- Mary Eberstadt, “Beyond Jeremiads: Signs of Cultural Revival, Circa 2025″:
Many young people across the West no longer have access to either way of answering that eternal question: Who am I? Their earthly families are volatile. Their place in a supernatural order is unknown to them. More and more young people do not have either a robust religious identity or a robust family identity. The decline of the churches and the shrinking of the family have seen to that. This widespread identity crisis—which is at bottom, to repeat, a love crisis—pushes many to seek ersatz community in the only way left to them, identity politics.
That is not only a personal problem, but a social problem. Why? Because identity politics says, in effect, that everyone is a victim. People cannot trust others except for victims like themselves. Identity politics declares peaceful coexistence with the wider community to be somehow unwanted, even impossible. It produces cancel culture.
All of these propositions are antithetical to a functioning society—or even a society that is pleasant to live in. In place of a Christian creed that tells people to love their enemies, forgive those who harm them, and welcome straying members back to the fold, identity politics says instead that its adherents should hate their oppressors, use power against those who harm them, and ruin the lives of those who have transgressed. Which of these creeds makes for a more amicable society, a less rancorous politics? The question answers itself. To repeat, secularization and re-paganization are not net neutrals. Both are undermining the ability of many Western people to live peaceably with their fellow citizens.
- Sean Fischer in The Free Press, “My Mom Was Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Then She Got Better”:
In January 2023, my mom went into the hospital to have a small surgical procedure, meant to patch a leak of spinal fluid. Instead, it cured her of all her symptoms. In just a few weeks, she became the person she had been 20 years prior: a healthy mother of three, who makes my dad howl with laughter. It turns out she never had Alzheimer’s. It was a misdiagnosis.
- Darren McGarvey on UnHerd, “How Britain shames its elders: They remind us of death”:
Loneliness and neglect accelerate mental and physical decline, complicating care needs. The elderly wither away not from age itself but from the absence of community. The recent debate over assisted dying illustrated just how little we offer those nearing the end of life. Instead of providing compassionate care, we debate helping people end their lives as if this is the pinnacle of ethical progress when, in truth, that entire debate arises in the context of a dire social care system that should shame us all. We must shift the conversation about ageing and death from mere survival to dignity, community, and respect
- The Today Show, “Chicago baker searches for the son she placed for adoption . . . and finds out he’s a regular”:
“You can’t tell this story without thanking God.”
- Erika Bachiochi, “Speaking About Abortion”:
To support a renewed flowering of family life, our responsibility to one another will have to extend beyond the needs of families to each and every person. To build a culture that truly values every human life, each of us has to learn, day by day, by God’s grace, to encounter each other — to be responsible for one another — as human persons who are owed love and respect simply by virtue of imaging the divine, a Trinity of persons united by Love.
- Politico, “AI abortion training is here”:
Medical students at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston are developing artificial intelligence tools to help them learn how to provide all-options pregnancy counseling without putting themselves or their patients at risk of prosecution under the state’s abortion ban.
- Catholic Herald, “Colin Farrell on fatherhood, sober spirituality and his new foundation for special-needs families”:
James Farrell, Farrell’s 21-year-old son, was born with Angelman syndrome, which results in a happy personality but severe intellectual and developmental disorder, whose symptoms include seizures and difficulties with both speech and movement.
“When James was born, we thought he was perfect,” Farrell says. “Well, he is perfect – he’s a lovely young man – but we thought he was physically and neurologically perfect too. And it turns out he has a condition. At first he was misdiagnosed as having cerebral palsy, which is a common misdiagnosis because cerebral palsy and Angelman syndrome share similar characteristics, so at first we didn’t know which way it was going to go; but by the time he was two, he was already having seizures, and I knew that he had profound, significant developmental delays.”
An instinctively, if unconventionally, spiritual man, Farrell admits that he began to look at life in a very different way. “You really do take nothing for granted,” he says. “There’s a deep sense of fear – I’ve run through hospitals with James in my arms when he was having a seizure – but there’s also a deeper sense of love and respect. You know how you hear that a child’s first steps are a seminal moment in the life of the parent – as well as the child, of course! – well, if you’ve been told there’s a chance your child will never walk at all, those steps take on a whole new meaning. They go into another realm.”
