The grieving parents of the late Daniel James, who became suicidal after becoming paralyzed from an injury sustained playing rugby, and who committed assisted suicide in Switzerland after being taken there by his parents for that purpose, have said that no one can judge their son. From the . . . . Continue Reading »
During an interview conducted in April 2007 but published in the Wilmington News-Journal for the first time yesterday, Joe Biden was asked how he reconciles his Catholic faith with his position on Roe v. Wade : It’s very difficult. I was raised as a Catholic, I’m a practicing Catholic, . . . . Continue Reading »
Mark Oppenheimer at the Wall Street Journal mourns the death of the practice of real debate in America: It used to be that high-school and college debates mirrored, in a salutary way, political debates. In school, young men and women learned to research topics and then debate their rivals, using . . . . Continue Reading »
Last week Public Discourse published the modified text of an address delivered by Archbishop Chaput speaking as a private citizen about the responsibilities of the Catholic voter. It contains a stern rebuke directed at Prof. Doug Kmiec: In his own book [ Can a Catholic Support Him?: Asking the Big . . . . Continue Reading »
Boy, I get accused of being hard on bioethics, but Michael Cook, the creator of Bioedge, has topped me. He blew his top, finally sick and tired of the rush at prestige universities to reward the most radical bioethicists with big dollars (or pounds), the more radical the better.We all know about . . . . Continue Reading »
I recently came across a nice turn of phrase by Jules Renard, a wry French memoir writer from the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: “Irony does not dry up the grass. It just burns off the weeds.” Yes, I think that’s quite right, but only if the irony . . . . Continue Reading »
This is how the culture of death moves toward cultural hegemony: The first step is to claim that killing (which is descriptive and accurate in that it means “to end life”) will be reserved for the very rare case. But as soon as that premise is accepted, the acceptable category of . . . . Continue Reading »
President Bush’s use of federal funding restrictions to induce creative thinking into ethical ways of deriving pluripotent stem cells continues to be a major triumph, in my opinion, with the astonishing progress that continues to be made in adult stem cell and IPSC research—not that the . . . . Continue Reading »
This is hardly surprising: Hawaii has had to drop its universal health plan for children because people who could afford to insure their children decided instead to let the state assume their responsibility. From the story:Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the . . . . Continue Reading »
I am having trouble keeping up: Every day now almost, it is one once unthinkable thing after another.In the UK, a woman tried to commit suicide by swallowing anti-freeze, and doctors refused to save her! From the story:A young woman who attempted suicide was allowed to die because hospital staff . . . . Continue Reading »
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