Fr. Neuhaus has penned a reply to Doug Kmiec on Catholic political obligations and pro-choice candidates. It’s in the National Catholic Register, but only available to subscribers.

The Pro Ecclesia blog has posted some excerpts:

… The question is that of justice for unborn children. When one candidate supports the unlimited abortion license and another wants the abortion question returned to the states, it is disingenuous to suggest that they are equally pro-choice. And to say that the first candidate’s position is closer to a Catholic understanding of subsidiarity is, I am sorry to say, risible. Catholic teaching and the mandate of justice is that all members of the human family, born and unborn, be protected in law. To deny that protection is a grave injustice.

The candidate who would return the abortion question to the states so that citizens working through their elected representatives can enact laws protecting the unborn is, in taking that position, pro-life. The candidate who, by supporting Roe v. Wade, would deny to citizens that opportunity is pro-choice. It is a great disservice to try to obfuscate such an obvious distinction.

***
It is deeply regrettable that Mr. Kmiec cites Archbishop Chaput’s 1976 support of President Carter, who endorsed Roe v. Wade, as evidence that one can rightly support his preferred candidate today. Archbishop Chaput can speak for himself, and he has, both on the First Things website (May 20) and in his new book Render Unto Caesar. He makes it unequivocally clear that he regrets that 1976 decision, which he rationalized at the time along lines very similar to those now employed by Mr. Kmiec.

The archbishop says that he does not believe there is a proportionate reason — a reason he will one day have to give to the aborted babies — to justify support for a pro-choice candidate. Nor has Mr. Kmiec indicated such a proportionate reason. Mr. Kmiec claims his candidate wants to reduce the number of abortions by reducing the incidence of unwanted pregnancy, and he will do that by encouraging “responsible sexual behavior.” One may be permitted to point out that four decades of sex education, including the massive promotion of contraception, has not been a great success in reducing unwanted pregnancies or abortions.

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“<=:-)", a friend suggests to me, is likely the papal smiley face—-the Pope smiling with his mitre on.

Zenit reports on Papal text-messaging:

Benedict XVI is weaving together a mini-catechesis with a medium nearly any young person can relate to — cell phone text messages.

The Friday morning local time message to Youth Day pilgrims was a call to Christian love. “The spirit impels us 4ward 2wards others; the fire of his love makes us missionaries of God’s charity. See u tomorrow nite – BXVI,” it read.

Before the Pope’s boat-a-cade reached Sydney Harbor Thursday afternoon local time for his official arrival to World Youth Day, the Holy Father sent his third text message. That one said, “The Holy Spirit is the principal agent of salvation history: let him write your life-history 2 – BXVI.”

We’ve mentioned before news that some conservative Anglicans have been in talks about entering the Roman Catholic Church en masse. Now, conflicting reports are coming from the UK.

The Independent runs with this headline: “Pope rides to Rowan’s rescue. Exclusive: Vatican shuns defectors and backs calls for Anglican unity.”

While the Telegraph‘s “Holy Smoke” blog says that’s nonsense. The headline: “Benedict is encouraging Anglican converts.” And the opening paragraph: “More evidence this morning that Catholic liberals are panicking at the prospect of an influx of conservative Anglicans. They want us to believe that Pope Benedict is ‘shunning defectors’ in an attempt to shore up the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not true.”

Mike Potemra and Jack Folwer hash these stories out on “The Corner” here and here.

Readers of First Things will be interested in this book by FT-contributor Frank Beckwith:

Mail delivery to Rome most be delayed. Otherwise our friend Carrie Gress would have asked Joseph Pearce about the hard-hitting review in the new issue of First Things of his new book on Shakespeare’s supposed Catholic faith.

If you’re a print subscriber, the August/September issue of First Things should be in your mailbox within the next few days—-if it hasn’t already arrived. And if you’re an online subscriber, you’ll be able to read the issue early next week when it is posted online.

In the meantime, here’s the opening of Robert Miola’s review:

In The Quest for Shakespeare, Joseph Pearce claims that the “real Shakespeare” was a secret Catholic. Pointing in the preface to his own “robust muse” and “Bellocian bellicosity,” Pearce goes on to mock contemporary writers on Shakespeare as “vultures,” “carrion critics,” “gossip and gutter-oriented ‘scholars,’” and “silly asses of academe.”

