Sarah Degner Riveros argues that pro-lifers must learn to talk about rape:

An inability to discuss rape is a particular problem for the pro-life movement. Instead of listening to survivors and believing them, pro-lifers sometimes make the argument that rape studies overestimate the prevalence of rape. This argument is a detriment to the cause of protecting women and children.

Also today, Russell E. Saltzman offers some advice to senior seminarians:

Do no harm. By that I mean spend your first year doing nothing. Doing “something” is always harmful, except visiting; do lots and lots of visiting. Keep track of your visits and, without padding, publish the numbers in the newsletter so people will know you’re doing your job.

George Weigel on Pope Francis’ view of poverty:

Here, the Holy Father took the opportunity to explain, once again, his choice of papal name, while using that exercise to make two important points. Stressing the Church’s care for, and work with, the poor throughout the world, the pope reminded his audience in the Vatican’s Sala Regia that Francis of Assisi knew that there were various forms of poverty.

Also today, Daniel Mattson on sexual identity:

Words reveal truths about who we are in nature and in grace, and as such, we believe a falsehood about our nature when we embrace a gay identity, or when we believe that anyone has an “orientation” toward the same sex. I believe there is a natural law, and I believe in the truth proposed by the Catholic Church that my body reveals who (and what) I am.

Dawn LaValle on Terrence Malick’s latest film:

To the Wonder startles us into realizing that the world is shot though, positively charged, with presence. Whether that presence is fructifying love or slinking destruction stands as an accusing question throughout the film. The most frightening aspect of all is that it is our choice to accept the love that surrounds us, or to keep ourselves destructively closed off from it.

Also today, Elizabeth Scalia explores the use of Scripture in the marriage debate:

For the five or six thousand years preceding the last fifty, no one needed an explicit pronouncement that marriage was an office involving opposite sexes because it seemed obvious. In the last half century, however, human sexual mechanisms have become utilized less for production and more for pleasure.

R. R. Reno on conservatism and gay marriage:

Redefinition of marriage to allow same-sex unions undermines the proper separation of cultural and governmental power that is so important for a liberal regime. Marriage is an institution as fundamental as religion and morality. It is more primitive and ancient than anything resembling organized government.

Also today, Laura Mitchell explains the transaction costs of cohabitation:

What happens when a couple lives together before they get married? These transaction costs are magnified to such an extent that it’s nearly impossible just to walk away. Doubts about the relationship are swept aside because to address them would mean to look on Craigslist for a new apartment and furniture.

Micah Mattix analyzes the first line of The Wasteland:

Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month” is not so much about his conflicted response to spring (rooted in some forgotten childhood trauma) or about creating a linguistic puzzle to help us develop our skills of attention but about hope. What makes April cruel in the poem (among other things) is that the hope of new life that spring evokes is, at least for Eliot at the time, always temporal.

Also today, David DeWolf on pro-abortion legislation in the state of Washington:

Washington already provides state-funded abortions for low-income women. And all carriers that currently provide health insurance in the state offer at least one plan that includes abortion coverage. In answer to the question of why the Reproductive Parity Act was needed, proponents said they were concerned that implementation of the Affordable Care Act might cause insurance carriers to stop covering abortions and new carriers might enter the market with more restrictive coverage.

And in our third feature, Wesley J. Smith on media bias:

The Gosnell story should be huge. But the media has generally looked the other way. As of this writing, the major network nightly news programs have not even covered the trial, and most reporting outside of the Philadelphia area has been sporadic, placed on inside pages, and written blandly—the kind of low-voltage reportage easily lost in the constant white noise of media overload.

Anna Williams on Romeo and Juliet:

Alyssa Rosenberg argues on Slate that Romeo and Juliet “is full of terrible, deeply childish ideas about love.” She’s quite right . . . because that’s the point of the play. Reading the text, instead of assuming it represents the genre “perfect love that is tragically thwarted,” makes it clear that other characters and arguably Shakespeare himself see Romeo and Juliet’s love as gravely flawed.

Also today, Pete Spiliakos on Republicans’ misplaced priorities:

What did the Republican Washington establishment do in the recent immigration negotiations? They pushed for the largest possible guest worker program with the lowest possible wages. The impact of such a guest worker program on the wages of Americans without college degrees would likely be small, but as an indication of GOP priorities it is a much larger problem.

And in our third feature, Christine A. Scheller interviews Dr. Aaron Kheriaty on faith and depression:

I was deeply moved when Aaron included Gabriel in the dedication of The Catholic Guide to Depression, his new book (co-authored with Monsignor John R. Cihak). Aaron writes about what it was like for him to walk into my family’s tragedy. More importantly, he and his co-author offer hope to depression sufferers and their families.

