
If one measure of a society is its treatment of its most vulnerable citizens, then that society should be especially judged by how it responds when those with mental illness commit heinous crimes.
- Nathanael Blake: Sending the Wounded to the Front:
The battle against transgender ideology will be won by the wounded.
Chloe Cole’s recent discussion at the Heritage Foundation shows that the victims of the transgender movement are the ones who will defeat it. The eighteen-year-old is a flesh-and-blood refutation of the supposed medical authority and scientific expertise of the trans movement. The wounded bodies and psyches of detransitioners rebut the trans movement’s claims to compassion and expertise. Their scars are marks of its fallibility, and their existence shows that the science is not settled. They are living proof that the affirmation-only approach is hurting people.
But sending them to the frontlines of the fight against transgender ideology—and against the medical-pharmaceutical complex that profits from it—is asking a lot from those who are already hurt. The courage of Chloe’s testimony is evident in the vulnerability it requires to share intimate details about her body, her mental health, and her social and family life. The cost of telling the truth about transition is surrendering a lot of privacy. For example, Chloe related that “after about a year or so being on testosterone I started experiencing some urinary tract side effects. I was more prone to getting UTIs [urinary tract infections] and sometimes I would even get blood clots in my urine.” Few adults would want talk about this on a national stage, especially as part of a heated culture-war debate. Yet she is doing this while still a teenage girl.
- Daily Signal: ‘Jane’s Revenge’ Claims Another Pregnancy Center Victim:
Vandals attacked a pro-life Minneapolis pregnancy center early in the morning on Saturday before a pro-abortion protest against the center and its work.
Attackers broke seven windows of First Care Center and vandalized the building with messages like “If abortions arn’t safe neither r u” [sic] and “Jane was here” on Friday night, according to Tammy Kocher, the group’s executive director. These messages echo the threats of “Jane’s Revenge,” a radical group associated with attacks on more than 100 pro-life pregnancy centers and churches across the nation since May 2022.
. . . .
First Care’s surveillance video shows two hooded people in masks and gloves defacing the building around 1:30 a.m. for two minutes, Kocher told The Daily Signal. She emphasized that the attacks primarily hurt women in need.
“Who they’re really hurting is our clients who are hurting, single moms who are living in poverty and who need support,” Kocher said. “They’re trying to take away practical caring holistic support from families in need.”
- Patrick T. Brown in the New York Times: What Republican Parents Really Want:
There has recently been a lot of chatter in Washington about family policy, and surprisingly to many people, a lot of it has happened among Republicans. Senators like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have released proposals that offer financial benefits to many American households for children, while other conservatives have talked about becoming a “parents’ party.” The overturning of Roe v. Wade has accelerated this trend.
But the center of gravity in the Republican Party is still more comfortable picking culture war fights than offering policy solutions. A true party for parents needs to provide something for their pocketbooks as well as for their values. Republicans, still grappling with their newfound identity as the party of the working class, need to understand that a pro-family agenda that doesn’t provide material support to families will be, at best, half-baked.
The path forward for Republicans is to listen to parents, particularly those without a college degree who have too often been left out of such discussions, and respond with tangible policy solutions. A “popularist” version of a conservative governing agenda — which would be heavily informed by polling — has the potential to put the meat on the bones of a parents’ party approach to politics. And critically, it could attract at least some bipartisan support.
Polling I did for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in conjunction with the Institute for Family Studies and YouGov suggests five key areas of focus: improving the child tax credit, protecting kids online, supporting new parents, promoting strong families with involved fatherhood and striving to eliminate marriage penalties in our tax code and benefit programs.
- Naomi Schaefer Riley: What ‘impostor syndrome’ says about our schools:
Younger women are more likely than baby boomers to report feeling insecure about their abilities. Could the problem have something to do with the education they received?
She said her husband works long hours at a factory making industrial refrigerators, earning around $1,800 to $2,200 a month.
Despite a tight budget and lack of help at home, Ms. Takatori said she felt child-rearing was manageable. She credited aid from the town such as free medical care for all children as well as support from other moms and elderly women who help look after children.
At a park stocked with play equipment, Ai Todaka, 35, watched her 6-year-old daughter, Riko, holding her younger brother Aoi, 3, as they slid down a long winding slide together.
“The elder one begged for a baby because she envied her friends with many siblings,” said Ms. Todaka. “That’s why I had another one.”
- Herb Stupp in the Wall Street Journal: Jim Buckley’s Century of Service:
From the Senate to the State Department to the Court of Appeals — he’s one of few Americans to serve in all three branches of government.
Ronald Reagan appointed Mr. Buckley undersecretary of state for international security affairs and president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In 1985, Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, sometimes called the second-highest court in the nation. Judge Buckley took senior status in 1996 and heard cases for a few more years.