A promising beginning, you might think. Unfortunately, The Quest for Shakespeare proves to be a patchwork of other people’s work, indiscriminately selected, hastily stitched together, and served up with self-congratulatory fanfare. Seldom has such a slight book managed to combine ignorance and arrogance on such a grand scale.

You might notice a banner ad for the book at the top of this page…

If you haven’t already read it, check out the feature essay Miola wrote for us in May, “Shakespeare’s Religion.”

That’s the title of a new book by Paul DeHart, professor of political science at Lee University. In a wide-ranging discussion of analytic philosophy, metaphysical and moral realism, natural teleology, and moral theory, DeHart builds on the work of Hadley Arkes, J. Budziszewski, and the analytic philosopher Robert Koons. The result is a unique blend of Budziszeski’s What We Can’t Not Know approach to natural law thinking, Arkes’s “logic of morals” going Beyond the Constitution, and Koons’ philosophical Realism Regained. The Claremont Review of Books has posted a review I wrote of the book online here.

I leave most of the Anglican-watching, Anglican-speculating to Jordan Hylden, but here’s a story that was left out of yesterday’s post. Over the weekend, reports came that “senior” bishops from the C of E had met with Catholic officials about swimming the Tiber en masse. Now, just published a few minutes ago on the Telegraph‘s website, comes this:

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham, is to lead his fellow Anglo-Catholics from the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic Herald will reveal this week.

Bishop Burnham, one of two “flying bishops” in the province of Canterbury, has made a statement asking Pope Benedict XVI and the English Catholic bishops for “magnanimous gestures” that will allow traditionalists to become Catholics en masse.

He is confident that this will happen, following talks in Rome with Cardinal Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Kasper, the Vatican’s head of ecumenism. He was accompanied on his visit by the Rt Rev Keith Newton, Bishop of Richborough, the other Canterbury “flying bishop”, who is expected to follow his example.

Read the rest here.

“I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world—that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit…” Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, during an interview with Mike Wallace.

Dawn Eden has the details here, including streaming video and screen shots.

Here’s a nice article about the new Bioethics Institute and Chair at Franciscan University. Patrick Lee, a collegue of mine at the Witherspoon Institute, is doing great work at Franciscan.

What began as a little joke around the office has become a grass-roots political movement online. Richard John Neuhaus in 2008.

News Channel 3 explains: http://www.news3online.com/index.php?code=603a543g92Is08HvrocI

In the current issue of America, “A Sexual Revolution: One woman’s journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic.”

The Theology of the Body seems key. A bit from the article:

Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.

My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.

As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.

Read the entire article.

It is remarkable that it has gone unremarked—months into the election season, and nobody seems to have noticed that John McCain is running on an astonishingly Catholic platform. Nearly every time he ventures off the establishment conservative ranch, he moves in the direction of liberal Catholic politics.

So why doesn’t anyone want to talk about it? On the Left, this would mean acknowledging that a Republican might have more to offer than just such culture-war issues as abortion and stem cells—while also facing up to their own candidate’s manifestly atrocious record. On the Right, this would mean acknowledging that where McCain can seize the Catholic vote, he may do so by sacrificing conservative principle.

I write a bit about this in the new issue of the Weekly Standard.

Dan Moloney, former associate editor of First Things, has a nice article up on NRO today about teenage planned pregnancy and the Gloucester case. It echoes some points that should be familiar to readers of First Things (here and here).

News from the UK:

Trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead. Or so we thought. Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed. Now British scientists are leading the field in trying to put that right.

Continues:

Although Kate could not speak, or hear properly, or make any kind of signal, or take in sustenance except through a tube into the stomach, she was sometimes aware of herself and her surroundings. She had a raging thirst that was not alleviated by the ward staff. She was racked with pain. Sometimes she’d cry out, but the ward staff thought it was just a reflex action. Kate suffered so much pain and despair that she tried to take her own life by holding her breath.

