Studies compete for the most accurate representation of the risk to a marriage posed by living together before the wedding, but most estimations predict somewhere around a 33 percent increased risk of divorce. Regardless of magnitude, however, they all claim the same thing: that premarital cohabitation is highly correlated with unsuccessful marriages… . Continue Reading »
The famous first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was almost certainly not written in April but in January. In a letter on January 23, 1921, Eliot refers to the nascent poem as “the first writing of any kind I have done for six months.” Two weeks later, he showed the completed first section “in 4 parts” to Wyndham Lewis. … Continue Reading »
On April 1, the Health Care Committee of the Washington State Senate held a two-hour hearing on what its proponents euphemistically call the “Reproductive Parity Act,” and its opponents describe as the “abortion insurance mandate.” If passed, EHB 1044 would require that if any health insurance plan provided coverage for maternity care, it “must also provide a covered person with substantially equivalent coverage to permit the voluntary termination of a pregnancy.” … Continue Reading »
When twenty children and six adults were gunned down at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December, it rightfully made huge news. Since the killings, the media have worked energetically to keep the atrocity front and center in the public consciousness”as a story still important in its own right, to be sure, but also as a way to lend support for gun control laws … Continue Reading »
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… . Continue Reading »
While reasonable people can and do disagree about immigration, the stance of the congressional GOP on guest workers indicates that many Republican leaders have chosen to learn the wrong lessons from the most recent election. Let’s start with some facts about the contemporary United States… . Continue Reading »
I met Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., while working on a wire service story about the Psychiatry and Spirituality Forum at the University of California, Irvine, which he directs in addition to serving as director of residency training and medical education in the department of psychiatry. When my son Gabriel died by suicide the day after I submitted that 2008 story, Aaron was the first person I called… . Continue Reading »
If the conclave of 2005 was about continuity”extending the legacy of John Paul II by electing his closest theological advisor as his successor”the conclave of 2013 was about governance. The College of Cardinals came to Rome convinced that the incapacities of the Roman Curia over the previous eight years had become a serious obstacle to the Church’s evangelical mission … Continue Reading »
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as has often been pointed out, imagined two very different dystopias. In 1984, written just after the Second World War, Orwell depicts the forces that held people captive as fundamentally external: coercion, espionage, laws, constraints, threats, lies, the state. By contrast, Huxley’s Brave New World, published just after the Wall Street crash had turned the excess of the twenties into the Great Depression of the thirties, portrays a future in which people are enslaved to forces within themselves … Continue Reading »
Last Tuesday’s March for Marriage contained many of the standard elements for a socially conservative protest march. There were young families pushing strollers, some Catholic parishes that rented buses, youthful nuns praying. In short, it was easy to view as a smaller scale version of the March for Life. But one thing was conspicuous about the participants: It was a majority-minority group… . Continue Reading »
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