Last month Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped while he drove home from an afternoon Mass. He was not in great health at the time, and yesterday his kidnappers called church officials to notify them of his death. Today his body was found buried in the southeastern part of Mosul; he appears to have died of natural causes. Our prayers go our for him; his family; the people of Iraq, especially the persecuted Christians; and for those who kidnapped him and brought about his demise.

Wired has the most (un?) intentionally funny line I’ve seen all morning in this interview with Paul Ehrlich:

Ehrlich, now head of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology, has always had a knack for seeing the big picture, even if his specific predictions haven’t always panned out.

I understand that it’s unfair to tag big thinkers for missing a detail here or there. And Ehrlich has (sort of) admirably (kind of) disavowed his demographic classic, The Population Bomb. But he did write that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over . . . In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” And then, when that didn’t work out, he wrote another book positing the same basic thesis, The Population Explosion, in 1990.

In fact, we now know that the biggest demographic problem facing the world is a population collapse, which looms on the other side of 2050. If fertility rates don’t change, then world population will peak somewhere between 9 billion and 12 billion and then sharply contract within the next 75 years.

Paul Ehrlich may be an interesting thinker, but the opposite of what Wired postulates is true: While he may have gotten a few details right here and there, he’s demonstrated a real knack for never understanding the big picture.

An article in Time this week profiles the new American ambassador to the Vatican, our friend and former board member Mary Ann Glendon. Although her first weeks in office have been spent preparing for the pontiff’s visit to the US in April, she spoke about her vision of feminism and how Benedict XVI’s thought might influence public policy. If you’re interested, take a look.