Then a Cambridge neuroscientist called Dr Adrian Owen put her in a special kind of scanner and performed an unprecedented experiment. It revealed evidence of fluctuating levels of brain activation when she was presented with pictures of her parents. From that point, she started her long journey back into the world. This is a story about brain-impaired patients who come gradually out of coma into “minimal awareness” after being misdiagnosed as being in PVS: breathing, appearing to be wakeful, yet deemed to be dead to themselves and the world. It is also about the disastrous consequences of such misdiagnoses, estimated in the UK and other countries to be running at two in five cases. And, crucially, it is about a neuroscientific research programme that is set to transform the prospects of diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of brain-injured people the world over.

And then there is this:

But here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. “Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.

As important as this news is, I actually don’t think it matters much to the ethical discussion surrounding the care of patients in so-called persistent vegetative states. I wrote about it after the last PVS breakthrough-study a while back for the Weekly Standard:

Always wary of the political and moral implications of their results, there were the predictable claims that the results shouldn’t been seen as having broad implications to other PVS patients. Of course the PVS patient par excellence, Terri Schiavo, was immediately brought up: James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, claimed, “I’m quite confident that [Schiavo] would not have responded in this way.” At the same time, however, he too was taken aback: “It’s a little disturbing. This suggests there may be things going on inside people’s minds that we can’t assess by interacting with them at the bedside.”

The reason, of course, that some find this study disturbing is because they believe it would entail a different moral status, and thus medical treatment, of the PVS patient. No longer dehumanized to mere biological life, the patient might retain activity in the mind, and thus rightly be classified as a person. Even some pro-lifers make the mistake of arguing along these lines, as if this recent study vindicates the anti-euthanasia position. “See, she has a mental life, we just can’t notice it through our normal five senses,” so the argument would go.

This, however, is a mistake. And those who uphold the inherent dignity and equal worth of all human beings regardless of age, handicap, disability, or incapacity should beware of championing this study and future studies like it. For the intrinsic value of human life is not contingent upon the results of brain scans indicating mental activity. To think that it is would require one either to affirm body-self dualism or to reject the proposition that the lives of all human beings are of equal, intrinsic worth. Both positions are untenable.

Read the rest to find out why.

The Rev. Sam L. Ruteikara, co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, writes in today’s Washington Post:

But will the money allocated for AIDS stop the spread of the virus in sub-Saharan Africa, where 76 percent of the world’s HIV-AIDS deaths occurred last year?

Not if the dark dealings I’ve witnessed in Africa continue unchecked. In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention. AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.

Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.

PEPFAR calls for Western experts to work as equal partners with African leaders on AIDS prevention. But as co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, I have seen this process sabotaged. Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing.

He continues:

International suppliers make broad, oversimplified statements such as “You can’t change Africans’ sexual behavior.” While it’s true that you can’t change everybody, you don’t have to. If the share of men having three or more sexual partners in a year drops from 15 percent to 3 percent, as happened in Uganda between 1989 and 1995, HIV infection rates will plunge. It is that simple.

We, the poor of Africa, remain silenced in the global dialogue. Our wisdom about our own culture is ignored.

Telling men and women to keep sex sacred — to save sex for marriage and then remain faithful — is telling them to love one another deeply with their whole hearts. Most HIV infections in Africa are spread by sex outside of marriage: casual sex and infidelity. The solution is faithful love.

So hear my plea, HIV-AIDS profiteers. Let my people go. We understand that casual sex is dear to you, but staying alive is dear to us. Listen to African wisdom, and we will show you how to prevent AIDS.

Read the entire piece. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?)

Christine Rosen reflects on the passing of Harriet McBryde Johnson:

When Harriet McBryde Johnson died earlier this month at the age of 50 from a congenital neuromuscular disease, obituaries called her a “disability-rights activist.” This is far too narrow a description of her life. She was less a traditional activist than an acute social conscience. Ms. Johnson forced us to look at disability in a different way — not as something that we should seek to eradicate, but as something that is integral to the human condition, a “natural part of the human experience,” as the American Association of People With Disabilities puts it.

