I cringed to read that Jolie had decided to cut her body for preventions sake. It is a regrettable step, if a necessary one. My own breasts have nourished my children in their infancy and toddlerhood for the better part of the last decade. As I write this, I am nursing my twenty-one-month-old son Samuel. My cringe came with a worry: that a dramatic announcement like Jolies will distract women from less dramatic-and costly-preventative steps.

Women who lack Jolies means are collectively throwing up our hands. How can we, the working poor, afford weeks of preventative therapy, surgery and breast reconstruction to prevent breast cancer? Will our insurance cover this? Can cancer-free breasts be saved, or are they eventually bound to kill us? Where will this research lead? Will there come a time when young women are routinely urged to receive genetic testing and then have their bodies cut in prevention rather than risk a future cancer diagnoses? How cursed have breasts become?

If simpler steps for prevention are available, we are wise to take advantage of the knowledge we have to keep cancer at bay. These may be, to quote a Nativity hymn, painful steps and slow." But they require of us the Lenten sacrifices of moderation that lead to good health: reduction in the consumption of fats, regular exercise, avoiding the vices of excessive alcohol and smoking, and eating healthy unprocessed foods.

After consulting pro-life physician Dr. Peter Rosi, a breast cancer specialist in Chicago who changed to family practice in his effort to educate young parents and to prevent cancer in women, I began to practice extended breastfeeding to about three years with each of my children. I have never taken the Pill.

My family eats a diet that is strong on vegetables and we aim for hormone-free foods. We garden and grow pesticide-free foods. When we can afford it, during winter, we buy foods that are hormone- and pesticide-free. We have reduced sugar and dairy consumption. We get vitamin D through vitamins and sunshine. For calcium, we eat almonds and bok choy. We avoid the use of plastic in the kitchen by using glass storage containers rather than risking the possible breakdown of bisphenol A (BPA), which is linked to cancer. These are some ways I am trying to prevent breast cancer in my body and in my children.  

For women, bearing children before age thirty may not be a politically, socially or economically wise choice, but for preventing cancer, some studies recommend this step. Breastfeeding a baby beyond the first year, even through the second year as recommended by the World Health Organization, is also a way to support breast health.

I married at age twenty-four. My first child was born when I was twenty-five years old, and I gave birth three times during graduate school. Those births were not always met with welcome by those close to me, but God called me to be a mother and I have welcomed the opportunity with open arms.

As for most mothers, learning to nurse was a challenge for me. I faced bleeding nipples and some crying sessions on the phone with my mother and with a La Leche League consultant. It is by Gods grace and with much patient help from others that I have been able to pass along the antibodies and immune protections to my babies that reduce their risk of diabetes and childhood cancers and, as was announced just this week, may even lower their risk of ADHD. I put children before a career, and it took me eight years to complete my Ph.D. as I wrote a dissertation from the kitchen table.

Society in the United States already has a hard time with the God-given nourishing function of the female breast. Mothers in most states have the protected legal right to nurse their babies anytime, anywhere. But mothers buy Hooter Hiders" and cover themselves in order to not offend others or raise eyebrows. This is not the case in contemporary Latin America, for example, where the new pope was photographed greeting a breastfeeding mother who was openly nursing her child in his presence.

Nor was it the case in the Renaissance, as artistic renderings of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ readily attest. Twenty-first-century lactivists" stage nurse-in protests when businesses like Victorias Secret (2006) and Hollister (2013) ask nursing mothers to refrain from nursing in public. Breasts are oversexualized to the point that the mainstream has difficulty accepting them in any non-sexual context.

As a Church and society, we can support nursing mothers by providing information and encouragement to seek help from organizations like La Leche League and making referrals to an IBCLC board-certified lactation consultant when a new mother is struggling with nursing. Families, churches, and employers can make breastfeeding mother-baby togetherness a norm, so that mothers can succeed in nursing without feeling pulled in two while they mother their children. 

Lets not leave our health solely up to health experts who stand to gain tremendous amounts of income from fearful women who are willing to go to costly and painful lengths to avoid cancer. Day by day, we can act in moderation from childhood onward, avoiding risk factors and choosing healthy behaviors, in order to lower the risk of premature death, so that Gods call to live and serve the world and the family with our hands, our hearts, and even our breasts, can be lived out in old age as in youth.

Sarah Degner Riveros is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Valparaiso University. Due to an editorial error, an earlier draft of this piece was originally posted. It has since been updated.

RESOURCES

Risks of hormonal contraception explained by a breast cancer specialist physician

Breastfeeding children into toddlerhood and having multiple children reduce breast cancer risk

Cancer is linked to BPA in plastics

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I have grappled with this tactic for over twenty years as an activist against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. When I first engaged the issue in 1993, the Hemlock Society was the nations foremost organization advocating legalized physician-assisted suicide. Talk about candor in advocacy-hemlock was the poison swallowed by Socrates to carry out his death sentence, and the slogan of the organization was good life, good death." No confusion or pretense about the agenda there.

But look what happened. The Hemlock Society eventually merged with one of its own offshoots, Compassion in Dying, to form Compassion and Choices. Talk about euphemistic honey to help the hemlock go down.

Today assisted suicide is described almost exclusively through euphemism, especially in media coverage. The most prominent phrase is death with dignity." Several years ago, Compassion and Choices began a campaign to convince reporters not to use the word suicide" to describe a terminally ill persons deliberate use of a lethal prescription of drugs. The word suicide," Compassion and Choices scolded, is biased" and steeped in value judgment." Worse, in the groups view, it carries a social stigma," causing readers to be misled." In contrast, the group claimed that aid in dying" is value neutral" since it is undertaken by terminally ill people who take medication"-another euphemism in this context-who dont want to die but merely shorten their dying process."

The contrary is true, of course. Assisted suicide is the accurate and descriptive term that explicitly describes the act in question. Suicide describes the act, not the motive. Someone who kills himself commits suicide, regardless of whether he does so because of mental instability, a career collapse, or a terminal illness.

None other than the founder of the Hemlock Society, Derek Humphry, protested the use of euphemisms in assisted suicide advocacy in a 2006 letter to the editor published in the Register Guard of Eugene, Oregon. Humphry wrote against using the term death with dignity" to describe the lawful act [in Oregon] of a physician helping a terminally ill person to die by handing them a lethal overdose," as an affront to the English language." The proper term should be physician-assisted suicide, Humphry opined, because, 'Physician means a licensed M.D.; 'assisted means helping; and 'suicide means deliberately ending life."

Humphry ended the letter with a plea to call a spade, a spade." Indeed. Otherwise, we cant have an honest societal debate about one of the more consequential-and potentially culture-changing-issues of our time.

The assisted suicide movement certainly isnt alone in deploying euphemisms as a political tactic. We all have examples we can name. The right to an abortion," rarely used, would be accurate. The ubiquitous right to choose" and that sound bite of all sound bites, choice," are inaccurate because their intent is to hide the subject of the decision. Similarly, the New York Times recently referred to babies who survived late-term abortion-only to be murdered by the abortionist Kermit Gosnell-as fetuses," even though there is no such thing as a born fetus.

The intentionally bloodless term collateral damage," used during war, is particularly galling in this regard. Collateral in this context means secondary," or indirect." Damage means physical harm caused to something in such a way as to impair its value, usefulness, or normal function." The point of the term is to distance ourselves from the horror that actually happened: the killing and wounding of non-combatants during an act of war.

The proper and accurate term for such a circumstance is civilian casualties." Surely war is of sufficient import, and basic respect for these victims should require accurate terminology in describing the carnage.

