1. The Tablet: “Tragic Egypt Church Fire Spotlights Coptic Christians’ Struggle”
CAIRO, Egypt — Cries of grief rose, and fingers of blame were pointed in the wake of a tragic fire that gutted Martyr Abu Sefein Coptic Church and claimed the lives of 41 people including 15 children and the church bishop, Abdul Masih Bakhit.
About 5,000 people were gathering on August 14 for Sunday Mass when the fire broke out at 8:30 a.m. inside the small four-story building in Imbaba, a working-class neighborhood five miles from Cairo.
Government officials said the deaths resulted from an ensuing stampede and smoke inhalation. Witnesses told The Tablet the first firefighters didn’t arrive for more than an hour-and-a-half after scores of trapped worshippers had already suffocated to death. As the fire spread to the upper floors, some screaming victims jumped out of windows.
Church officials said the blaze was caused by a short circuit in an air conditioner, but one news wire service reported that witnesses also pointed to a faulty generator. Neighborhood residents rushed to rescue the people inside the church as the emergency response was slow. The children died when they were trapped in a daycare room inside the church as the unchecked blaze engulfed the building, witnesses said.
“The firefighters came after the people died although they [were on] the next street [from] the church,” another witness said. “Even the bodies were laid in the street be- cause the ambulance was slow to arrive. Nobody cares about those poor souls.”
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In a phone call with a local TV station, Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II said the Martyr Abu Sefein Church, like many others, is too small for the number of congregants it serves and urged that authorities allow the building of more churches.
“In Egypt, major disasters mostly afflict the poor. Egypt is a very racist country … Muslims are more secure than Copts, and men are more secure than women and children, while the most vulnerable among Egyptians are those poor Coptic women and children, which is what happened in this poor church,” Mohamed Abou El-Ghar, leader of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, wrote on his Facebook account on Aug. 15.
Abou El-Ghar criticized the discriminatory and bureaucratic obstacles that prevent building safe churches and called for more equality.
“The constitution clearly states that all Egyptians are equal, which means that Christians have the same rights as Muslims, and because Muslims build their mosques without problems, churches must also be built without problems,” El-Ghar said.
2. Al-Jazeera: “Egypt’s Copts want changes to law after deadly church fire”
3. Mustafa Akyol: “Muslims, Too, Can Defend Salman Rushdie’s Freedom”
In the hospital I visited a couple who had lived together for 60 years, we prayed together, and afterwards the husband said it was the first prayer in his life, and it filled him with joy. Three days later I learned he had died. His wife told me that in all those years she had never seen him so happy. She was very grateful. The man was in disbelief all his life but three days before his death, he met God.
5. From Charlie Camosy: “’Unimaginable cruelty and trauma’ — A survivor of forced sterilization speaks out”
After I was raped, I did not realize I was pregnant at first. A social worker approached my grandmother because of gossip in our neighborhood. I was taken to the health department in Hertford, North Carolina, a few miles away, where the pregnancy was confirmed.
I found out as an adult, when I was unable to get pregnant, that the social worker had coerced my grandmother to sign the letter “X” on documents agreeing to have me sterilized. My grandmother never completed first grade, and she could not read or write. She did not understand what she was signing, but she still signed “X” because the social worker threatened to end her welfare food supplements from the state of North Carolina.
These classist and racist eugenic sterilization policies that harmed me were promoted actively by Margaret Sanger and Dr. Alan Guttmacher of Planned Parenthood and their millionaire funders.
The social worker sent the signed “X” document to the eugenics board of North Carolina, which consisted of five white men who approved an order to sterilize me at 14 years old. This is unimaginable cruelty and trauma.
6. Abigail Favale: “Our Bodies, Our Selves: Gender Dysphoria and the Longing for Wholeness”
According to Laura Reynolds, a former trans-identified woman, the gender paradigm has “rebranded self-harm as self-care.” This is yet another contortion of language with devastating consequences. Clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria have shifted in recent years toward the affirmation model of care, which unquestioningly affirms a patient’s interpretation of his or her condition. This seems to be the lone corner of psychology where the typical approach to psychological distress is upended, where practitioners are encouraged to take a patient’s self-assessment at face value, rather than testing that assessment against reality.