Ms. Johnson, a lawyer, first earned national attention when she debated philosopher Peter Singer at Princeton University in 2003, an experience she wrote about for the New York Times Magazine. Thankfully free of the ponderous cant that infects so much of bioethics, she was brutally direct when she talked about disabilities, including her own. “Most people don’t know how to look at me,” she wrote, describing her severely twisted spine and her “jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.” But she abhorred the “veneer of beneficence” that overlay the arguments of those who said she would be “better off” without her disability. “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life,” she argued, challenging Mr. Singer’s support of what she called “disability-based infanticide.”

A bit more:

Although they never formed formal alliances (and Not Dead Yet takes no position on prebirth issues, such as genetic selection), Ms. Johnson and her fellow activists often found themselves on the same side of the ramparts as conservative Christians: Not Dead Yet marshaled the support of 25 national disability groups to oppose the attempts of Terry Schiavo’s husband to “starve and dehydrate her to death,” for example, and defended congressional efforts to intervene in the case. As Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, told a group in Tampa, Fla., during the Schiavo controversy: “Surely, it will not be argued that the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and all the rest are now or ever have been puppets of religious conservatives.” Indeed, Ms. Johnson, an atheist, once chastised Mr. Singer for describing his enemies as a monolith of religious faithful focused solely on “the sanctity of human life.”

What Ms. Johnson’s life and the organizations she worked with demonstrate is that the convenient categories we often invoke to discuss these issues — secular or religious, liberal or conservative — can obscure as much as clarify, and that the culture benefits from hearing arguments from advocates of both secular and faith-based perspectives. Ms. Johnson’s description of Mr. Singer’s philosophy — “it is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible” — could be the slogan of our impatient, technologically sophisticated age. And both conservative Christians and secular disability-rights activists have capably criticized this devotion to extreme individualism.

In many ways, the truths that Ms. Johnson forced us to confront are easier to dismiss when they come from so-called right-wing religious nuts. Ms. Johnson, with her experience of disability and her commitment to liberal principles, made people far more uncomfortable. Her critique challenged our cultural assumptions about disability. How accepting are we, really, of those who are not able-bodied? “The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist,” she wrote. “My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world.” Yet, despite the lip service we pay to “accommodation” (and the genuine good that comes from legislation such as the Americans With Disabilities Act), we now find ourselves in a disturbing situation: As our scientific powers to eliminate disability grow, our acceptance of disability wanes.

The entire piece is worth reading.

Here is a link to the New York Times Magazine piece she wrote. The opening:

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called — and not just by his book publicist — the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that’s not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ”persons.” What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn’t. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I’ll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

The New Republic is up in arms at the latest Catholic League press release.

At her Washington Post / Newsweek site “On Faith,” Sally Quinn wrote about attending the funeral Mass for Tim Russert:

“Last Wednesday I was determined to take it [the Eucharist] for Tim, transubstantiation notwithstanding. I’m so glad I did. It made me feel closer to him. And it was worth it just to imagine how he would have loved it.”

Quinn hasn’t liked the response her publicizing this (remember, the Mass was private) has received:

I’m baffled by the reaction, and completely blindsided,” Quinn said. “I’m very pluralistic about religion, and I feel that everyone should respect everyone else’s.” Then she continued, talking about Russert:

I was really close to him, and I was grieving. And I thought me taking the Eucharist would be a thing that he would really enjoy. And all these things are what religion should be about. … There’s no sign out there that says you’re not allowed to take Communion. [The Catholic Church is] like, “Everyone is welcome. This is God’s house.” God doesn’t turn people away, supposedly.

I think it’s really an important issue. The Pope doesn’t want people who are pro-choice to take it. John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, even the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and others were not allowed. … Frankly, none of that was going through my mind. I was feeling absolutely destroyed. It felt right to do it as a tribute to him. I wasn’t thinking politically at all.

I’ve become a champion of pluralism and a spirit of inclusiveness. Any religious people who purport to be Christians, or whatever faith you might be, would do everything they could to welcome others—in the case of Catholics, to welcome others the way Christ would welcome others. This is a perfect example of WWJD. Would Jesus have said, “No you don’t, Sally Quinn. You’re not going to get away with this one!”

