Twenty Things That Caught My Eye: Fearing the Taliban; Being Unserious about Child Welfare; David Beckham Waits in Line for the Queen & More

1. J. D. Long-Garcia: Thousands of Afghan refugees fled to America in search of a new home. Too many are still waiting.

“We are afraid of the Taliban,” she said. “In the U.S.A. we are safe, but in Afghanistan we have our own house. If the Taliban see us [in the media], maybe they will take our house, or burn it down.”

2. Catholic News Service: Kidnapped Nun Sustained by Prayer in Captivity

Sister Suellen, 83, was abducted by a group of armed men the night of April 4-5 from the medical mission residence in Yalgo she had shared since 2013 with two other Marianite sisters and lay employees.

Through Sister Suellen’s ordeal, the Marianites of Holy Cross, of which she is the former international leader, heard nothing about her whereabouts. She was freed peacefully in late August in neighboring Niger into the custody of the FBI and U.S. Embassy and Air Force personnel.

No ransom was paid, Sister Suellen said, another one of the inscrutable mysteries of her harrowing experience.

Speaking from New Orleans where she returned quietly Aug. 31, Sister Suellen expressed gratitude that her life was spared and for the invisible actions of the uncounted people who prayed and worked for her release.

“Prayer sustained me,” she said. “I went through my Mass every day. I did each part of the Mass and received spiritual Communion. … That was the thing that kept me going because I had nothing.”

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4. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Child Welfare Is Becoming a Joke

The field is mired in risible theory and impenetrable jargon, and increasingly divorced from concern with the welfare of children.

5. Daily Signal: Debunking Abortion Myths

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, founded the same year as the landmark abortion case in 1973, has ramped up its efforts to combat the abortion industry in its August report “Correcting Misinformation on Maternal Medical Care.”

The report cites “abortion is an essential healthcare service” and “unrestricted abortion access is necessary for providing life-saving care for pregnant women” as two common myths that medical boards and media outlets have pushed.

Dr. Christina Francis, CEO-elect of the pro-life association and a practicing OB-GYN, told The Daily Signal in an interview that abortion advocates have turned to scare tactics in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. “When Roe was the law of the land, they didn’t have to work very hard to get their way in the courts,” she said.

6. David Novak on Public Discourse: The Bible Does Not Condone Abortion, It Condemns It

Now that Dobbs has made abortion a state issue once more, debates about abortion gained greater urgency. One matter that has long been a source of contention is whether the Bible says anything about abortion—and if so what it says. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible or “Old Testament,” it is usually the pro-life side that invokes the biblical commandment, “thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17), along with several biblical commandments that require society to punish those who do intentionally kill their fellow humans (for example, Leviticus 25:21). For them, to abort a fetus (whom they prefer to call an “unborn child”), is murder. Based on the Bible’s prohibitions against killing such as these, its teaching about the sanctity of human life, and its penalties for negligence that lead to miscarriages, it is clear that the Bible by no means condones abortion—and indeed even condemns it.

Pro-life advocates would be better advised to show the evident reasons for these biblical prohibitions, and how these reasons are compatible with existing prohibitions and penalizations of abortion in non-religious polities. Indeed, the Bible’s prohibition “thou shalt not kill” only formulates in writing what the Bible itself assumes is a self-evident prohibition, already having moral authority throughout the world. That is why God holds Cain accountable for the murder of his brother Abel (Genesis 4:6-12), even though no written proscription had yet been promulgated anywhere in the world.

7. Bishop Earl Boyea: Fight Like Heaven Against Abortion

What is distinctive is how Catholics fight battles. Yes, we have every right to use all the means any citizen uses but we have greater “weapons” at our disposal. Bishop Boyea exhorts us to “fight like heaven” against those who are going to “fight like hell” (the pro-aborts’ words) to prevail on this measure.

How wonderful these words are! Too often Church officials speak of the means of spiritual warfare as means of last resort, but Bishop Boyea puts spiritual actions first and asks a lot of spiritual warriors. He called for a 54-day novena! I actually get goosebumps writing that. Not just a holy hour or just a single Rosary but a 54-day novena beginning on Sept 15 and ending on Nov. 8, polling day. My parish has already determined to keep the Church open for longer hours so we can pray in front of the Blessed Sacrament and pray together. Bishop Boyea also urges fasting and almsgiving and the action of working to persuade others of the sanctity of human life.

8. Kay Hymowitz in City Journal: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry

The subtitle of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is “A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.” It alludes to Perry’s admirable determination to go beyond cultural analysis to offer actual recommendations for the young women readers she is hoping to attract. She suggests a strong dose of much-needed sexual realism—including an acceptance “of the existence of the sexual asymmetry.” Many of her concluding admonitions are sad reflections of how lost some of her readers may be: “a man who is aroused by violence is a man to stay away from . . . whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM.” Bromides are a professional hazard in the advice business, and Perry does not wholly avoid them: “We should treat our sexual partners with dignity,” she explains. “We should not treat others as mere body parts to be enjoyed.” Luckily, her rigorous and lucid explications of modern sexual dilemmas illuminate the reasons such clichés exist.

9. Leah Libresco Sargeant: Designing Woman: Does the world we build welcome mothers, or does it treat them as a problem to be solved?

When the world makes demands of women that are impossible to fulfill, we are offered ways to “fix” our bodies. Unaugmented, many women find that female bodies and female fertility are expected to be standardized and made “safe” to be welcome in the world.