George Weigel on reforming the Curia:

The cast of mind in the Roman Curia must be changed, so that the entire Curia thinks of itself as its many good people now do: as servants of the New Evangelization, not as the twenty-first-century version of a papal court. That means that those curialists who think of themselves as courtiers must either be converted to a different self-understanding or replaced.

Andrew Wilson on competing definitions of freedom:

In the modern West, people generally think of slavery, captivity, and the need for liberation in Orwell’s sense, rather than Huxley’s. Our vision of freedom is primarily socio-political, with the greatest threat to human flourishing being the other, whether the Nazi, the slave-owner, or the autocrat. Oppression comes through pain, not pleasure; the essence of liberty is to be without external constraint.

Christopher Palko describes the conservative coalition at the March for Marriage:

The March for Marriage had without a doubt the most racially diverse crowd that I had ever seen associated with a right-of-center political cause. On the Mall, you would hear Spanish being spoken behind you, an African-American gospel group singing in front of you, and members of an Asian-American church standing beside you.

Also today, Melinda Selmys on Michael Voris and homosexuality:

Voris’ work is important because it brings together in one place all the negative tropes and stereotypes that animate the Catholic opposition to the sinister “gay agenda.” In doing so, it reveals the deep sense of grief that the American Church must grapple with to become effective in ministry to homosexual people.

William Doino Jr. details the most recent criticism of Mother Teresa:

The expansion of Mother Teresa’s order speaks volumes about its integrity and effectiveness, but the support and admiration it has received has proven too much for some. On March 1, three Canadian academics—Serge Larivee, Genevieve Chenard, and Carole Senechal—released a report on Mother Teresa, renewing Hitchens’ criticism.

Also today, Valerie Weaver-Zercher explores the growing popularity of Amish romance novels:

The thrill of the chaste that animates Amish fiction is rooted not just in sexual purity, but in the broader sense of moral innocence. Chastity descends from the Latin term castus, meaning a state of being “morally pure” or “holy,” and this concept fuels the genre in several ways. The Amish, who reject public grid electricity, phones inside homes, and car ownership, are often viewed as chaste residents of an otherwise defiled larger culture.

Tania M. Geist on Pope Benedict’s theology of Holy Saturday:

On Holy Saturday, God incarnate entered “the absolute and extreme solitude of mankind.” Here Benedict pointed out that we have all experienced that terrifying feeling of abandonment, which is why we fear death—similarly to how, “as children, we are afraid of being alone in the dark, and the only thing that can comfort us is the presence of a person who loves us.” And that is precisely what happened on Holy Saturday.

Peter J. Leithart on Good Friday:

At the beginning of his prophecy, Isaiah gives a gruesome word portrait of the condition of Zion. She’s covered from head to toe with “bruises, welts, open wounds,” without bandages or balm. Zion longs for the Lord to bind up her wounds. She needs a physician, but the Lord sends another patient, as battered as she. She wants a makeover, but Yahweh sends a mirror: Behold my Servant! Behold yourself! How in hell does that help?

Also today, Joshua Schulz restates the natural law case against same-sex marriage:

The natural law argument is that government has an interest in behavior that is essentially procreative and only accidentally sterile (through age or deliberate sterilization via contraception) and not in essentially non-procreative behavior. Procreative behavior is governed by norms of fidelity, exclusivity, and indissolubility because it is the kind of behavior that creates children, and such behavior creates rights in children that are correlative with parental duties in adults.

George Weigel says we must ponder the Cross in order to reform the Church:

We would have arranged things differently; we would have chosen another kind of Messiah—that theme runs like a bright thread throughout Lent, in the readings from the Old and New Testaments that the Church assigns to the liturgy during the Forty Days, so that the Church can ponder again the full panorama of salvation history. And as the Holy Father suggested in the Sistine Chapel, the temptation to deny the Cross is perennial.

Also today, Carson Holloway explores Bret Stephens’ attack on priestly celibacy:

Stephens admits that, according to the evidence we have, the vast majority of Catholic priests are not sexual abusers of children. But never mind. Scientific empiricism aside, his principle at least sounds reasonable, and it might work out to be true in the long run and in the aggregate even if the presently available evidence does not support it. Is it not futile and dangerous to try to conquer our natural and ordinary desires?

Keith Riler argues that population planning won’t balance the government budget:

Holding all else constant, a five percent addition to the U.S. population would reduce the national debt by almost seven trillion dollars. This brings to mind James Taranto’s caution that “a war on fertility is an act of cultural and economic suicide. Today’s low fertility is tomorrow’s shortage of productive citizens—of the taxpayers who would have to pay for the ever-expanding entitlement state.”