“Baffled” and “blindsided?” “There’s no sign out there that says you’re not allowed to take Communion. [The Catholic Church is] like, ‘Everyone is welcome. This is God’s house.’”

This coming from a religion journalist.

“I’m very pluralistic about religion, and I feel that everyone should respect everyone else’s.”

For Sally Quinn, respecting all religions apparently means all religions must respect all of Sally Quinn’s religious choices. She needn’t respect a religious community’s desire that only those in communion with Christ and His Church receive the sacrament of communion.

A reader writes in and notes the striking similarities between Mr. Bottum and Mr. Spock.

In the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, I review three new academic books on enhancement biotechnology. I found the books a bit underwhelming… But reading through them and noting their deficiencies served as the catalyst for the articles I co-authored with Chris Tollefsen for First Things and The New Atlantis—where we tried to present a more adequate grounding for the discussion.

Here’s the opening of the review:

Imagine it’s 1900, and you’re a bioethicist. Of course, “bioethics” didn’t exist back in 1900—we had real academic disciplines in those days—but play along: You’re sitting on a presidential bioethics commission, and scientists show up to testify that a new thing called vaccination could increase life spans by 30 years. Would you judge vaccination unethical? Would you worry about “potentially devastating impacts on the economy, family, and generational relationships”?

If you wouldn’t have objected back in 1900, then you can’t object in 2008 to the changes being offered by biotechnology. Or so claims Ronald Green in Babies by Design. According to Green, those who object to some of today’s biotechnological innovations are engaged in “status-quo bias rather than reasoned reflection.” Reasoned reflection, according to Green, tells us to make “deliberate interventions in our own and our children’s genetic markup—to both prevent disease and enhance human life.”

Consider another thought experiment. What would have happened had our ape ancestors, millennia ago, decided that their genome was best and did what they could to preserve it, preventing further enhancement? If we don’t think the ape genome was best, why should we think our current genome is best?

This just-suppose device appears in John Harris’s Enhancing Evolution, another new volume which insists that concerns about the possibly dehumanizing effects of some biotechnologies are unwarranted. Harris asks, why wait for Mother Nature to improve us? Why not improve ourselves? Indeed, he argues, “there is a positive moral duty to enhance.” He longs for the day when we replace “natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with ‘enhancement evolution’” and anyone who thinks otherwise is “like our imagined ape ancestor who … thought evolution had gone far enough.”

Yet another new book, Russell Korobkin’s Stem Cell Century, uses the same device. In it, the dean of the Harvard Medical School tells Korobkin that stem cell therapies “have the potential to do for chronic diseases what antibiotics did for infectious diseases.” If you don’t object to penicillin, then you can’t object to the coming “penicillin for Parkinson’s.” Phrased like that, who could object?

There’s something revealing in these new books. They all argue that we have a moral imperative to enhance ourselves, and none of them seriously confronts the concerns that many thoughtful people have about the moral hazards of trying to design a more perfect human. They want to keep the technologies safe and their applications just, to be sure; but they consider these challenges to be easily surmountable. It’s as if we’ve discovered unqualified human goods. Or as Harris puts it, “enhancements are so obviously good for us that it is odd that the idea of enhancement has caused, and still occasions, so much suspicion, fear, and outright hostility.”

John Harris is no fringe figure. He’s professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester and editor in chief of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics. Green, too, belongs to the mainstream. He is a Dartmouth ethics professor and the founding director of the NIH’s Office of Genome Ethics. Korobkin has fewer obvious credentials—admitting on his website that he’s been researching stem cells only “for the last two years”—but he is a respectable professor at the respected UCLA School of Law.

Read the rest here.

You are the Democratic candidate for president. You want to reach out to Catholics. So what do you do when the majority of the elected officials on your National Catholic Advisory Council have the seal of approval from NARAL Pro-Choice America?

Bill McGurn explains in his Wall Street Journal column.

