1. Lord have mercy on this heartbroken family — the heroic birth mother and heroic adoptive parents and all who love them.
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6. NBC New York: ‘My Son Is Gone:’ Heartache, Tears at Funeral of 1-Year-Old Killed in NYC Shooting
With a stroke of his pen, a single federal judge in Maryland has struck down a longstanding health regulation from the Food and Drug Administration that was designed to provide women with a modicum of contact with a member of the medical profession.
In a giant leap backward for humankind, Judge Theodore Chuang imposed a new policy, initially limited to the era of COVID-19, that allows abortion facilities to operate essentially as pill mills.
8. BBC News: Mexico Supreme Court rejects state’s bid to decriminalise abortion
9. George W. Bush at John Lewis’s funeral
10. R.I.P.
11. Walter Russell Mead: “There are still liberals in the Arab world, and some of them are secular, but nobody thinks they will drive policy for the foreseeable future.”
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Catholic schools are worth saving not only for the proven results in serving children from low-income, working-class and middle-income families, but because of the impact our schools have on American society as a whole.
14. Jonathan V. Last: Why Are Americans Having Fewer Babies?
One of the most underappreciated correlations to demographic collapse, however, is religiosity. While adherence to a given religion does not correlate strongly with fertility outcomes, attendance of religious services does. The more often you go to church, synagogue, or mosque, the more children you are likely to have. By quite a lot. A woman who attends services weekly will have almost twice the number of children, over her lifetime, as a women who never attends services.
15. Institute for Family Studies: Living a Life of Purpose: An Interview with Michelle Singletary
I think one way out of poverty is that you just have to have people helping you and you must have a purpose. I remember the Reverend Jesse Jackson coming to my elementary school, and he gave his “I Am Somebody” speech. He kept saying, “You are somebody. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you’re not.” He said, “You might have come from a broken home, your parents might have abandoned you, you might have been abused, but you are still somebody.”
16. Courtney Martin: The Little Grief Alongside the Big
Importantly for me–a fixer, a doer, a skilled wielder of an eye-rolling #firstworldproblems within my own head: we must acknowledge the little griefs. I needed to register that there was a picture in my head of what my daughter deserved and I couldn’t give it to her. I don’t know when I will ever be able to give it to her again. And then there’s this: she’ll never turn four again. The moments that are happening in these, our pandemic-time lives, aren’t re-livable. And that made me sad at depths that surprised me.
17. Nick Ripatrazone: Contemplating creation through the lens of a wildlife camera
The photos and short videos offer moments of shared contemplation and awe in response to God’s creations—a daily reminder that the world is more than humans alone and that we can appreciate wildlife without harming or bothering them. It’s a daily devotional that we hope will cultivate a sense of wonder in our daughters.
18. Casey Chalk: Which Americans Are Really “Highly Effective People”?
In his discussion of Habit 2 (“Keep the End in Mind”), Covey argues that “by centering our lives on timeless, unchanging principles, we create a fundamental paradigm of effective living. It is the center that puts all other centers in perspective.” He rejects paradigms that are spouse-centered, money-centered, work-centered, pleasure-centered, friend-centered, self-centered, and even church-centered.
19. Terry Pluto: Faith & You: Not in the mood to ‘rejoice in suffering,’ even if it may be true
But in the middle of a crisis, we tend to forget about the other times when “God brought us through,” as some people would say.
It’s almost as if our memories of pain and suffering producing something good are deleted because of what we are dealing with today.
One of the best ways to help someone in the middle of a painful mess is to ask them, “Can you think of something very hard in life and how you made it through?”
21. Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble: Behaving Virtuously in the Online Wild West
We must beware of the temptation to consider our online life devoid of moral implications. The internet is not a playground parallel to the universe of actions by which we’ll be judged by God upon our death and at the end of time; digital sin can be just as damning as those we commit in person.
22. Francis X. Maier: Brave New World Revisited
Huxley sounds quite sensible. But I’m no longer convinced by his reasoning; it’s too reasonable. If today’s street violence and political extremism serve any good purpose, it’s this: They remind us that humans have a chronic appetite for destruction. Hate, revenge, the desire to vindicate ourselves by humiliating, or simply annihilating, others: These are poisonous feelings. But they’re also delicious ones, and we each have a dark, inner laboratory where we perfect the flavor of our grievances.
23. Eliot A. Cohen: Go Memorize a Poem
It is trite but true to say that we live in a time of acute anxiety—about the pandemic, social injustice, even the very foundations of our political order. We live, too, in a time when a posture of victimhood and one of its more dangerous variants, fragility, have become characteristic across the left and the right. Robust poems committed to memory can counteract the corrosive effects of self-pity. They can offer a different way of viewing the world, particularly to generations that did not suffer the buffetings of the early and mid-20th century, and are now bewildered by the calamities that seem to arise from nowhere, and leave them powerless.
24. Catholic World Report: Knights of Columbus in Alberta build gardens for maternity house
Peter Dugandzic, who has been in the Knights for 15 years, expressed the importance of the Elizabeth House. He said the Knights will continue to support the group, noting that the Knights’ next project will be to construct a Marian grotto in the backyard. He said the Knights are already in contact with the previous designer of the last grotto and they expect construction to begin in the fall.
“[This facility provides] for these young ladies and it brings in the appropriate support to help them emotionally, financially, and from a health perspective to ensure that they’re under the best of care and that they begin a new life with a stable environment for success moving forward in terms of helping them develop life skills, a plan for the future, which would include education,” he told CNA.
25. Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith
What I understand now is that I was one of those who did not appreciate the weapons of the spirit. I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I hate to admit it. But I don’t think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power.
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