Also today, Elizabeth Scalia on the Palm Sunday liturgy:

Without our collective calls for Barabbas, for the Crucifixion of Christ, and for Jesus to save himself, we lost an opportunity to be appalled by ourselves. We were denied a chance to once more glean some sound theological, spiritual, and personal insights into how often we choose what is worst, rather than best, for us; the assist that we give to the destruction of the Body of Christ when we advance the brokenness of the world; the lazy service we give to our cynicism.

R. R. Reno describes the meaning of marriage:

We now see love between men and women as feelings of affection and desire that may feel strong but aren’t necessarily permanent. That’s because we’ve unraveled amorous feelings and the potent power of sexual desire from the enduring, permanent fact of new life. Marriage requires both if it’s to shine with the luminosity of eternity, which is what most who marry desire, even if they can’t articulate or even identify it.

Also today, Matt Emerson analyzes competing revelations:

Even among those who declare no connection with God, reason operates under what amounts to a kind of revelation. These skeptics don’t conceive of revelation in the same way that I do as a Catholic, but for many, the ultimate source of an epistemological “guide” does not matter: Certain perceived facts, or certain foundational positions, hold the same thetical value for them as the Bible does for many Christians.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., on Pope Francis and Christians in the Middle East:

The Chaldean and Syriac Catholic Churches of Iraq and Syria, while differing in rite and tradition from the Latin West, are integral members of the universal Catholic Church, in full communion with the bishop of Rome. The persecution they and other Middle Eastern Christians now suffer—so severe it threatens their continued existence in their ancient homelands—is a bitter wound for the Church and an unavoidable concern for the Holy Father.

Also today, Wesley J. Smith on Sen. Rob Portman’s support of same-sex marriage:

Periodically measuring our principles against our life’s experiences is necessary to ensure that our moralities aren’t actually masked legalisms devoid of empathy and mercy. But surely, living a principled life has to go deeper than “how I feel,” or “what’s in it for me.” If we all “tailor our consciences to fit this year’s fashions,” as playwright Lillian Hellman once put it, our lives will become like flotsam and jetsam driven by the winds of emotion and currents of expediency.

Robert T. Miller examines the morality of using unmanned robotic drones:

Although the machines involved are extraordinarily dangerous, the moral principle governing their use is perfectly ordinary: It is the familiar one that human beings should engage in an activity that poses dangers to others only if, in the totality of the circumstances, doing so is reasonable—i.e., if the good to be achieved, taking account of the probability of success, is proportionate to the possible ill effects.

Also today, in a book review from our April issue, Mary McConnell on homeschooling:

I remain an enthusiastic advocate of homeschooling, but recent years have found me occupied with reforming “real” school. Two much-heralded but very different books, Joseph Murphy’s new survey of the professional literature on homeschooling, Homeschooling in America, and Quinn Cummings’ story of homeschooling her daughter Alice, The Year of Learning Dangerously, rekindled my interest in the movement that once so engaged my family.

Pete Spiliakos describes a populist Republican economic agenda:

The Republican National Committee is in a cul-de-sac. They see that support for the Republican party is becoming isolated to constituencies that are in relative demographic decline. What the RNC does not see (or chooses not to see) is that the party’s weakness is largely the result of the perception of the party as a vehicle for the self-interest of the wealthy.

George Weigel on the time he met Pope Francis:

When Pope Francis stepped out onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s on the night of March 13, I thought of the man I had met in his Buenos Aires office ten months before: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., who was looking forward to laying down the burden of leadership and devoting himself to prayer, reflection and study.

Also today, in a feature from our April issue, Robert T. Miller offers a pragmatic defense of American liberalism:

There is a great gap between politics and moral philosophy. Thinking that a certain set of political arrangements is the best way to organize a particular society in particular historical circumstances is a prudential judgment, and in supporting America’s liberal political system I do not thereby commit myself to a liberal political philosophy.

(From left to right) Matthew Schmitz, deputy editor; Matthew Cantirino, assistant editor; Lauren Wilson, managing editor; David Mills, executive editor; Tristyn Bloom, editorial intern; R.R. Reno, editor; Katherine Infantine, junior fellow; Anna Williams, junior fellow

Elizabeth Scalia on the struggle with intrinsic disorder:

I am “intrinsically disordered” when it comes to food, and it doesn’t really matter how I became so. Whether it is due to a genetic pre-disposition, or a habit of psychological buffering—or some combination of nature and nurture—the fact remains that I am disordered, and I must deal with it. Every day. Sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by tempted minute.

Also today, Patrick Beeman on the Catholicism of Rich Mullins:

From his early life, Mullins admitted to being intrigued by the beauty of the Catholic Church and attracted to its mystery. In 1991, he was interviewed and quoted as saying “I think I would like to be a monk. I really considered Catholicism a few years ago, but there were some things that I just couldn’t reconcile.” Like all Evangelicals who consider entering the Catholic Church, Rich had theological difficulties to overcome.