The struggle over the lexicon about how to properly describe aliens illegally in the United States is another example. I think illegal alien" is properly descriptive. So too is the somewhat more tactful undocumented immigrant," as that describes the lack of formal permission for these people to be residing in the country. But notice that many advocates for legalizing the status of millions of such people in the country now refer to them merely as migrants" or immigrants."

The media play a huge role in this problem. Indeed, it is easy to discern the side of a controversy that the media favor by the words and terms reporters deploy in stories to describe the political combatants. Thus, the Associated Press stylebook requires the use of the following terms involving contentious debates:

Similarly, illegal alien" is now forbidden by the A.P.:

Euphemisms are a propagandistic tool of misdirection. They ill serve a free people. But advocates wont stop manipulating us until we insist that they, in Humphrys words, call a spade a spade."

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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I regret the need to report this, but I must. In the March issue we published Homosexual Marriage, Parenting, and Adoption," written by Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France. Or so we thought. It turns out that Rabbi Bernheim plagiarized some portions. In Part II of the essay, The Negation of Sexual Difference," he lifts sentences and paragraphs from a 2010 interview with Béatrice Bourges, president of the Collective for Children and an opponent of same-sex marriage and adoption.

Even more egregious, big chunks of Bernheims exposition of the biblical vision of malefemale complementarity come from Fr. Joseph-Marie Verlindes recent book, Lidéologie du gender: Comme identité reçue ou choisie? Verlinde carefully cites his sources (including John Paul II). Not only does Bernheim plagiarize Verlinde, he also gets rid of the attributions, transforming the quotations into his own voice.

It seems he has bad academic habits. His 2011 book, Quarante méditations juives, includes passages plagiarized from an interview with Jean-François Lyotard published in 1996. When first accused, Bernheim insisted that it was Lyotard who had plagiarized his student chaplain lectures from the 1980s, only later to admit fault.

Bernheim also cultivated the impression that he had passed the agrégation, a competitive exam at the pinnacle of French academic training, when in fact he had not. The French take their academic honors very seriously, and as a friend familiar with the French scene explained, to pretend that one is agrégé is the rough equivalent of falsely claiming to have received battlefield honors.

The first thing to say is that this affair cant be interpreted as an example of progressives hunting down dissenters. Bernheim took a strong stand on a controversial issue, but it wasnt his opposition to gay marriage that precipitated the scandal. It was his dishonesty. These transgressions of basic academic integrity were uncovered by Jean-Noël Darde, a plagiarism watchdog, not a gay activist.

The second thing to say concerns plagiarism. One of the perversions of our era is to make a god of intellectual property. Most commentators described Bernheim as stealing" words and sentences. This is wrongheaded. Plagiarism is a sin against truth, not property. Its first and foremost a kind of lying, not a kind of stealing. He violated our trust by speaking in a voice that was not his own, which is why in this and other cases of plagiarism the writer loses intellectual and moral authority broadly.

A third thing to say concerns the man. In my years of teaching, I had to deal with plagiarism many times. Now and then a cynical young person tried to get by with the minimum of work. But most of the students who plagiarized did so because they were desperate or scared, or both. I could tell because it was so obvious, and thus pathetic and pitiable. And indeed, when I confronted students I found that there was almost always a great deal of pathos in the background: psychological crises, terrible fears of failing, a consuming sense of hopelessness in the face of the assigned material.

Bernheims plagiarism seems to be of this sort. Now that Ive reviewed some of the details, I cant believe he believed he could get away with it. (I am, in fact, somewhat embarrassed that I didnt grow suspicious when the French rabbi sounded so much like John Paul II when talking about sexual complementarity and transcendence.) Please join me in praying for Rabbi Bernheim. From my reading of the evidence in this affair (whats so hard about citing someone?), it seems he certainly needs it.

The final thing to say is that Im sorry. The essays arguments arent any less true for having been plagiarized. But we allowed the magazine to be a vehicle for falsehood. The lie was in the byline. Homosexual Marriage, Parenting, and Adoption" was not in any proper sense by Gilles Bernheim. I apologize to you for publishing an essay that betrayed your trust in the integrity of First Things.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things . He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Typically, those who have wrestled with the issue of canon in the history of American religion have made only crude differentiation among different groups. In colonial America, there were the Quakers and nearly everyone else. In antebellum America, things became a bit more complex, but there were Shakers, Mormons, and a cluster of prophets on the one hand and Bible alone" anti-creedal evangelicals on the other extreme. Toss in Emerson and Thoreau.

Enter David Hollands eloquent and intelligent  Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America . For anyone who teaches in the field of American religious history, this is essential reading. It should assume a venerable place on graduate school exam lists. However,  Sacred Borders  has just as much to offer pastors, Bible study leaders, and, well, frankly, any Christian willing to think deeply about the ways that American Christians have understood revelation and Scripture.

Hollands argument is extended and detailed; it eludes simple summary. The subtitle of the book points to its breadth. He brings into conversation and contest both those whose belief in ongoing revelation threatened (sometimes mildly, sometimes obviously and severely) a closed biblical canon and those who answered such threats and policed the canons borders.

What I realized while reading  Sacred Borders  is that many, if not most, Christians believe in at least enough continuing revelation to pose some sort of threat to a strictly closed canon. At the same time, nearly all who challenged the closed canon maintained some sort of belief in canonicity; indeed, many pulled back from the logical conclusions of their ideas out of a traditionalist respect for the Bible. Along the way, Holland engages the early Puritans, Quakers (from George Keith to Elias Hicks), deists, Jonathan Edwards, prophets (such as Nimrod Hughes), Swedenborgians, Shakers, Mormons, Adventists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and more. Holland describes some figures as inhabiting a canonical borderland"; it seems to me that many individuals were in more of a borderland than they knew.

Before proceeding with Hollands argumentation , let me give you a sample of the many pleasant surprises included in his narrative. In 1811, Nimrod Hughes published a pamphlet about a visionary experience he had sitting in a jail cell. His vision led him to believe that God would destroy one-third of the earths population on June 4, 1812. His  Solemn Warning   went through five editions and caught the attention of former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who discussed both Hughes and a mixed-race prophet named Christopher McPherson. Adams told Jefferson that modern prophecy was unphilosophical and inconsistent with the political Safety of States and Nations."

Jefferson, architect of religious freedom, told Adams not to worry about McPherson. However, he quoted Jeremiah to the effect that every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, thou shouldst put him in prison and in the stocks." Adams looked up Jeffersons verse and agreed, telling the sage of Monticello that he could not help wishing that the ancient practice had been continued down to more modern times and that all the Prophets at least from Peter the Hermit to Nimrod Hews inclusively, had been confined in the Stocks and prevented from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood." Nimrod Hughes began a quick fade from American consciousness on June 5, 1812. The former prisoner certainly did not merit imprisonment because of his prophecies.

Hughes helps Holland make one of the central arguments of his book: theology matters. Ideas matter. It would be tempting, he writes, to explain Hughes away through the context of the brewing war with Great Britain. A fiery two-tailed comet in the sky," Holland writes, wars and rumors of wars, a frightened and backward-looking populace, and a fanatic ready to make the most of their fear. What more do we need to know?" A great deal, it turns out.

As it happens, Hughes wrote his pamphlet prior to the comet and prior to the war. Instead, Holland argues, Hughes tapped into a long-standing biblical tradition of prophetic revelation [rather] than into any passing events." Belief that God had ever spoken, Hughes reasoned, must be open to the idea that He would speak again." Indeed, throughout  Sacred Borders, Holland warns scholars not to reduce religious phenomena to simple social explanations at the risk of ignoring longstanding religious traditions (in this case, centuries of debates about the biblical canon). He finds that concern about the canon was a  constant  in American religious history through the antebellum period. The question of canon was always timely, and he argues that Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen thought about God and the Bible as much as any of their evangelical contemporaries."

