National Review is reporting that officials in the McCain campaign are calling state Republican officials around the country to gauge how much support they would lose if McCain named a pro-choice politician as his vice-presidential running mate.

National Review’s editorial today lays out some of the reasons that this would be a disaster. (Compare, as well, this sensible note from Jay Nordlinger on Friday.)

And U.C.L.A. law professor Stephen Bainbridge, over on his website, adds the important point that Obama’s answers at the Saddleback Forum this weekend have finally removed any ground on which the pro-lifers supporting Obama could stand. “Personally,” Bainbridge writes, “I think they’re going to have to punt on abortion and try making a double effect argument.”

What kind of political suicide would it be for McCain to choose this moment to undo the gains he’s made?

The saga of uncovering Shakespeare’s religion continues with Joseph Pierce’s new book, The Quest for Shakespeare, and Robert Miola’s recent FT review, now available to non-subscribers. The tension runs high on both sides:

At a conceptual level The Quest for Shakespeare repeatedly exhibits the logical fallacy of association—the idea that identification of Catholic associates constitutes evidence of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. It never occurs to Pearce that a survey of Protestant associates could just as easily lead to the opposite conclusion. His work also exhibits the biographical fallacy—the unqualified conviction that one can read the author’s life from the work and vice versa.

This fallacy is widespread in Shakespeare studies, true enough, but the business of wrenching passages out of dramatic context as evidence of the playwright’s personal beliefs usually reveals more about the critic than about Shakespeare. Pearce endorses this method for himself—and then vents his spleen on anyone else who dare use it for different conclusions. Thus, for example, he ridicules the “doyens of postmodernity” for writing into the plays their own “prejudiced agenda.” As Pearce notes about much contemporary work on Shakespeare: “For the proponents of ‘queer theory’ he becomes conveniently homosexual; for secular fundamentalists he is a proto-secularist, ahead of his time; for ‘post-Christian’ agnostics he becomes a prophet of modernity.”

Quite right, one wants to say. But what shall we do when Joseph Pearce comes along to say, in essence: “You’re all stupid to think that Shakespeare is just like you. Actually, Shakespeare is just like me”? There is a parable about a mote and a beam that applies somewhere here.

Dr. Hymie Gordon (Mayo Clinic): “By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth (Harvard University Medical School): “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”

Dr. Alfred Bongioanni (University of Pennsylvania): “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”

Dr. Jerome LeJeune, “the Father of Modern Genetics” (University of Descartes, Paris): “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.”

Rick Warren: At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?
Sen. Barack Obama: Well, I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.

In keeping with our journal’s spirit of unremitting morbidity, I spent this past Saturday morning in a graveyard. This was no ordinary graveyard, mind you, but Princeton Cemetery, which has been called the “Westminster Abbey of the United States.”

Dozens of luminaries, including John von Neumann, Kurt Goedel, Grover Cleveland, Aaron Burr and Jonathan Edwards jostle for space there, but the best grave by far belongs to Paul Tulane. Stone markers outline a huge area as exclusively his, and in the center there stands a massive statue of him. The total effect is so majestic that it is not obvious whether the stone slab that lies before the statue invites one to pray for or to Mr. Tulane. When I die, however few and unimpressive my attainments, I want my tomb à la Tulane.

Starting Monday, September 8, Fr. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., will be giving a series of seven lectures on the life and works of John Henry Cardinal Newman, with a special focus on his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. The lectures are from 6:30 to 7:30 PM in the undercroft of the Church of Our Saviour, on 38th and Park in New York City, and are sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute. Admission is $70 for the series or $10 per lecture and pre-registration is required. Please call (845) 373-8037 for more information. The schedule of lectures is as follows:

September 8: Introduction
September 15: Tradition and the Church
September 22: Some Classic Texts
September 29: The Nature of Belief
October 6: Belief in Traditional Christian Doctrines
October 20: Certitude and Doubt
October 27: The Nature of Religious Faith

Fr. Koterski has written for us in the past (click here and here for two reviews). Last year I attended his Wetherfield lectures on St. Augustine’s City of God and found him to be one of the best teachers I have ever encountered, a professor whose love of God and love of study radiate in his lectures and answers to questions. If you are in New York and interested at all in Newman, consider attending the series.

“Save the world! Stop having children! Such was the rather drastic solution to the problem of climate change proposed in an editorial in the prestigious British Medical Journal, no less, the other day.” As The Independent goes on to note, the paranoia of overpopulation is nothing new: Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus was advocating population control–especially for the hapless and helpless in Africa and India. Eugenics is another name for it, and we still hear his gospel preached.