What would it look like, I wonder, to take a so-called “affirmative” approach to my own mental illness? What would it sound like for a therapist to affirm my perception of reality? “Why yes, you should be hypervigilant at all times, especially during Mass, just in case a gunman shows up. You are in constant danger; your baby could die at any moment. Yes, your breasts aren’t really part of you since you feel so disconnected from them. In fact, you might consider amputating them, so your reflection doesn’t bother you anymore. And yes, if you feel like you are a terrible mother, I’m sure that you are.”
You may think I’m being flippant here, because those responses seem so absurd, the dire opposite of therapeutic. Yet when I listen to the stories of detransitioners, this is often how they describe their experiences with affirmative care. The affirming doctors and therapists do not explore other causes or potential solutions but send the patient straight down the medical transition track.
7. “How Canada ignored warnings that euthanasia would immediately go too far”
8. Thomas B. Griffith in the Wall Street Journal: “Yeshiva University Fights for Its Freedom of Religion: Schools should be able to have policies consistent with their faith, even if they are politically unpopular.”
In recent years, a spate of lawsuits have asked whether, and to what degree, religious colleges and universities are free to craft policies consistent with their religious values, even when those policies are unpopular with those who don’t share those values. These decisions run the gamut from the mundane—whether to allow tobacco, alcohol, caffeine or meat on campus—to the headline-grabbing—how to structure on-campus housing arrangements or decide which student clubs get official school recognition.
In these lawsuits, student plaintiffs typically ask the court to force the school to abandon a longstanding religious principle in favor of a policy incompatible with the school’s faith. But as judges continue to evaluate the legal merits of these cases, it is important to consider the real danger to the First Amendment, and to the continued viability of religious schools, each time a suit like this succeeds.
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As a former federal judge, I’ve seen how it is vital that these institutions remain free to make these decisions without government interference. If not, these laudable institutions will be presented with a Hobson’s choice: They can either continue to fulfill their mission of faith formation and pastoral guidance, or they can conform themselves to the government’s demands.
This pressure to conform is on full display in a case currently making its way up to the Supreme Court. In YU Pride Alliance v. Yeshiva University, plaintiffs have asked the lower courts to force Yeshiva to recognize an LGBTQ club on campus, which is inconsistent with Yeshiva’s interpretation of the Torah’s values. The New York courts agreed with the plaintiffs, denying Yeshiva’s repeated requests for a stay. With no other legal options available, Yeshiva is now asking the Supreme Court to step in and protect its religious identity once and for all. Whether right or wrong, and whether we agree or disagree with Yeshiva’s theology, the Supreme Court stated in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020) that the First Amendment provides robust protections for the types of “internal management decisions” that are “essential to” the “central mission” of religious schools, including those related to spiritual formation.
These protections force the government to keep its hands off an area in which it has no competency—religious doctrine—and afford religious schools the flexibility needed to fulfill their unique role. This hands-off approach is good not only for the religious, but also for government, keeping courts, legislatures and agencies out of the business of supervising religious controversies. And of course it benefits the students, who remain free to choose schools that best meet their intellectual and spiritual needs. When evaluating the merits of these suits, judges and all who benefit from the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution must safeguard these bedrock First Amendment principles.
9. “’I Gave My Son up for Adoption—We Both Had Better Lives’”
There are no easy choices when you’re facing an unplanned pregnancy. Adoption is hard. Abortion is hard. We are never free from the consequences of our actions. So we choose our hard and hope for a better tomorrow.
I knew that I would suffer no matter what decision I made, but I think I made the right one. Adoption gave both of us a future. It gave us both hope.
When you abort a baby, it’s a final decision and you can’t go back. When I placed Michael for adoption, I had hope. I could imagine what he was doing, imagine him happy, imagine him growing up and falling in love. I knew I had done what I could to give my child a good family, to make things right.
It’s frightening to be young, alone and pregnant. It can be tough to face the future in that situation. But I believe there is a lot we can do to instill hope and confidence in women who are considering abortion, such as improving access to basic healthcare and to maternity care.
