First Things RSS Feed - Kenneth Craycraft

The Pro-Natalist and Pro-Life Case to Make Birth Free

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:00:00 -0400

In 2024, the United States, along with the rest of the world, is facing a population time bomb that will have devastating economic and social consequences in the coming decades. But it is not the kind of calamity that anti-natalist doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), have been wrongly predicting for decades. The coming social upheaval will be a result of declining birth rates and shrinking populations. The solution to the coming catastrophe will not be fewer but more births—and to create a culture that welcomes life rather than destroys it. Perhaps no public policy concern is more urgent than increasing birth rates. And no concrete proposal will do more to facilitate that than to make birth free.

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What to Expect From a Harris-Walz Presidency

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 06:00:00 -0400

A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them. With no close contender, theirs would be the most anti-life, anti-woman, and anti-family presidency in the history of the country. Unborn and unwanted newborn children would be exterminated. Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men. Women-only spaces would be eradicated. And parents would lose authority over the medical care of their own children.

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The Equality Act’s Assault on Religious Liberty

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 15:20:00 -0500

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR5, the so-called “Equality Act,” to amend various provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it passes the Senate and is signed into law by the president, the bill will cause incalculable damage to our society—with a particular assault on women and religious believers. The bill is expressly designed to impose a controversial sexual-ideological scheme on the American public, and to forbid any religiously-based objections to that agenda.

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What to Know About the Equality Act

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:55:00 -0500

Two bills have lingered between the Democratic House and Republican Senate for the last few years. Now that Joe Biden is president, and both houses are controlled by Democrats, these two bills are likely to be signed into law: the Equality Act and the Do No Harm Act .

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Why Biden Picked Xavier Becerra

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 13:10:00 -0500

Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden is fulfilling predictions that his administration will be the most militantly pro-abortion of any in American history. His nomination of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra for Secretary of Health and Human Services is an expression of Biden’s commitment to force extreme, oppressive abortion policy on the American public. As California AG, Becerra has been a tool of the abortion industry. Biden has rewarded the pro-choice lobby’s support of his candidacy by appointing Planned Parenthood’s unofficial spokesman and advocate. The Becerra pick has nothing to do with health care policy in the United States, and everything to do with enforcing a radical abortion agenda.

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What Christians Can Expect From Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:30:00 -0500

The administration of presumptive President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is certain to implement policies and initiate litigation that will, at best, be in tension with the moral commitments of Christians in the United States, imposing high costs on conscientious attempts to practice our faith. At worst, the incoming administration will impose moral positions on Christians that are repugnant to us and infringe upon the exercise of religious faith in the public square.

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Biden’s Betrayal

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 06:00:00 -0400

If elected, Joe Biden will be the second Catholic president in U.S. history. He is already following the formula of the first, who expressly rejected any claim of authority that Church teaching had on his moral and political life. John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association is the roadmap to Biden’s campaign and accommodationist faith.

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Thomas Howard, RIP

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 06:00:00 -0400

Thomas Howard, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 85, made the journey from catholic evangelical to evangelical Catholic as gracefully and admirably as any who have made the journey. Though the adjective and noun changed places, Tom’s heart for the gospel never wavered. Neither did his gracious and generous friendship with all the evangelicals and Catholics for whom his influence was deep and abiding. When I was a seminarian at an evangelical seminary, I first heard about Tom as the evangelical who said that that was not enough. And a few years later, I came to know him as the Catholic who helped lead me toward my own conversion and faithfully served as my sponsor when I was received into the Church.

My most acute memories of Tom are of sitting together in the parlor of his house at Beverly Farms, sipping gin and talking about his friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge; frequently going to Mass together at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston, followed by lunch afterward at Union Oyster House; and visiting the discalced Carmelite sisters in Danvers, to whom he introduced my wife and me. Tom had a deep sense that these things God had given us were infused with the presence of grace, and thus the order of salvation to which they belong. He accounts for this in his wonderful little book Hallowed Be This House .

Tom’s journey toward Rome, after a lengthy stop in Canterbury, was driven by his discovery of, and deepening appreciation for, the grace and beauty of liturgical worship. But he always retained a deep appreciation for the fervor of what he called the “trusty Protestant Fundamentalism” of his youth and early adulthood. In his short apologia, Lead Kindly Light: My Journey to Rome , he writes gracefully about the “earnestness” of the faith in which he was raised. And he celebrates the lasting effect of that legacy, and the abiding influence it had on his Catholic life.

More than any other mentor in my conversion journey, Tom taught me about the incarnational nature of God’s gracious intervention in our lives. While he never lost his admiration for the enthusiasm of his evangelical heritage, Tom came to believe that the things of heaven are communicated to us by the stuff of earth. And even those evangelicals who could not follow him all the way to Rome could admire and appreciate the quickening of their own sense of the incarnational forms of grace that infuse our lives and, ultimately, convey our salvation.

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Kamala Harris’s Record of Anti-Catholic Bigotry

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 06:00:00 -0400

In 1958, as John F. Kennedy was preparing to run for president of the United States, polemicist Paul Blanshard published the second edition of his incendiary 1949 book, American Freedom and Catholic Power. This was the bible of anti-Catholicism in American public life. In it, Blanshard called for a “resistance movement” that would oppose the Catholic Church’s “antidemocratic social policies,” and attacked Catholic schools as “the most important divisive instrument in the life of American Children.” Echoing Blanshard’s bigotry, a February 1960 editorial in Christianity Today asserted that it is “perfectly rational” to oppose the nomination and election of a “Romanist” because “a Catholic presidency would be torn between two loyalties.”

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Joe Biden Is No Moderate

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 09:40:00 -0400

An August poll found that about one-third of registered voters, when asked to categorize Joe Biden on the political spectrum of “very conservative” to “very liberal,” believe him to be “moderate.” Only about a quarter of the respondents consider Biden to be “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is likely because his campaign and the Democratic party have focused on Biden’s aww-shucks, “devout Catholic,” Joe Lunchpail persona rather than his actual policy positions. This has made him an elusive opponent and effective candidate.

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