Then, in 1968 Paul Erlich warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” The problem, he said, wasn’t the lack of fertility but its unbridled excess, resulting in national starvation. Now, however, with the population of Europe poised to half itself every sixty-five years, the tune is changing–or at least it should be.

All of which makes George Weigel’s latest column of especial interest:

It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious time for the reception of a papal encyclical reaffirming the Church’s classic teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning than the summer of 1968. Now, forty years after it was issued, Pope Paul VI’s letter, Humanae Vitae, may finally be getting the hearing it deserves.

Why? Because the developed world is in demographic crisis from decades of plummeting birth rates. Because younger women have figured out a truth that eluded their mothers in the Sixties: the sexual revolution — made possible in part by easily available contraception — is great for predatory men, and not-so-great for women. And because John Paul II’s “theology of the body” has set the Church’s teaching in an engaging, humanistic framework. The Catholic Lite Brigade will doubtless make this anniversary year the occasion to celebrate two generations of theological dissent; wiser souls will ponder the wreckage caused by the sexual revolution, especially to women, and think again.
. . .

It bears repeating yet again, because the mainstream media consistently get it wrong: the Catholic Church does not teach an ideology of fertility-at-all-costs. To the contrary: the Catholic Church teaches that every couple has a moral responsibility to welcome new life as a gift from God, to consider the number of children they can rear and educate, and to order marital life in concert with those two responsibilities. Where the Church is boldly countercultural is in teaching that the morally appropriate means to regulate fertility is through biology rather than technology. Natural family planning according to the rhythms of biology, the Church proposes, honors the integrity of women and the special nature of the marital bond; natural family planning honors, if you will, the iconography of marital sexual love and its dual nature as both love-sharing and life-giving. Technological means of family planning impede that.

“Save the world! Stop having children!” is a cry doomed to silence itself, but, as those worried about third-world and inner-city poverty will be quick to argue, the answer isn’t simply “Have children!”

Save the world! Have families!–Now that’s worth a try.

Walking in the underground tunnel between Times Square and Port Authority, I overheard a conversation between a father and his young son as they passed a man handing out literature on the “hard facts” of heaven and hell:

Son: Daddy, what’s hell?

Father: Well, it’s a place where you kind of just sit in fire.

Sigh. Another missed teaching moment.

Earlier I posted a note about our junior fellow Stefan McDaniel’s essay on friendship in the magazine Dappled Things. As I was reading the new issue yesterday, I came across an artful poem by Roger Mitchell that employs the metaphor of barrel-making to describe marriage:

Holy Matrimony
(Anniversary in Colonial Williamsburg)

Watch the cooper resume
his old manufacture,
how the hollowing knife
will carve perfect volume
from imperfect nature.
So we two, man and wife,
embraced like oaken staves,
these golden rings our hoops,
this common life our cask,
have joined our tapered selves.
From us, clerkish time scoops
his purchase. You might ask
what our maker meant,
what profit would he earn
working with such rough woods,
as if, after a stint,
he might hope to return
and find us full of goods.
We form a paradox:
open to deliver
yet tight enough to hold,
an enclosure whose locks
free all who would enter,
though bound by bands of gold.

“Open to deliver / yet tight enough to hold.” A beautiful description of the freedom in bound unity that one is supposed to find in the married life.

A small group of U.S. evangelists have had their Bibles confiscated at an airport in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming—and they’re not leaving without them. Chinese officials say it’s illegal to bring into the country printed religious material beyond that required for personal use. (Does that go for drugs, too?)

Pat Klein, director of Vision Beyond Borders, the group whose Bibles were lifted, says she’s been bringing Bibles into China for 21 years without a problem. She also says the group is staying put until the Bibles are returned.

“We’re being inconvenienced a little, but it’s nothing compared to what our brothers and sisters in China experience for their faith in Jesus Christ,” Klein said.

Let’s hope it remains nothing more than a little inconvenience.

A notice in the New York Times on Saturday:

Correction: August 16, 2008. An article on Friday about the planned construction of two large solar power installations in California described incorrectly the operation of the solar panels in one, to be built by SunPower. Its panels pivot from east to west to follow the sun over the course of a day—not west to east.

Not, of course, that one doesn’t trust the New York Times to say which way the sun rises.

(via Instapundit)