It is my view that we should give these young women the support and information they need, so they can choose adoption, and hope, over the finality of abortion.
10. Elizabeth Kirk: Overview of Michigan Ballot Initiative: “Right to Reproductive Freedom”
The next interpretive question raised by the proposed amendment relates to the scope of the term “reproductive freedom.” The language provides that it “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy.” Is this clause (relating to pregnancy decisions) merely illustrative of the scope of “reproductive freedom” or is it definitional and therefore exhaustive? Even if the scope of “reproductive freedom” is limited to specifically pregnancy-related decisions, the language is breathtakingly broad. Within its scope, it includes “decisions about all matters” related to “prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.” None of these terms is defined. For example, could “infertility care” implicate a fundamental right to in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technologies? Could “sterilization” implicate a fundamental right to gender-reassignment surgeries? Is every decision related to prenatal care, childbirth, or postpartum care “fundamental”? Would the broad term “abortion care” justify a new constitutional protection for partial-birth abortions, in direct conflict with the federal prohibition on partial-birth abortions?
11. “LA convent-turned-maternity home meets critical need for pregnant moms”
12. “Prison Ministries Try to Break Back in After COVID-19”
13. “The Burial of a Young Mother”
We are called to form families, to get married and have children. This is hard enough in this day and age. But we are called to something more, and that is to found families, to intentionally found generations that are connected and know each other.
14. Fr. Paul Scalia: “The Seriousness of Humor”
Humility is the awareness of the truth about ourselves – the ability to see ourselves as we are. It’s the power to see ourselves in the proper proportion, neither greater nor lesser than we really are. This sense of proportion is necessary for humor. We laugh when something strikes us as out-of-proportion or incongruous. Humility is a sense of proportion and therefore leads to laughter. It prompts us to take our Lord seriously and ourselves lightly.
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This all may seem out of keeping with the seriousness of faith. But Scripture tells us that there is a time not only to weep but also to laugh. (cf. Eccl 3:4) Saint Thomas considers the lack of mirth a vice. He observes that the man without mirth. . .is burdensome to others. In her characteristically winsome manner, Saint Theresa of Avila prayed, “Lord, deliver me from sour-faced saints.”
Christian mirth is a fruit of trust. If we do not trust God, then we have no sense of proportion. Without trust in him, we see ourselves as in charge and responsible for everything. And there’s nothing funny about that. The man who trusts in God can both weep for his sins and laugh at his imperfections. He knows that God is in control, and that he is not. So, he can afford to be lighthearted.
This levity also guards against discouragement. The struggle to live the faith and raise families in the culture of death provides many opportunities for discouragement. To keep from being overwhelmed by trials, we must have a sense of humor. Without it, our engagement in the spiritual combat will quickly make us brittle, bitter, and resentful. We ought to be warriors, but joyful ones.
15. Francis X. Maier: “Our Parallel Polis”
[Václav] Benda is best known for his 1977 essay “The Parallel Polis.” Václav Havel and other dissident leaders borrowed heavily from its ideas. Benda argued for a strong moral witness against the evils of the ruling regime. But he also said that witness wasn’t enough. Reform from above was unlikely. So he pressed for the construction of an alternative, “second culture” closer to the real life and needs of the people; a parallel polis (i.e., community) with parallel structures to the harmful official ones, and designed to one day replace them.
The specifics of his plan were written forty-five years ago for a state very different from our own. But his basic insight – the need for a second culture of friendship and truth to counter a dominant culture of loneliness, conflict, and systematic lies – is more urgent than ever.
Benda died in 1999, a decade after his nation’s Velvet Revolution. But his example, and the Catholic faith that sustained and guided him, speak directly to us today. The elements Benda saw as essential to totalitarianism – “the atomization of society, the mutual isolation of the individuals, and the destruction of all bonds and verities which might enable them to relate to some sort of higher whole and meaning. . .beyond pure self-preservation and selfishness” – are more elegantly disguised and more shrewdly marketed in America in 2022. But they’re just as real.
And yet, we already have the second culture we need. It’s called the Church. We just need to live our faith as Benda did. In other words, like we really believe it.
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