Even more remarkably, to my eyes at least, Holland offers an always necessary reminder (for scholars) that to the individuals about whom he writes, God was a presence, a real presence. God was a benevolent Father to liberal Protestants (and many others), a God of universality" and reason to deists, etc. God sat at the center" of debates about the canon, Holland reminds us. Arguments from the Almightys character," Holland informs, and what strikes me as a genuine impulse to know Him, really do appear as the primary engines of the canonical discourse."

What should historians do with this realization , which Holland says came to him as a surprise? The most difficult question for historians engaging a religious past is what to do with God." The answer to me seems simple. If we want to understand Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, Horace Bushnell, and Ellen White, we have to take their quest for Gods presence, voice, and spirit seriously.

Holland shows how his thinkers in many ways inhabited the same intellectual world. For example, Theodore Parker clarified Proverbs 29:18 with brackets: 'Where there is no vision [revelation] the people perish." The Shaker Frederick Evans made the same point with dashes: 'Where there is no vision - revelation - 'the people perish." Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Shakers, Mormons, and Evangelicals all wrestled with many of the same issues.

Now, one could read this book simply to become familiar with many of the leading theologians and religious leaders of preCivil War American history. I also recommend it, however, because it will help Christians be aware of the complexity of issues surrounding their canon. If the canon is closed, why? How do we know? What sorts of ongoing revelation threaten a closed canon? If the canon is open, if reason or intuition or visions have as much or more weight than Scripture, how could Christianity (or any religion) maintain an essence or an anchor? Why did God give Christians the Old and New Testaments and not give sacred books to other peoples? Why has God stopped giving human beings Scripture?

Why do these issues bedevil Christians more than, say, Muslims? One answer goes back to the emergence of Christianity:

Christians reopened the scriptural canon, and mostly closed it again. No wonder some Christians are always trying to crack that door open once more.

John Turner is assistant professor of religious studies at George Mason University and author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. This article originally appeared at the Anxious Bench.

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The horrible Cleveland kidnapping and rape case is something about which almost any adult American who listens to any news (or even some entertainment-oriented programming) can name some basic facts. It is easy to understand why the Cleveland case got so much attention from the media and interest from viewers. The Cleveland story has many news hooks. It has violence, sex, death, and unimaginable horror in a normal-seeming neighborhood under the noses of the authorities.

The combination of elements is one reason why the Cleveland story became so big so fast, and so is the fact of coverage, but there is more to it. Stories dont have legs just because of their inherent interest and the fact of some media coverage. The nature of the coverage matters too. If every television and radio news outlet had limited its coverage to a one-minute report that three kidnapped women had escaped and a man was in custody, the story would likely not have acquired its current salience.

It matters if a news story contains a narrative that explains the lives of those involved and makes emotional connections with the viewer and listener. It is the difference between the yeah-something-happened-in-Philadelphia-lets-move-on coverage that the mainstream media eventually gave the Gosnell trial and the four straight days in which the network evening news programs gave the Cleveland story prominent coverage-including leading with the story for three straight days.

As Conor Friedersdorf pointed out, the Gosnell grand jury report provided an enormous number of potential news hooks. There was the failure of the authorities to supervise Gosnells clinic. There was the intersection between government negligence and extreme pro-abortion politics. There were acts of spectacular evil like cutting the spines of newborn infants. There was the Jeffrey Dahmer-type keeping of fetal (infant?) body parts as trophies. Lest you think that this might be too gruesome, the previous weeks evening news coverage contained a description of a man starving a pregnant woman for two weeks and then punching her in the belly until she had a miscarriage.

The current conservative broadcast media is not the answer-or at least not the answer to this particular problem. They inform the maybe one-third of the public that regularly consumes right-leaning media. Much of the time the conservative media put a conservative audiencefriendly spin on stories that the mainstream media already cover. When the conservative media emphasize a story the mainstream media downplay or ignore, the result is that, on some news stories, we have two parallel Americas. There is one America for those who consume right-leaning media and another (larger) America for those who dont.

Very rarely, if conservative media can mobilize its audience, they can shame the mainstream media into acknowledging the existence of a story. Mollie Hemingway did this brilliantly, but there is coverage and there is coverage. The NBC Nightly News carried a story on Gosnells murder conviction, but there was no context. It was just another murder trial. It was a local crime story. They covered" this fascinating and horrible story into boredom.

The conservative outside groups are often an expensive (for the donors) waste of time. Super PACs like American Crossroads have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on commercials that were, in retrospect, futile. Remember when Obama bowed to a Chinese leader and this symbolized American subservience to China because of Obamas borrowing policies? You probably dont, but Karl Rove and American Crossroads made an ad to remind you.

Remember when Jay Carney had an awkward answer about the Obama teams fundraising tactics? You probably dont, but American Crossroads produced an ad about it. (That ad should really hurt the constitutionally prohibited 2016 Obama reelection effort.) American Crossroads produced an attack ad more than three years before the next presidential election against a candidate who might well not be the Democratic nominee.

There are several ways conservative donors could better spend their money. The first would be to set up an alternative media outlet that would compete with the mainstream media for the attention of a general audience rather than for the conservative segment of the population. Such an outlet would not be another Fox News. It would be patterned after the news divisions of the major broadcast networks and aim for the same market segment, but with a reporting staff and editorial judgment that had a conservative perspective.

The draw would not be to put a conservative spin on the news of the day. It would be to pursue stories that the major networks dont get to. Such a network could take the time to explore the reporting angles opened up by the Gosnell case. They could also report on any number of other matters that dont make the news. We just dont know what stories get missed because of the absence of such a well-funded right-leaning news outlet.

Another way conservative donors could better spend their money would be to either start new conservative outside groups (or repurpose old ones) to use ad money to pursue educating the public about issues of long-term concern rather than running opportunistic ads that attack particular candidates. Such groups would focus less on gaffes and shaping how viewers perceive the often transient controversies that dominate the news for a day or a week and then fade away.

These better conservative outside groups could run ads explaining the abortion extremism of the Democratic party, the risks of centrally rationed health care, cheaper alternatives to the current Medicaid system, or tax reform that would increase the take-home pay of middle-class families. Having a larger share of the public understanding how conservative ideas will save them money will do more to help Republicans than any number of ads that show pictures of Obama set to scary mood music.

Conservative donors would be better off funding either new right-leaning broadcasting outlets or public educationoriented outside groups. Giving money to the current crop of conservative super PACS is only a slight improvement over donors spending the money on their own leisure. Conservative donors have a chance to escape the trap of just talking about the news of the day. They can escape the media spin cycle.

Pete Spiliakos writes for Postmodern Conservative . His previous On the Square" columns can be found here.

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Christians in the United States who imagined that, whatever tribulations or hardships they have to endure, they would not include speeches by the president of the United States and the policies of the United States government had better reconsider, in light of President Barack Obamas April 26 address to the annual Planned Parenthood Gala at Washingtons Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

It was an appalling speech that had the sole benefit of clarifying the last-ditch commitment of the present administration to the most open-ended abortion license possible. And it drew a line in the sand that those committed to the biblical view of the sanctity of human life cannot ignore-and must challenge.

Planned Parenthood is a multimillion-dollar industry, funded in no small part by the federal government, that has been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children and is currently responsible for over one thousand such deaths every day; yet the president described Planned Parenthoods work as providing quality health care to women all across America."

Pro-life advocates efforts to craft state laws requiring Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists to follow the minimal sanitation and safety standards required of true medical facilities are, according to the president, a matter of shutting off communities that need more health care options for women, not less."

The clinic-regulation laws that have been passed in states across the country are, the president charged, part of an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to womens health"-as if abortuaries that do not meet the health and safety standards required of your local McDonalds are contributing to anyones health."

