On September 11, 2017, between midnight and dawn, a statue of Fr. Junípero Serra—whom generations of California schoolchildren called “the Father of California”—was beheaded at Mission Santa Barbara. Reading about the defiled statue in the paper, I immediately question my father, my . . . . Continue Reading »
For most of his career, Starr viewed the California experiment benevolently, as a phenomenon balanced between utopia and reason. But he was an intense Catholic believer who seems finally to have despaired of California’s grandiloquent and heartbreaking destiny. Continue Reading »
Imagine receiving a letter telling you that while your insurance company won’t pay for experimental drugs to combat your cancer, they’d be happy to cover lethal drugs to help you die. You want to try to live a little longer, but you're only offered funding to hasten death. This happened to . . . . Continue Reading »