R. R. Reno on the future of conservatism:

American conservatives need to return to first principles. Tax rates are not irrelevant. Restraining government spending may be good policy (and a fiscal necessity). But our goal is limited government, not limited taxation. The sign of success is a free people capable of self-government, not government spending as a certain percentage of GDP.

Also today, Seth Chalmer describes what Jews should expect from the next pope:

Instead of lecturing the new pope on how best to be Catholic, Jews should identify the maximum we can reasonably ask from the Catholic Church, without asking it to stop being the Catholic Church. Here is my proposal for a realistic agenda for Catholic-Jewish relations.

From our archives, Richard John Neuhaus on the late Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Frank is simply wrong when he writes that Karamazov is about “the great theme that had preoccupied [Dostoevsky] since Notes from Underground: the conflict between reason and Christian faith.” I am keenly aware that Joseph Frank probably knows as much about Dostoevsky as any person alive. For all his undoubted knowledge, however, I am persuaded that he misunderstands texts that are crucial to his claim that Dostoevsky’s lifelong obsession was with the presumed conflict between reason and what Frank persistently calls “irrational faith.” Since that claim is key to, in some ways the key to, his construal of Dostoevsky’s life and work, this is no little disagreement.

Timothy George argues that the next pope should be Catholic:

As one involved in various church dialogues over the past thirty years, I have come to see the crucial role played by the Bishop of Rome in helping all Christians everywhere to work together for Christian unity. Far more than anything in the mainline Protestant world, the Second Vatican Council made possible the springtime of ecumenism among Christians today.

Also today, Wesley J. Smith on Everyday Saints and Other Stories:

The book is all the rage among American Orthodox Christians, but deserves a far wider audience. Using biographical vignettes (with photos) of monks, abbots, bishops, nuns, and “fools for Christ,” its author, Archimandrite Tikhon, paints a powerful picture of the courage and cleverness Orthodox monastics deployed to survive Soviet persecutions—even as it shatters the stereotype of monks as dour men dressed in black who never enjoy themselves and are ignorant of and indifferent to the outside world.

John Daniel Davidson reviews Islam and the Arab Awakening:

Can a Muslim-majority country, freed from the strictures of dictatorship, bring forth and preserve a democracy that grants equal rights to minorities and women, protects free speech and political dissent, and does not insist on the imposition of Islamic law? Tariq Ramadan’s unwillingness to engage this question, in a book purportedly about the social and political future of the post-Arab Spring Middle East, denies a fundamental tension at the heart of Islam.

Also today, Filip Mazurczak defends Archbishop Oscar Romero:

On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot during the celebration of Mass by the death squadrons of El Salvador’s military government. Today his reputation is undergoing a second assassination: Critics have responded to the floating of his name for beatification by wrongly charging the man with supporting violence, communism, and heresy. Those who would make the archbishop a radical hero have offered their own version of these claims in approving tones. Both are wrong.

Edward Feser replies to David Bentley Hart’s article on the natural law:

Hart equivocates insofar as he fails to distinguish two very different theories that go under the “natural law” label. He also uses terms like “supernatural” and “metaphysical” as if they were interchangeable, or at least as if the differences between them were irrelevant to his argument. These ambiguities are essential to his case. When they are resolved, it becomes clear that with respect to both versions of natural law theory, Hart is attacking straw men and simply begging the question against them.

Also today, George Weigel describes the unique impossibility of the papacy:

To be pope is to take on a task that is, by precise theological definition, impossible. Like every other office in the Church, the papacy exists for the sake of holiness. The office, though, is a creature of time and space, and holiness is eternal. No one, not even a pope who is a saint, can fully satisfy the office’s demands. Yet the office, according to the Church’s faith, is of the will of God, and the office cannot fail, although the officeholder will always fall short of the mark. That distinction between the office and the man who holds it is a consolation to any pope.

Peter J. Leithart on religious change in the Middle East:

Alarming reports have been coming in for years: Christianity is being expelled from the Middle East. According to Walter Russell Mead, more than half of the Christians in Iraq have fled the country since 2003. Today it’s happening in Syria. Swedish journalist Nuri Kino reports on a “silent exodus of Christians from Syria” in the face of “kidnappings and rapes.”

Also today, Hans Boersma reviews What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense:

No argument is more effective in promoting gay marriage than the insistence that its rejection offends our sense of justice and equality, especially as concern for the underprivileged and marginalized lies at the heart of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Many today believe it patently “unfair” and “unjust” to ban an entire group of people from the benefits of marriage merely because they happen to be attracted to people of the same sex.