Moreover, such laws are an attempt to mandate government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor"-as if a butcher like Philadelphias Kermit Gosnell, who severed the spinal cords of infants born alive in botched abortions, was any womans personal physician.

Perhaps because the Obama speech to Planned Parenthood coincided with Gosnells homicide trial, the president did not utter the word abortion" once. But the timing notwithstanding, that omission was hardly surprising in an address that may have set a new standard for deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

For it requires willful moral blindness about reality to say that what Planned Parenthood is about" is helping a woman from Chicago named Courtney" make sure she could start a family, by providing access to affordable contraceptive care to keep her healthy" in the face of a fertility-threatening disease. Today, President Obama noted to applause, Shes got two beautiful kids. Thats what Planned Parenthood is about."

About the millions of beautiful kids" (many of them African-American) who were never born because of Planned Parenthood, the president of the United States had not a word to say. Not a word of remorse. Not a word of compassion, for either the slaughtered innocents of our time or the mothers suffering post-abortion trauma. Just a celebration of your right to choose," without the slightest moral pause over the question, Choose what?" 

But there was worse. For President Obama concluded his remarks as follows: Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you . . ."

And that is nothing short of blasphemy.

Too harsh? No. For in its discussion of this grave sin against the Second Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2148) teaches that it is also blasphemous to make use of Gods name to . . . reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or to put them to death." That is precisely what happens in Planned Parenthood abortuaries. And on that, the president of the United States called down the divine blessing.

Pray for him. Pray for the United States, which is in very, very serious trouble. 

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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There have been moving calls for pro-life Americans to renounce the use of the death penalty, even applied to such men as Gosnell. Some people think it renders our witness for the sanctity of innocent life more credible when we extend it even further to cover the guilty. I disagree. What some call a consistent ethic of life" or a seamless garment" I call mismanaged mercy and botched, misguided compassion .

It emerges, most often, from the attempt to short-circuit the natural virtues in pursuit of the supernatural, and among the many fruits of this moral disorder was the clerical sex abuse scandal-where hasty mercy was offered toward insiders" (fellow priests), at the expense of future nameless victims (all of them laymen). No doubt the bishops who exercised such mercy, who sent their offending priests not to prisons but to rehabilitation centers, told themselves that they were acting as Jesus would. Someone should have told them about the millstones.

In fact, one may not practice mercy without having first satisfied justice-and then only when an act of mercy will not enable or excuse the given crime. Surely, if we can see that an excessive or cruel punishment violates justice, we should likewise be outraged when the guilty are slapped on the wrist-as bigoted white juries used to do to white defendants who savaged blacks.

The mercy we ask of God is different in kind than we as men are asked, or even permitted, to dispense. Gods resources are infinite, and (as Jesus reminded us in the parable of the workers in the vineyard) what he gives to one of us need not be taken from anyone else. Even then, he pardons only the penitent. Human rulers are obliged to insist on the fair distribution of limited goods on earth.

Central to the story of the prodigal son, but often overlooked, is this line, addressed to the aggrieved elder brother: Son, you are with me always, and everything I have is yours." In other words, by taking back his wastrel son, the father is not unjustly cutting the elder sons portion in half. He is satisfying justice, and adding to it mercy. So in begrudging his brothers forgiveness, the elder is guilty of envy.

Envy is, for Aquinas, the gravest of deadly sins , and envy of spiritual goods (such as mercy obtained) is the deadliest form. Christian love demands that we wish and pray for the eternal salvation of every human soul, however improbable. That includes the souls of men like Kermit Gosnell, Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and the Nazis justly hanged at Nuremburg. This wholesome wish has nothing to do with whether or not we favor their deaths.

Those of us who believe in the immortality of the soul can distinguish between death and damnation-as could St. Pius X, who to the end of his reign employed a papal executioner. So could the Vatican city-states legal code, which kept the death penalty on its books until 1969. Since St. Paul wrote, Christians have believed that death could rightly be inflicted as a penalty-not merely to stop a murderer from killing again, but as an act of justice. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (and here, few Reformers would have differed) called the civil magistrate the legitimate avenger of crime."

Pope John Paul II made history when he issued Evangelium Vitae , then revised the Churchs Catechism to match it, and suggested that the only proper use of capital punishment is in societal self-defense, in cases where even modern prisons could not safely contain a killer. The reason, according to the revised Catechism, is that bloodless means better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person" (CCC 2267). Some scholars such as Jeffrey Mirus have suggested that we see here a development of doctrine. Others, including Cardinal Avery Dulles, have disagreed.

Since John Paul IIs teaching appears at such variance with previous, equally authoritative statements, it cannot be said to be binding in conscience on Catholics. In terms of authority, an encyclical that teaches something new might be seen as roughly analogous to a district courts decision; until the Supreme Court (the extraordinary Magisterium-exercised in an ecumenical council or ex cathedra ) weighs in, the question remains unsettled. (By contrast, Humanae Vitae reaffirmed millennia of previous teaching-had it approved contraception, the situation would be akin to that of Evangelium Vitae on this point.)

Furthermore, as others have argued, John Pauls condemnation of capital punishment rests on his prudential judgment of concrete conditions"-which may or may not be correct, but which rests outside the scope of papal authority. A pope can solemnly teach what makes a war just or unjust, but his opinion about any given war is just that-his opinion. It deserves respect but does not demand religious submission." Not every crusade, or papal war supported by interdict, was infallibly justified.

I agree entirely with death penalty reformers who point to the innocent men executed, the paucity of decent legal representation for the accused, and the racial imbalances among those put to death. If the U.S. were largely to cease employing the death penalty until these outrages are fully addressed, that would mark progress for the sanctity of life-because it would be centered on sparing the innocent. (I would add that a better use of energy might consist in trying to stop the routine, rampant rape of prisoners in America.) But when someone is manifestly guilty of heinous crimes of public import, crimes rightly deserving death, to rush to mercy may in fact entail a miscarriage of justice.

Let us go back to Nuremburg. Those men executed for crimes against humanity could surely have been safely contained in prison, and prevented from re-establishing National Socialism in Germany. By the standards of the revised Catechism, it would have better served the common good and the dignity of the human person for such men to spend the rest of their lives in humane prisons-writing their memoirs, answering fan mail, and giving advice to aspiring activists who shared their goals. Is this really true? Would the world have been better served by reading Goerings prison memoirs? (He killed himself, to cheat the executioner.)

Likewise, for Kermit Gosnell to escape the executioner undermines our respect for justice. In the concrete conditions" of life in America in 2013, the unborn are treated as worse than chattel-worse than cattle, actually, since those are killed more humanely. Embryos are kept frozen in limbo for our convenience, and through stem cell research are cannibalized for parts. Late-term abortions, such as Gosnell routinely performed, are legal in most states-and the president of the United States, as an Illinois state senator, refused to rule out the killing of babies who survived this gruesome process.

Sending the most hardened murderers off to watch cable TV and share the weight room with embezzlers and drug users makes a mockery of justice. It shows profound disrespect to his victims, and the next victims of our culture of death. In cases as grave as these, where notorious criminals commit appalling crimes that still go mostly unpunished, true justice and genuine mercy demand the hangman.

John Zmirak is author, most recently, of The Bad Catholics Guide to the Catechism. He blogs at The Bad Catholics Bingo Hall .

