“We shall not weary, we shall not rest,” Richard John Neuhaus proclaims, “until every human being created in the image and likeness of God is protected in law and cared for in life.”

Everyone has read Fr. Neuhaus’ closing address at the annual convention of the National Right to Life Committee this month, yes? It is quite possibly the great prolife speech of our time—a marker of the present and a manifesto for the future:

The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed. I expect many of us here, perhaps most of us here, can remember when we were first encountered by the idea. For me, it was in the 1960s when I was pastor of a very poor, very black, inner city parish in Brooklyn, New York. I had read that week an article by Ashley Montagu of Princeton University on what he called “A Life Worth Living.” He listed the qualifications for a life worth living: good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential. These were among the measures of what was called “a life worth living.”

And I remember vividly, as though it were yesterday, looking out the next Sunday morning at the congregation of St. John the Evangelist and seeing all those older faces creased by hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and yet radiating hope undimmed and love unconquered. And I saw that day the younger faces of children deprived of most, if not all, of those qualifications on Prof. Montagu’s list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of lightning, a bolt of lightning that illuminated our moral and cultural moment, that Prof. Montagu and those of like mind believed that the people of St. John the Evangelist—people whom I knew and had come to love as people of faith and kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God, hope unvanquished—it struck me then that, by the criteria of the privileged and enlightened, none of these my people had a life worth living. In that moment, I knew that a great evil was afoot. The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed. . . . [more]

I’ve always had a soft spot for Tom Holt, the British writer of comic fantasy novels. If you’ve never read him, give one of his books a try. Expecting Someone Taller, his recasting of the Siegfried saga, is a good place to start.

I plucked a copy of his Here Comes the Sun off the shelf the other day, and there on the first page found the following—a tribute to his mother, the mystery writer Hazel Holt:

For
MY MOTHER
But for whose tireless encouragement
And selfless dedication to the furtherance
of my writing career
(To the neglect and detriment of her own
prodigious talent as a crime writer)
I would now be the son and heir
of a bestselling authoress
Instead of just another
Penniless
Author

Now that’s what a book dedication wants to be. Got examples of other classic dedications? Send them along.

“Phoenix Mars Lander Sticks Fork in Martian Dirt”—add a knife and a spoon, and we’re ready to dine on Mars.

The Weekly Standard has posted online my obituary for the poet and science-fiction writer Tom Disch:

He sent me a note on July 2, just some jokey line about politics: nothing unusual, nothing portentous, nothing worth a call to see how he was feeling. Two days later, according to the news reports, he sat down in his New York apartment and put a gun to his head–a July 4 suicide, the noise of the shot lost in the crash of the fireworks above the East River.

I can picture it, unfortunately. Those ratty, rundown rooms in which he lived. The pistol he kept in gleeful defiance of the city’s gun laws. The prickly brilliance with which he thought himself down into a narrower and narrower trap. The cosseted ill-health and the limp. The endless self-conceit that confirmed even his despair as a great and cosmic thing: an arrogance against the universe, a point of deadly pride. “Here in old age,” he grandly announced when I saw him at lunch this spring, “I’ve finally decided that being a genius is enough for any man, and I’m just going to have to live with it.”

He couldn’t, of course, because it’s not enough: The mad brightness of his arrogance burned against a background blacker than the grave. But the truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn’t do with words. . . . [more]