Nathaniel Peters has a nice review as this week’s “Book of the Week” for Books and Culture. Here’s how John Wilson, the editor of B&C, describes it:

Our current Book of the Week is Mystics, by William Harmless, reviewed by Nathaniel Peters, who commends it as a lucid guide to a subject that has occasioned a good deal of muddle and flimflam. Nathaniel is a junior fellow at First Things, where—in addition to publishing a very fine magazine—they send a steady stream of interns and fellows (of both sexes) out into the public square.

And here are Nathaniel’s opening two paragraphs:

The word mystic does not bring to mind edifying images for most Christians these days. It smacks of a vapid, Southern California mindset, readily exploited by marketers of tea and juice and such. For the more historically minded, mystic might suggest the wild-haired, unwashed visionaries off in the wilderness—not, in other words, something of much concern to everyday believers as they balance their finances or play catch with their kids.

But true mystics are far from amorphously spiritual. As Bernard McGinn has put it, “no mystic (at least before the present century) believed in or practiced ‘mysticism.’ They believed in and practiced Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism), that is, religions that contained mystical elements as part of a wider historical whole.” McGinn’s work serves as the starting point for William Harmless, a professor of theology at Creighton University, whose new book Mystics is a walk through the lives and teachings of eight great mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus from the Christian tradition, as well as the Sufi poet Rumi and the Buddhist divine Dogen.

could use your prayers.

Only in Canada.

Al Mohler comments.

Our editor in chief has some poignant remarks on Tim Russert’s passing in today’s daily article on the homepage. Read those first. But also take a look at Peggy Noonan’s column.

A taste:

The beautiful thing about the coverage was that it offered extremely important information to those age 15 or 25 or 30 who may not have been told how to operate in the world beyond “Go succeed.” I’m not sure we tell the young as much as we ought, as clearly as we ought, what it is the world admires, and what it is they want to emulate.

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn’t. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better. That’s what it really admires. That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, “The thing about Joe was he was rich.” We say, if we can, “The thing about Joe was he took care of people.”

The young are told, “Be true to yourself.” But so many of them have no idea, really, what that means. If they don’t know who they are, what are they being true to? They’re told, “The key is to hold firm to your ideals.” But what if no one bothered, really, to teach them ideals?

After Tim’s death, the entire television media for four days told you the keys to a life well lived, the things you actually need to live life well, and without which it won’t be good. Among them: taking care of those you love and letting them know they’re loved, which involves self-sacrifice; holding firm to God, to your religious faith, no matter how high you rise or low you fall. This involves guts, and self-discipline, and active attention to developing and refining a conscience to whose promptings you can respond. Honoring your calling or profession by trying to do within it honorable work, which takes hard effort, and a willingness to master the ethics of your field. And enjoying life. This can be hard in America, where sometimes people are rather grim in their determination to get and to have. “Enjoy life, it’s ungrateful not to,” said Ronald Reagan.

And ask yourself this:

I’d add it’s not only the young, but the older and the old, who were given a few things to think about. When Tim’s friends started to come forward last Friday to speak on the air of his excellence, they were honestly grieving. They felt loss. So did people who’d never met him. Question: When you die, are people in your profession going to feel like this? Why not? What can you do better? When you leave, are your customers—in Tim’s case it was five million every Sunday morning, in your case it may be the people who come into the shop, or into your office—going to react like this? Why not?

A reader sends in a link to this report, just published online:

A new study of Texas’ Inpatient Hospital Discharge Public Use Data Files for 2000 through 2003 shows that the six US Catholic hospital systems operating in Texas reported providing contraceptive devices and medications as well as sterilizations of men and women in violation of human dignity and the Gospel (study may be downloaded from Catholic hospitals betray mission). Over 9,600 women were explicitly diagnosed for direct sterilization. 900 additional operations to interrupt fallopian tubes and 57 events related to legally induced abortion or “termination of pregnancy” were reported in circumstances that may also have violated Catholic hospital directives. The study does not include data on the hospitals’ provision of these procedures on an outpatient basis.

Though this data is from the earlier part of this decade, one wonders if it’s not part of a continuing trend. Consider this article in yesterday’s edition of the Washington Times:

Federal authorities are investigating the actions of a Catholic charity in Richmond which helped a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl to receive an abortion in January, in possible violation of Virginia law.

In possible violation of Catholic charity, too.