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Doctorows previous novel, the best-selling Little Brother, published in 2008, sets the stage for Homeland, published this past February. In the San Francisco of the near future, the Department of Homeland Security throttles American liberties in its system of surveillance and coercion after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge, and seventeen-year-old Marcus Yallow fights back. Homeland continues the story. . . . Continue Reading »

It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lords Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry Jesus is Lord!" assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesars. Christs lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesars by power. . . . Continue Reading »

Kierkegaards philosophy is not so much a salve as a thorn in the flesh. To his atheist admirers, he presents a challenge, for they want to celebrate his intellect yet reject his belief in Christianity as the center of truth. Their effort to do so-to square the circle-has led to misdirection, and diversions. Thus, they praise irony and paradox in Kierkegaards writings, and delight in his rapier wit; they wax eloquent about his psychological insights and marvel at his prolific output; they explore his turbulent relationship with his father, and doomed courtship with his forlorn fiancée; and they provide expert analysis of his battle with Hegel.

But one thing they hesitate to emphasize is precisely that which drove the Danish philosopher most: his Christian faith. About that, they remain strangely passive. They cannot ignore it, so they try to minimize it, usually mentioning it in a perfunctory manner. Some are more clever, and try to employ Kierkegaards philosophy against Christianity, or even empty it of religion altogether. The literary critic Harold Bloom, for example, comments:

Bloom is correct about Kierkegaard being a genius, but this does not quite exclude his being an apostle." The eminent poet W.H. Auden rightly called Kierkegaard a preacher, an expounder and defender of Christian doctrine," who may properly be compared" to Cardinal Newman. Underscoring that are Kierkegaards private prayers, which reveal an intense piety, and love and devotion to Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard believed we should approach the Bible with holy reverence, and that it should be read on our knees." He summed up the meaning of his life when he declared that his work viewed as a totality, is religious from first to last," and that the whole of my authorship relates itself to Christianity."

If Kierkegaards Christianity creates dilemmas for the secular, it has proven equally vexing for his fellow believers. Kierkegaard was scandalized by the state of Christianity in his day, especially as expressed by the official Lutheran Church of Denmark. He assailed what he called the latters involvement in Christendom"-a flabby, self-assured idea of Christian civilization, which went along to get along-with authentic Christianity, which was far more demanding.

He looked around and saw not serious Christians but a mass of people who assumed they were Christians simply because they were born into a supposedly Christian country and belonged to the state Church. He was particularly scandalized by the leading Danish clergy, who rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty, and promoted superficial religion-trapped in a jovial mediocrity"-even as they professed to be witnesses for Christ." In a series of polemical blasts, Kierkegaard contrasted this easygoing lifestyle with genuine Christianity:

At the heart of his attack upon Christendom" is a repudiation of the notion that the Church can elevate society merely by its existence, and that all Christians have to do to transform society is build up Christianitys collective numbers.

Kierkegaard replies: No, no, no!" Real change, real progress begins with the individual, not with any kind of statistical Christianity" which places size over substance:

There can be no reform of the Church, much less society, he declared, unless individual hearts and minds are first converted to the gospel. Otherwise, our whole way of life" would amount to nothing but stuff and nonsense."

For confronting the establishment of his time, Kierkegaard was denounced as being vitriolic and accused of creating division-much like those today who call their fellow Christians to account.

Kierkegaard was misunderstood in his time, and still is today. He once wrote in his journal, People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood."

The two biggest misconceptions about Kierkegaard have to do with his attitude toward the Church, and his general disposition. Because he rebuked the Church so sternly, some people think he was trying to subvert it. On the contrary, says scholar Howard Johnson, Kierkegaard was a loyal son of the Church," who like St. Thomas Aquinas," or any other theologian until recent times, was so living in the sacramental, ecclesiological reality" of Christianity that it would never have occurred to him to try to topple altars." His critique was constructive, not destructive:

The second misconception is that Kierkegaard was a perpetual malcontent, the gloomy Dane," who could only protest and never find peace and solace. In fact, the moment he committed himself to Christ, unreservedly, Kierkegaard found that peace which was the source and strength of his whole life. After his fathers death, he confessed:

As his biographers attest, Søren Kierkegards life was marked by many trials and tribulations, but he persevered. James Collins, one of his most perceptive interpreters, reminds us that at his own request, there was erected over his grave a marker inscribed with these lines of his favorite religious poet," Hans Adolf Brorson:

If we keep the faith, and endure the gauntlet of this world, we too, God willing, can achieve the eternal peace which Søren Kierkegaard, through his burning witness, so nobly earned.

William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Leahy reportedly has prepared amendments that would recognize same-sex companions. The letter from these church leaders pledged they would be strongly opposed by many in our communities who would be otherwise sympathetic or even enthusiastic about the benefits of immigration reform."

The signers included representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Association of Evangelicals, and Lutheran ChurchMissouri Synod, among others. Some of them joined a media conference call to reiterate their warnings. They were even joined by Jim Wallis, a same-sex marriage supporter, who admonished: This is the wrong place at the wrong time."

These church leaders who are prioritizing their churches teaching about marriage ought to be commended. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission laudably said he would not support legislation with the same-sex recognition. As for Jim Wallis, he is at least a realist who understands politics as the art not of the ideal but of the practical.

Their stance contrasts vividly with a statement from 120 United Methodist officials, including forty-two bishops (about half of them retired), who urge recognition of same-sex families" in any immigration legislation. The eleven millionmember United Methodist Church does not recognize same-sex marriage, but many of its U.S. church officials, alas, prefer to pretend otherwise.

Dozens of United Methodist bishops were at the Mexican border early this month to demonstrate support for immigration legislation. Unlike some of the Evangelical supporters of immigration reform," United Methodism in its policy statements officially (although unbeknownst to most members) favors non-enforcement of current immigration law and full entitlement benefits for all immigrants.

The May 3 United Methodist letter opposes curtailing family chain immigration, specifically citing the Gang of 8" elimination of a sibling category and capping of children over age thirty. It also complains of favoring immigrants with advanced degrees. It pronounces as unacceptable" triggers making citizenship for illegal immigrantscontingent on increased border security, which would result in greater arrests and deportations." E-verify for employers and militarization" of the border are likewise criticized.

Spending such massive sums of money for border security, a function which is questionable in its efficacy, while at the same time cutting necessary programs that benefit people in real need is simply immoral," the United Methodists complain. Therefore, we urge Congress to drastically cut the funding for border militarization to only the essentials." And they are troubled by the Gang of 8" proposal to defer government benefits for newly legalized immigrants by a decade or more. They also dont like rigid criteria" denying citizenship to illegal immigrants guilty of three misdemeanors or one aggravated felony, speculating about racial profiling," and surmising that punitive public policy is usually ineffective public policy."

This statement reflects the fact that United Methodist and other mainline Protestant public policy advocates have been politically marginalized for so long that they have the luxury of political posturing before their own audience without worry for any actual national impact.

Jim Wallis, for example, likely agrees with the United Methodists on virtually every point about immigration. His unvarnished rhetoric of twenty-five years ago sounded very much like theirs, if not more radical. But he has carefully aligned himself with strategically more important Evangelicals for more than a decade. And his public endorsement of same-sex marriage so far has not significantly estranged him from Evangelical allies; witness his inclusion in the largely Evangelical media conference call aimed at Leahy.

Fascinating times for church political witness. If some form of mass legalization passes, it will probably solidify new religious alliances and confirm a political evolution especially for many Evangelicals. If it fails, it will be perhaps one sign that despite all the rhetoric, Evangelicals remain politically conservative and skeptical of sweeping legislative solutions to immigration and much else.

Meanwhile, Evangelical and Catholic public resistance to including same-sex couples in otherwise appealing (for them) immigration legislation hopefully evinces a persistent adherence to traditional Christian teaching amid increasing adversity. It recalls the USCCBs refusal to back Obamacare over abortion. May such principled stubbornness continue.

Mark D. Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy.