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11. Harvard Crimson: Fifteen Questions with Harvey Mansfield

FM: I know you are conservative, but are you a Trump supporter?

HCM: No. I voted for him in 2020. I’m definitely not a Democrat. He did some things that Republicans like, and some things that they don’t — all his boorishness. So for the Democrats, they put those together. Whereas to a Republican like me, there were some good things that I liked, like his Supreme Court appointments, tax cut, the turn against China, things like that. But then, the January 6 thing, I crossed him off my list totally. I never want to see him again. Because that was what I feared and a lot of other people feared would happen during his presidency, but didn’t quite. I think he’s had a very bad influence on America and on the Republicans, and they need to get rid of him.

12.  Stephanie Slade in Reason: As Liberalism Falls, Authoritarianism Rises to Take Its Place

According to American National Election Studies data, the share of Americans who self-identify as moderates or say they don’t know what they are has fallen from 55 percent in 1972 to 39 percent in 2020. In that sense, people really have been moving toward the poles. But if partisan consolidation is the story of the last few decades, the story of the last few years is one of fracturing. More people are calling themselves conservatives, for example, but their preferences and priorities are not necessarily shared.

The future of the parties is now a matter of live debate. But in both cases, the elements that seem to have the most energy behind them have something important in common: a desire to move their side, and the country as a whole, in an illiberal direction

On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties. On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support.

13.  Scott Winship: What a New Study Gets Wrong About Child Poverty and the Social Safety Net

The New York Times this week reported on a new child poverty study with two big findings. First, child poverty has fallen by 59 percent between 1993 and 2019. Second, the most important reason for the decline was the expanding social safety net. The first finding is true but not exactly breaking news. The second finding is simply false—and bolsters a counterproductive progressive framing around anti-poverty policy.

14. Jason Bedrick & Jonathan Butcher: Arizona Shows The Nation What Education Freedom Looks Like

Families want education freedom, and Arizona is a national model for how to provide it. The state is ranked second overall, behind only Florida, in the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Report Card. The report surveys all 50 states and Washington, D.C., in the areas of education choice, academic transparency, regulatory freedom for schools, and a high return on investment for taxpayer spending on education. Arizona is ranked in the top five in three of the four categories.

Arizona lawmakers’ embrace of choice, transparency, and regulatory freedom has produced a solid return on investment, ranking 13th nationwide. Education spending has been held to reasonable levels, though the state’s unfunded teacher pension liability represents 8.3 percent of its GDP. Although Arizona’s scores on the NAEP are still middling, they’ve improved significantly over the past two decades, and Arizona’s charter sector is competitive on the NAEP with the top states in the nation.

15. The Hill: Fewer Than Half of Americans Can Name All Three Branches of Government

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual Constitution Day Civics Survey found a significant drop in the percentage of Americans who could name all three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — falling by 9 percentage points from a year earlier.

About a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch.

The survey also found a decline in the number of respondents who could name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.

16. Andrew T. Walker: Honoring the Life of Eliza Fletcher

By media accounts, Eliza Fletcher was a loving wife and mother, a pillar of her community, a teacher, and from all appearances, a lovely Christian woman. One video shows her on social media singing “This Little Light of Mine” to her students during the darkest days of the pandemic’s lockdown.

Then came the horrible news that her body had been found, dead, the victim of a brutal murder, the details of which are still unknown. Her funeral was two days ago, on Saturday.

How on earth we can live in a world where a woman can do something as simple as get in a morning run and lose her life for it still confounds me, despite my firm grasp of humanity’s sinful plight. How can humanity be so evil, so cruel, and so vicious? How long, O Lord (Psalm 13)?

Lest I end this column grimly, let me draw attention to what the best of humanity can do when confronted with evil—grieve and honor. Friends of Mrs. Fletcher within the Memphis running community hosted a “Finish Liza’s Run” memorial to commemorate her life. It looked to be a beautiful tribute to a beautiful life lost to a horrific injustice that one can only hope and pray is swiftly and rightly judged.

17. Father Roger J. Landry: How the Eucharist Shaped the Life of Cardinal Nguyen Van Thaun

One of the greatest privileges of my life was to get to know, during my seminary years in Rome, the Venerable Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the heroic former archbishop of Saigon who was imprisoned by the communist forces in Vietnam for 13 years, including nine in solitary confinement.

After his release, he was expelled from his country and St. John Paul II made him the vice president, then the president, of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (now part of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development). John Paul II would ask him to preach the retreat for the Roman Curia during the Great Jubilee of 2000 and would name him a cardinal the following year.

Pope Francis declared Van Thuan venerable in 2017 and now the only thing needed for his beatification is a medically-inexplicable miracle — and so I’ve been matchmaking those who need a miracle with his cause’s similar need.

His priestly vocation was discovered as a young boy participating in the various activities of the Eucharistic Crusade movement in his hometown of Hue, Vietnam. Later, as a seminarian, priest, seminary professor, rector and bishop, his Eucharistic faith and piety grew. But it was during his years of imprisonment that he gave an extraordinary testimony to the power of the Mass, the reality of the Lord’s presence, and the gift of Eucharistic adoration.

18. New York Post: 9/11 ‘miracle’ babies, now turning 21, were lifesavers for families

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20. CNN: England football legend David Beckham queued for 13 hours to pay his respects to the Queen