Farrell also gave up drink and drugs. “I think James was two when I got sober,” he says, “and the most significant and purest part of the fuel that I used to get off alcohol and drugs and all that stuff was knowing that he had health issues. All children need their parents – or a parent or a grandparent or somebody – to care for them. One of the things James has taught me was to access within myself a desire to live, even if it was initially more about me thinking I wanted to live to be around for him. He’s taught me a lot. Both of my boys have taught me a lot.”
13. Oklahoma DHS looking for more families to foster children across the state:
The Oklahoma Department of Human Services said they’re working to recruit hundreds more foster parents this year as officials said they’ve seen fewer Oklahomans signing up.
Their goal for 2025 is to recruit 400 new foster homes to put every child in a safe and stable environment.
Each day, there are more than 5,800 children in the foster care system in Oklahoma, a number DHS said is lower than in years past.
But another number that has dropped is the number of foster parents.
- Naomi Schaefer Riley for City Journal, “This Child-Welfare Rule Puts Social Justice Over Safety“:
The Administration on Children, Youth and Families allows relatives of a child to become foster parents without having to meet the same standards required for non-relatives.
- Boston Pilot, “‘They’re only demons’ — Newark exorcist shares insights”:
“You do have to have chutzpah,” Father Sudano said during a lecture on exorcism at Bridgewater State University’s St. Basil Chapel on Dec. 5. “These things take advantage of our fear, anxiety, and Hollywood, whatever we have in our head, and they know that.”
A few dozen people came to hear Father Sudano, 71, speak about his 12 years as an exorcist. Hollywood, he said, “often gets it wrong” about exorcism, to the point that even priests are unnecessarily scared of demons. This was his chance to set the record straight.
Demons, he explained, are fallen angels who despise God. He described them as operating sort of like the mafia. While most people consider Satan to be the opposite of God, God has no opposite. However, for the sake of a compelling story, Hollywood portrays exorcisms as an epic struggle between an evenly-matched good and evil.
“It’s not like that at all,” Father Sudano said. “I mean, can it be dramatic? Sometimes, yes, but the victor is the victor. That’s Christ. There’s no question about who’s going to win.”
- Thomas W. Carroll, “My Advice to Catholic Schools: Double Down on Your Catholicity”:
Catholic schools often face the tension between their solemn obligation to pass on our Catholic faith and the reality that many parents choose Catholic schools for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with faith. These include strong academics, smaller classes, strict discipline, a safe environment and a sense of community.
In the Archdiocese of Boston, where I served as superintendent of Catholic schools for five years, I encountered many parents who just were “not into the whole religion thing.” For example, I had one parent say to me, “I know the school has to have sacraments, but do we have to talk about them all the time?” I thought the phrase “have sacraments” was particularly revealing — as if celebrating sacraments was like your mom forcing you to eat your vegetables.
- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, “Woman, and Women, of the Year”:
Every new technology, whatever its positive potential, has a revenge of unintended consequences. The inventor of the birth control pill intended it as a tool to enhance marriages and the intimacy of husbands and wives by spacing children more manageably. The actual result, six decades later, is our current sexual anarchy; an environment where a female Supreme Court justice (Ketanji Brown Jackson) is unable or unwilling to define what a woman is. Like a constantly morphing virus, the sexual revolution has attacked every stable element of human sexual identity, with massive and toxic cultural results.
A religious sister who befriended Billy the Kid, calmed a lynch mob and testified against human trafficking is one step closer to canonization. Servant of God Sister Blandina Segale — an Italian immigrant who ministered during the days of the Wild West — is close to being named “Venerable,” said Allen Sánchez, the petitioner of her cause, at a Jan. 3 press conference.
Like Jesus Christ, Sister Blandina reached out to the peripheries, said Santa Fe Archbishop John C. Wester at the press conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a place where Sister Blandina served for years.
“Jesus was her everything,” he said.
Sánchez said he believed the spirituality of Sister Blandina can be summed up in one sentence: “Who are the vulnerable and what do they need from me?”