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For the past half-century, cultural conservatives have been running an ambulance service. Alarmed by the collapse of sexual morals, rising rates of divorce and illegitimacy, and legalized abortion, weve devoted energy and resources to shoring up the traditional family," conceived of as father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker, and their common children. But the nuclear family is as much problem as solution. An exclusive focus on defending the nuclear family reinforces the social dislocations that created the crisis.

Its a truism among social historians that the nuclear family is not the traditional family. Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner pointed out years ago that marriages used to be firmly embedded in a matrix of wider community relationships." Husbands and wives knew each other long before they were married, and their marriage pulsed" with the same life as the wider community. Today, by contrast, each family constitutes its own segregated subworld," a subworld that married couples have to exert much greater effort" to construct. For todays couples, success or failure hinges on the present idiosyncrasies of only two individuals." Once, it took a village. Now two are enough to tango.

Not even the most traditional of traditionalists wants to return to a world where clan ambitions and dynastic politics trump the desires of individual men and women. At its best, though, that matrix of wider relationships" provided models for lifelong marriages, encouragement and advice to weather marital storms, and dozens of sets of eyes to notice when marriages were going sour. Communities are meddlesome, but meddling can be a social good. 

Traditionally, marriage and family in turn opened out to the community. As Wendell Berry says, Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community." Even today, married couples say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is."

Marriage stretches beyond the local community to embrace the cosmic: The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth." Embedded in a network of relations, marriage and the nuclear family were public facts. 

For Christians, the wider public is first of all the Church. During each of the dozens of wedding services I have performed, I have asked the congregation, Do you as a church and family promise to do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage covenant?" I have been blessed to serve a church where the Amen" to that question is never perfunctory. 

Fragmented communities weaken marriages, and our society seems cunningly designed to fracture communities. The subtle threats are the most corrosive, and are deeply engraved on the physical arrangements and habitual patterns of our lives. What kind of scrutiny can a community have over marriages when neighbors see neighbors only when both are comfortably encased in a sound-proof, air-conditioned bubble of glass and steel? How much help will your friends be to your family if you squeeze out time for real conversation only a few times a year, on the handful of evenings youre not working late at the office? How much community scrutiny is possible when live and let live" is a cultural axiom? 

Raising such questions, and invoking Berry, presents a spectrum of issues that many cultural conservatives prefer to dodge. The most penetrating conservative analysts of family life, such as Allan Carlson, have always recognized the cultural contradictions of capitalism and of technological society. They have always recognized the costs (as well as the gains) of separating work and home; of geographic, vocational, and social mobility; of the indisputable wealth-generating power of capitalism. On the ground, though, conservatives look the other way when told that our economic system or our technological progress might inhibit the formation of what Berry describes as an economy that exists for the protection of gifts, beginning with the 'giving in marriage."

Nuclear families as we know them today are the product of the same forces that undermined the communal support system on which nuclear families depend. Without that support system, the nuclear family is at best a thin reed, at worst a cause of yet more fragmentation. So long as cultural conservatives avoid addressing these wider forces, we will be able to mount nothing more than a rear-guard reaction. So long as we stay in our ambulances, well continue to see an alarming number of industrial accidents. God willing, well heal some, but its high time we take a look at the factory to find out whats happening inside.

Peter J. Leithart is on the pastoral staff of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and senior fellow of theology and literature at New St. Andrews College. His most recent book is Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective . His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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We missed the actual ceremony. An overnight Kansas City snowstorm dropped eight inches over the seventy-five mile route to Warrensburg, Missouri, where it was held. We waited until late morning to leave, when the highways were reasonably clear. We arrived just after the army rituals were completed.

There was time to take him to dinner, accompanied by one of his three brothers, two of his three sisters, and a young lady scheduled to become one more daughter-in-law, thanks to number three son. (I was prepared to ask her to marry him myself, but ultimately he did it on his own.)

We spent hours in a corner restaurant booth as other families with their soldiers filed in, filling the remaining tables. As the restaurant is located close to Whiteman Air Force Base, its management is accustomed to this and the long farewells that attend such gatherings. Take as much time as you like, we were told, and we took it. It will be a year, give or take, before we see him again.

I cannot tell you what we talked about; I dont remember much of it really. Mostly, I spent time simply looking at him, wonderingly. Where did this man come from? When did I first meet him? When did this man become the man he is, and why did I not know it before now?

Thoreaus notion of a different drummer" is fetching, but I swear this boy came with a whole 'nother drum set. This was the sixteen-year-old boy I voted most likely to live in the basement watching History Channel. When I once mentioned this to him he asserted, convincingly, It can be a good life." All the same Im glad it wasnt the one he chose.

Right now, though, thats where Id like to find him: in the basement, safe. He originally enlisted in a National Guard unit that was not subject to deployment. His talents with electronics and communication gear brought him to the attention of those paid to pay attention (placing second as the Missouri Guards soldier of the year a while back didnt hurt, either). He was recruited, asked to transfer units, get another stripe, and go on deployment to a war zone.

My son, in a war zone: What an inexpressibly odd thing for a father to think about.  Add one more-one of mine-to the 66,000 currently deployed opposing the Taliban, the remainder left following the 2012 drawdown that reduced the American presence by 23,000. As the drawdowns continue we shall read soon of the last man" killed in Afghanistan.

The Taliban dont have to win," you understand. They have only to wait. So far as I can tell the U.S. is using the same tactics Alexander the Great employed against an asymmetrical" enemy two millennia and three centuries ago, creating strongholds and garrisons to keep them at bay. They failed. Alexander fought unsuccessfully for three years until he reached a political settlement of sorts by marrying Roxanne, daughter of a top chieftain the Macedonian killed. He declared peace and moved on to India.

We, too, seem prepared to declare peace anyway and move on. That wont bother me at all. Afghanistan is at the end-point of three decades of conflict, making it one of the world's most dangerous countries and one of the largest exporters of refugees and asylum seekers. 

We are waging a lost war; thats my opinion. Thats what happens to big nations battling smaller nations where many-say, a third-of the indigenous population are disinclined to accept assurances that foreign troops are there for their own good.

Me, I never got to serve; a medical disability. At the pinnacle of the Vietnam era, honestly, that didnt seem like such a bad thing. My feelings for the military then were ambivalent at best. Later, my disdain of the military lessening, I regretted missing military service. As an Army sergeant told me, though, there are some things worth missing.

There are other sons and daughters leaving distraught parents, spouses, and children at home. There are many who will not see their soldier-child again, except as God will grant. I should not complain any more than they. And I am proud of him; he could have declined but did not. Yet a song, a century and half distant, constantly runs through my mind:

Russell E. Saltzman is dean of the Great Plains Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church, assistant pastor of St. Matthews Church in Riverside, Missouri, and an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary. His book Speaking of the Dead is nearing completion. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Like many young men my age, I was unsteady, restless, volatile. I remember surges of anger-the kind of thing that, looking back, one attributes to adolescent hormones but, at the time, feels remarkably like losing control of your personality. And I remember how, in the midst of that turmoil, I wanted to learn to pray, to be still, to seek a quiet center" (in the jargon of much spiritual writing and reflection)-and, ultimately, to be transformed in such a way that those youthful fits of rage wouldnt rule my life anymore.

Opening Willards book, I read: The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said." In that sentence, I felt, was my diagnosis. I had grown up in an Evangelical Christian home, I had faith in Jesus," but what I didnt have was a sense of how Jesus life connected to the practical problems I faced in my day-to-day existence. I had imbibed what Willard memorably calls a gospel of sin management," a message that enabled me to be confident of post-mortem salvation but left me largely clueless as to how to handle my troubles as a teenager.