His honorable service was made evident during the 2003 ceremony where his courthouse portrait was unveiled. His retired colleague Patricia Wald described Mr. Buckley as “a man for all seasons with not just intellect and acumen, but patience, tolerance for other person’s point of view, good nature and true restraint.” Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg praised his legal writing, saying he was “unexcelled as a stylist and a craftsman.”
Mr. Buckley continued his public service into his 90s, publishing a prescient book on public policy, “Saving Congress From Itself” (2014). He wrote that federal “grants in aid” were needlessly inflating public spending and deficits.
“I swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. Buckley told me in a phone interview, “and I took that very seriously. That includes the notion of federalism, which is often ignored in today’s Washington.”
Despite his exemplary public service, Mr. Buckley has yet to be honored in the way he deserves. There are public landmarks named for former U.S. senators from New York, including the Moynihan Train Hall, the Javits Center and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. But nothing as yet for Mr. Buckley.
A new bill could change that. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.) has introduced legislation to rename the Staten Island expanses of the Gateway National Seashore for the centenarian who in the early 70s co-sponsored the measure to create this very park. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska) is co-sponsoring the bill. Why would an Alaskan want to honor the esteemed New York senator? Mr. Sullivan was an intern in Judge Buckley’s chambers and admires him greatly.
“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state,” the mayor was reported as saying by Daily News. “State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.” Hizzoner was promptly pilloried by the left for what liberals see as a violation of the First Amendment. “It is odd that Mayor Adams would need a refresher on the First Amendment,” says the ACLU’s Donna Lieberman.
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
- Francis X. Maier: Black Is Beautiful:
[H]ow a culture deals with death speaks volumes about its mental health — and its understanding of who and what a human being is. . . .
Survival is an end in itself only in the short term. An endless life of consuming and digesting successive experiences isn’t a “human” life at all. We have an instinctive hunger for higher meaning; for a shared purpose beyond ourselves. Without it, even cocooned in luxury, even with our senses anesthetized by noise and distractions, we end in despair. Yet this is exactly what American culture now breeds, which is why our rates of depression, mental illness, and drug use continue to climb. Even suicide can seem to make terrifying sense. Why stick around if this is all there is? Scattering ashes, human composting, radical longevity extension, cryogenic suspension: these all, in their own odd ways, involve a kind of self-delusion that masks unacknowledged, unhealable emptiness. They’re blind to what death at the end of a good life, well lived, actually is: the doorway to something greater.
- Rick Warren: God’s Purpose in Your Pain:
What I learned was that we draw closer to God by telling him exactly how we feel, not by telling him what we think he wants us to feel. God wants the real, not the ideal, from you. In pain, you cry out. You argue with God. You complain to God. You express all the negative emotions you’re feeling. You don’t suppress them, you confess them.
It was this last type that animated one of the greatest philo-Semites of our time. The prodigious writings of the recently deceased English historian and journalist Paul Johnson are suffused with a compelling and erudite form of philosophical philo-Semitism. For the Jewish reader, it is perhaps the most salient element within his entire oeuvre. The prominence and irreducibility of the Jews is a theme that runs through several of Johnson’s popular historical works — Intellectuals, Modern Times, A History of the American People, A History of Christianity — and is sprinkled liberally throughout his articles. This disposition is also the foundation of Johnson’s monumental A History of the Jews, an insightful and opinionated recapitulation of four millennia of Jewish history. For Jewish historians (I speak as a very junior member of the guild), it is slightly galling that the richest, most thought-provoking, and most scintillatingly written one-volume history of the Jews was authored by a devout Catholic. Johnson’s attitudes and ideas on this subject are of great consequence for Jew and gentile alike.
28. Christine Rosen: Do Social Media Platforms Have Civic Responsibilities?
29. Leaning Into Lent: Father Mike Schmitz’s Tips for a Fruitful Penitential Season
- Heather King: A silent vocation: The art of Judith Scott
Though unable to talk — “Ho ho bah” was a favorite ejaculation — Judith had an uncanny sense of presence and purpose. She knew exactly how to make her desires known. Woe to anyone who tried to trespass upon her precious magazines. She became the undisputed Queen Bee of the Creative Art Center, unswerving in her focus.
Stooped, shrunken, with dark circles around her eyes, Judith came to love headgear: a fringed scarf tied around her forehead, turbans. She took to festooning herself with costume jewelry: multiple strands of beads, chunky bracelets.
She came to favor strips of fabric for wrapping. Her deeply-controlled structures had the air of totems or mummies, often with strange protuberances. Always, something was buried within the piece. It might be a Styrofoam cube, a piece of wood, or an industrial spool. It might be a shopping cart or once, someone’s paycheck.
The art world started to take notice — but Judith was unimpressed by the star-studded gallery openings. She might walk around, throw kisses toward one or two of her pieces, then sit down in a corner and demand to be taken home.
Her work is now in museum collections around the world: New York, San Francisco, Dublin, Lausanne, Tokyo.
Also: I’ll be speaking at a conference called “Journalism in a Post-Truth World” this weekend at the Museum of the Bible.