1. This is wonderful:

2. Mike Pence announces Genocide Recovery Program for Iraqi minorities.

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4. Ashley McGuire in the Wall Street Journal about how Humanae Vitae “saved” her and made her Catholic:

I first read “Humanae Vitae”—which Pope Paul VI published 50 years ago July 29—when I was 21. As a senior at Tufts University, hardly a bastion of Christian belief, sheer curiosity brought me to the controversial papal encyclical. I knew only that it banned contraception. How could a billion people around the world embrace such a backward religion?
Two years later, I was baptized and received into the Catholic Church. “Humanae Vitae” was my gateway. Disillusioned with a culture that habitually objectifies women, I found the document stirring—as did countless other converts—with its call to safeguard “the reverence due to a woman.”
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The teachings in “Humanae Vitae” extend beyond organic sex. As those who benefited from its wisdom attest, holding nothing back from your spouse is a choice that can be transformative. Another fellow adherent, a lawyer, told me that embracing the teaching caused her to see not only her spouse, but everything, as sacred.
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The trust spouses place in each other imitates the transcendent trust that faith teaches us to put in the divine when things aren’t fully within our control. This sounds insane to a culture where the individual reigns supreme, but marriage is, after all, a call to abandon ourselves fully to another in love.
Women in particular stand to benefit from Pope Paul VI’s prescient teachings about men, women and love. “A man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman,” he wrote. This risks reducing a woman to “a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.” In the #MeToo era, his words are more relevant than ever. Removing contraception from the equation frustrates selfishness and demands of men that they always account for the whole woman. Women appalled by the prevalence of sexual abuse might give the document a look.
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Surprisingly, receptivity to the church’s teaching on contraception is highest among millennials. That might be because “Humanae Vitae” is as radical today as it ever was. And a small but passionate cohort of Catholic youth stand ready not only to defend it, but to share its truths with a world greatly in need of them.

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6. The Jewish Position On Abortion Isn’t What You Think It Is

7. Somerset Maugham on making mistakes.

8. A beautiful piece in First Things that includes this from Henri du Lubac:

The best Christians and the most vital are by no means found either inevitably or even generally among the wise and clever, the intelligentsia or the politically minded, or those of social consequence. … Their lives are hidden from the eyes of the world. … they are the source of all initiative and action, all spadework that is not to be fruitless. It is these people who are our preservation and who give us hope.

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