I read on and encountered this, from the same page in The Divine Conspiracy: How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century." Thumbing through my old copy of the book, I see a marginal note from my seventeen-year-old self: This is one of the most troubling questions. . . . How to fit together faith and obedience, justification and sanctification, Gospel and Law?" Asking that question was, in retrospect, the beginning of my interest in theology. The urgency of my adolescent angst had led me, unaware, into one of the central issues in the study of Christian teaching: how the forgiveness of sins issues (or fails to issue) in a changed way of life.

Willards own solution to this perennial dilemma is straightforward: When we come to faith," we are coming to Jesus not as an insurance salesman but as a Maestro who has a place for us in his master class.

What we need, Willard argues, is to hear the Sermon on the Mount afresh, not as mere law," aimed only at reforming our behavior, but as instruction on how our hearts may be renewed. Jesus, Willard says, does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him." To me as a high school junior, wrestling as I was with an existential burden, this sounded like very good news indeed.

In the years since high school, as Ive followed up those first tentative theological steps with more exploration in the Christian tradition, Ive become less enthused about some of Willards conclusions. I now think, for instance, that when Willard characterized much of classic Evangelical soteriology as concerned only with managing sin" or offering fire insurance" to escape hell, he painted a regrettable caricature.

Confessional Protestantism, the seedbed of Evangelical theology, has always stressed the importance of a renewed way of life. In the words of the Westminster Confession, when we are incorporated into Christ, the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified; and [we are] more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of true holiness."

But the crucial point, for Protestant theology, is that this transformation is only possible as the fruit of having our sin, not managed," exactly, but canceled, destroyed, borne by Christ on the cross and borne away. Freed in this way from fear of divine condemnation, we are joyfully enabled to inhabit the kind of changed life Willard writes about. And Evangelicals, from the beginning of our movement with people like John Wesley and William Wilberforce until now, have in fact done so.

On the other hand, though, Ive come to view many of Willards insights as abidingly significant. His practical teaching, found in the final third of The Divine Conspiracy and elsewhere, on why and how to practice disciplines (like memorizing Scripture, fasting, and observing times of solitude and silence) has no peer. (It was largely because of Willard that I decided to memorize Romans 6-8 while in high school.) And some of his sentences sparkle with such insight and comfort that they merit revisiting. For instance:

The reasons Ive spent the last ten years acquiring graduate degrees in theology, and the reasons Im now a teacher at a seminary, pursuing ordination to the priesthood and helping to train students who are also pursuing Christian ministry, are multiple and complex. But lying near the heart of that tangle of reasons is, I think, a frightened, frustrated seventeen-year-old picking up Dallas Willards book The Divine Conspiracy. Ill always be grateful for the stimulus I gained from it, and for its author. May he rest in peace.

Wesley Hill is assistant professor of New Testament at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania .

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It was an interesting gathering, being the first review of the Helsinki Accords" since the Berlin Wall had come down. The head of the Romanian delegation had a noticeable and somewhat ominous bulge beneath the armpit of his jacket. The head of delegation of another country, which had best remain unnamed, wore a three-piece suit that seemed to have been dry-cleaned in clam chowder. The intellectual leading lights of the just-completed Revolution of 1989-the Czechs and the Poles-were fully up to speed in their approach to our topic, which was establishing the rule of law in a post-communist Europe; others, it seemed, would take longer to acclimate themselves to the New (democratic) Order.

My job was to be the ambassadors speechwriter and liaison to the Holy See delegation (which was, in fact, one person). Max and I worked out several sharp, substantive statements that were not typical State Department pablum-on the meaning of pluralism (differences engaged civilly, not differences ignored); on the priority of religious freedom in any meaningful scheme of human rights; on the moral (not merely pragmatic) superiority of the rule of law to sheer coercion.

I also learned how to sit placidly, feigning interest, to remarkably long-winded speeches from professional gabblers, in the days before you could plug your iPod into your simultaneous translation earphones and thus enjoy some serious music while the diplomatese, like Ol Man River," just kept rollin along. 

On the last day, Max gave me lunch and asked me what I had learned. A great reverence for my great-grandfathers widowed mother," I replied. The ambassadors puzzlement invited further explanation: . . . who had the sense to get out of this patchwork of quarreling tribes and come to America." Maxs own parents being émigré Romanian Jews, he was not inclined to contest my point.

Prior to his death at ninety-two this past January 25, Max Kampelman could look back on a lifetime of high adventure and great achievement. He was a World War II conscientious objector who nevertheless contributed to the nations war effort by volunteering for a starvation experiment at the University of Minnesota that dropped him to 100 pounds but taught medical lessons that saved the lives of former POWs and death-camp survivors. He took advanced degrees in both law and political science and became a consigliere to Hubert Humphrey, whom he might well have served as White House counsel had the 1968 election gone differently.

He was a major figure in forcing human rights issues onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda, made an invaluable contribution to the moral delegitimation of the Soviet Union as ambassador for Presidents Carter and Reagan to the Madrid Review Conference on the Helsinki Accords in the early 1980s, and then worked himself into a heart attack negotiating a nuclear arms reduction pact with the USSR. In his last years, Max joined forces with other foreign policy heavyweights like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Sam Nunn in urging that the elimination of nuclear weapons become a national policy goal.

Throughout his public life, Max, who was not an especially pious man, worked out of the Jewish moral heritage he cherished: there was good in men and women, and it should be encouraged; there was evil in people and in the world, and it must be fought; true political authority had to serve the cause of justice.

When Max helped engineer my 1983-84 fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and thus my re-location to Washington, D.C., neither one of us thought he was incubating a papal biographer. But as his life had taken surprising turns, so did mine, not without his help. The point, he would insist, was to live vocationally. 

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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There is an old argument here, admittedly. Somewhere behind Fesers argument slouches the specter of what is often called two-tier Thomism": a philosophical sect notable in part for the particularly impermeable partitions it erects between nature and grace, or nature and supernature, or natural reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology (and so on). To its adherents, it is the solution to the contradictions of modernity. To those of a more integralist" bent (like me), it is a neo-scholastic deformation of Christian metaphysics that, far from offering an alternative to secular reason, is one of its chief theological accomplices. It also produces an approach to moral philosophy that must ultimately fail. . . . Continue Reading »

The world has only become more miraculous and wonder-filled since then: Last week saw reports of a little girl, born without a windpipe, who was fitted with one created from her own adult stem cells. In little more than a generation, computers, cell phones, and cameras have been combined into something we can hold in the palm of our hand, or even wear near our eyes.

So comfortable are we with interactive technology that we barely notice the electronic eyes on every corner watching us as we walk or drive. Algorithms are used to track our every move: what we are reading, where we are vacationing, and what spiritual or medical direction we are seeking out. Yet we shrug them off because they so helpfully recommend what next to do with our lives.

Miracle and wonder, yes, and yet instead of looking up at a nighttime sky full of movement and light and infinite depth, we keep our heads down. We can no longer see that sky for the artificial illumination we mistake for light. But no matter; it is empty of interest. We have pierced its boundaries and walked the stardust. Having been there, done that, weve narrowed our exploration to whatever we can see through our five-inch screens.

Informationally, the world is ever-broadening, but our interests continue to narrow as we close in on ourselves. In our reading, our entertainment, our news venues, our social media, our political involvements, we seek out echo chambers we may depend upon to repeat us back to ourselves in a reassuring loop, with dissenting ideas continually pruned away for the sake of purity. Settled within virtual enclaves of the like-minded, we bask in an illusion that most sensible people think as we do, and when we are forced to venture out beyond our unsullied orthodoxies and ideologies the world feels increasingly dangerous and disordered, and we cannot wait to get back to our safe zones, which are really ourselves.

We used to read about the boy in the bubble" and feel sorry for him. He was trapped within a limited world free of exposure to even the good" germs and bacteria that keep our immune systems adept, functional, and ready to withstand and beat back infection. Now we are become him. Though our bodies may wander freely, we keep our minds and spirits tethered to what is comfortable, unchallenging, and pristine, until our mental and spiritual immune systems become so weakened that a mere difference of opinion feels like an assault, and an encounter with an opportunistic bully can send us reeling to the canvas.

Self-idolization is a natural by-product of the instrumentalization of our age, and it is weakening us. The GPS destroys our sense of direction; social scientists cripple our instinctive knowing. The world says True North is a relative concept, and so whatever path one takes is the right one-the path to the All-Knowing Me, who knows nothing and is stranded and alone, and weak. 

A look at the headlines is enough to know that these are the days of bullying and idols-of menace and braggadocio, browbeating and constraint. We see it in authority seeking to control; we see it in media and moralists who pester us into mental submission; it lives within us when we oust the theologically untaught or ideologically confused among us, and settle for our own comfortable understanding.

We need to look up, again, if we are to become strong enough to shake off our own tendencies toward idolatry, and fend off the hectoring bullies. We need to gaze starward, and beyond, into the vastness of the One who created everything by the full-out intention of his yes," and then trust in the rightness of that intention with all our being. To face the coming battles we will need to look far beyond a distant constellation, thats dying in a corner of the sky" and grow strong, again, through the paradox of dependence and surrender.

Beyond the present powers and principalities, these are, still and ever, days of miracle and wonder, of right paths that can lead us safely home. These are the days of miracle and wonder, and dont cry, baby, dont cry" is just another way of saying, do not be afraid."

Elizabeth Scalia is the author of Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life and the managing editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos.com, where she blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbons Decline and Fall. It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, with a proposal for a quick buck, relying on the political twitter of the times: Youre an expert: Reframe Gibbons notorious chapter on the Romans and the Christians with some contemporary scholarship and cultural fillips, and we can put out a nifty pamphlet thatll sell." 

And Moss has read her Gibbon. Its all here, borrowed from the eighteenth-century master of an English prose far more wicked in its irony than Mosss: the fraudulent numbers of the persecuted and killed, the artful pen" of later Christian tricksters who embellished both the past and the inner vices of the early Churchs faithful, the self-serving formation of a culture of righteous resentment and hostility by pusillanimous Christians, and, of course, the proposal that the fictions and attitudes they engendered turned the Church into the worlds worst persecutor. . . . Continue Reading »

These are two admittedly sweeping claims, and Robert Miller thinks Im mistaken about both. Im quite sure Im right about the triumph of capitalism. I wish I were wrong about the troubled state of American conservatism.

Margaret Thatcher died recently. When she defeated James Callaghan in 1979, the United Kingdom was a country with many nationalized industries, large, powerful labor unions, and a governing elite so thoroughly socialized into the command-and-control outlook that few could imagine alternatives. By the end of her long domination of British politics things had changed dramatically, and Tony Blair, who explicitly repudiated the long-term Labour commitment to socialism, made no efforts to turn back the clock.

The same story can be told about Germany, France, Italy, many countries in South America, and, most famously of all, China. To a degree few in 1975 were able to foresee, capitalism is triumphant. It is accepted across the world as the only option for organizing economic life.

Miller is certainly right that our regulatory regime is much more complicated, and in many areas much more extensive. But the number of rules and their complexity is not necessarily a sign of declining economic freedom.

As Miller reminds us, government must intelligently regulate markets for all sorts of purposes: to ensure transparency, to prevent manipulation, to limit pollution and other socially negative consequences. This partially explains the explosion of regulation. (A culture of anxiety about being held responsible also encourages regulation designed to cover all contingencies). As economic freedom expands-which is to say as capitalism and free markets expand and take on new modes and forms-legislators and regulators run behind, trying to catch up to remedy the social problems freedom always creates.

Thats right, freedom creates problems. Its a good thing, often rightly encouraged, but it has costs. This is true of political freedom, as the Founders recognized, which is why they feared pure democracy. Its also true of moral freedom: see the decline of marriage and rise of illegitimate children. And its certainly true for economic freedom.

Miller very likely agrees. If companies have the freedom to sell products, some will lie about them. If bank executives can shift gains to themselves and losses to shareholders, some will. American conservatism is in disarray because it refuses to squarely acknowledge the obvious truth that the great good of economic freedom also creates problems. And addressing these problems means in some way limiting freedom.

Heres an example. The freedom of those with capital to invest in tire factories in China and to ship the tires to America (both very new freedoms flowing from the triumph of capitalism across the globe) undermines the livelihood of workers in tire factories in Akron, Ohio. Here as elsewhere the free flow of capital and goods (however restricted on the edges by regulations) forces factory labor in America to compete with factory labor in China and other low-wage countries.

This consequence of economic freedom is one of the causes of the declining economic prospects of middle-class America. (The other is the new moral freedom that releases us from social mores that once pushed people toward marriage.) Democrats propose responding by in some way limiting economic freedom through regulations or harvesting its fruits (increased wealth) through taxation. (They cant admit that middle-class decline is also a function of moral freedoms that progressives endorse.) Thus the Obama campaign: redistribution from those who benefit from expanded economic freedom to those who dont.

Republicans? In many cases they cant even admit that theres a problem. Sure, the middle class suffers from stagnant wages," Ive heard some conservatives say, but were all so much richer now, and therefore the middle class is actually better off. Even the poor have flat screen TVs!" Its a response that reminds me of Marxism and its habit of explaining away what people say about their lives by calling it false consciousness."

Other conservatives admit that theres a problem, but they insist its caused by the fact that theres not enough economic freedom. This was Mitt Romneys position. If only tax rates were even lower, and the economy even freer, entrepreneurs would emerge to create jobs.

Boiled down to its basic form, this response amounts to the view that what looks like a problem caused by economic freedom is actually caused by distortions brought about by limitations on economic freedom: regulation and taxation. If we had real" economic freedom, the market would solve the problems on its own. Once again Im reminded of my Marxist friends in college. The Soviet Union? Thats not real" socialism, theyd say.

Im interested in American conservatism as a political phenomenon and not an intellectual one. Here Miller must face the political facts. American conservatism cant admit that economic freedom creates problems. Today its Grover Norquist and not Richard Epstein who polices the boundaries of contemporary conservatism, funding primary challenges to those who deviate from tax-rate orthodoxy.

I predict that many will read this column as attacking" capitalism, which makes as much sense as saying that if I warn against the dangers of sunburn on the beach, Im denouncing sunshine. True conservatism affirms ordered liberty, not liberty pure and simple. This is as true for economic freedom as political and moral freedom. Well only be politically and socially relevant if we can explain how we plan to bring order to the economic liberty that global capitalism has so dramatically expanded. We need to show how conservative sources of order are more dignifying of the human person and more conducive to economic prosperity than liberal plans and policies.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things . He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Adams inexplicable behavior doesnt deter Hannah from seeking to strengthen her relationship with him. Nor do his merely intermittent interest in her, his apparently self-approving memories of his teenage desire to rape a girl who rejected him, or his tendency to speak disparagingly, even contemptuously, of her looks. (In a complimentary mood he says, Youre not that fat anymore.") Adams behavior does not seem to bother fans of the show either, most of whom, to judge from what one can find on the internet, wish their relationship would become more serious. Among a group of professional journalists (all of them women) discussing the show on Slate, only one is willing to go so far as to say that Adams rape fantasy is a distasteful phenomenon." Another acknowledges that Hannahs evident delight in Adams enthusiastic pantomiming of sexual violence is patently ridiculous and degrading," but immediately goes on to ask, portentously, Who among us hasnt had our artistic judgment eroded by love?" (Who indeed?). . . Continue Reading »