I cannot believe what I have just read. Antonia Senior has written a piece for The Times of London in favor of killing human beings in order to further the Feminist cause. I am not kidding. This is what she wrote. You might think it a joke or a hoax, but it’s not. The article appears in a column in a major newspaper and is meant to be taken seriously. Here’s her argument in a nutshell. As a pro-choice feminist, Senior says she had always believed that an unborn child was not a life but a potential life. That was her belief until she finally had her own child. After…
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Christ & Katrina
Russell Moore’s reflections on the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is a must-read. He writes: “I always feared seeing my hometown turn into Armageddon, and five years ago, sure enough, that’s just what happened. As a small child, I would sit in the pews of my church and imagine, as our pastor flipped through one apocalyptic scenario after another in his prophecy charts, what our town—Biloxi, Mississippi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico—would look like after the seals of the Book of Revelation had been opened, after all hell broke loose on the world as we knew it… “I outgrew the dispensationalism (while holding onto the gospel underneath…
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Ross Douthat on Feminism
Ross Douthat writes that a the slew of female primary victors last Tuesday constitutes a victory for feminism—even though they were by and large conservative candidates. He writes: “What Tuesday’s results demonstrated, convincingly, is that America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office. More strikingly, they’re comfortable voting for working mothers — for women publicly juggling careers and family obligations in ways that would have been unthinkable for the generations of female leaders, from Elizabeth I’s Virgin Queen down to Margaret Thatcher’s Iron Lady, who were expected to unsex themselves before being entrusted with the responsibilities of…
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Andrea Bocelli’s Pro-life Story
I didn’t know that Bocelli’s own story was a pro-life one, but it is. What makes testimonials like this one so powerful is that they cut through all the distracting garbage that afflicts the abortion debate in our culture. Stories like this one slice right through the morally bankrupt arguments of pro-choicers. Who could say with a straight face to Bocelli, “Your mother could have had you killed in utero, and that would have been a good decision too”? When you clear away all the confusing legal arguments and debates, the bottom line is this. Unborn babies are persons. They aren’t pre-human; they are human. It’s wrong to kill innocent…
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Was Shakespeare Christian?
Anthony Esolen makes the case in First Things that Shakespeare was a profoundly Christian playwrite. He writes: “There is an abundance of evidence to show that Shakespeare was a profoundly Christian playwright—and far more thoroughly concerned with the theology of grace, repentance, and redemption than any of his contemporaries. Here I should like to note one characteristic of his view of the world that seems to spring from his Christian faith—for it certainly does not spring from any recrudescence of paganism in the Renaissance, nor from the worldly laxity that sets in with the fading of western man’s assurance of Christian dogma and morals. For Shakespeare, chastity is as near…
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Lady Gaga and Spirituality
David Mills has a few things to say about Lady Gaga and spirituality at First Things. In particular, he deconstructs the trend toward “spirituality” as an alternative to “religion.” He writes, ‘It’s a great and self-serving mess, this claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” which we hear from almost anyone who talks about religion in public… So we find Lady Gaga, the pornographic songstress, telling a reporter for The Times that she has a new spirituality just before taking her out for a night at a Berlin sex club. Asked by the reporter, “You were raised a Catholic — so when you say ‘God,’ do you mean the Catholic…
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England’s exhausted, bleeding sons
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the great rescue at Dunkirk. On May 27, 1940, the British army had fallen back to the beaches of Dunkirk in the north of France. In front of them was the German army, and behind them was the sea. These British soldiers and their French allies were the last line of defense between England and Hitler, and they were about to be crushed. There were over 300,000 of them trapped on the beach. What happened next is the stuff of legend. Some say it was nothing short of a miracle. In his biography of Winston Churchill, William Manchester narrates it best: ‘The French…
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Miss USA, Feminism, and the Pornification of Women
Mary Kassian has an exhortation to young women who are being influenced by feminism and its pornification of women in our culture. She uses the recent Miss USA contest as a case in point. She writes: ‘It’s the ultimate irony that the foundational beliefs of feminism have contributed to the increased sexual objectification and pornographication of women.
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Ray Boltz in the NY Times
Many of you will remember that in 2008 Christian pop music star Ray Boltz came out as a gay man. That was two years ago, but today’s New York Times has a profile of Boltz’s new album that was released in April. Now, after more than five years of self-imposed absence from stage and CD, Mr. Boltz has reached a musical and religious destination. As an openly gay man, living in a gay-friendly part of South Florida with his partner, Franco Sperduti, he has released his first album since coming out.
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Same-sex “Marriage” and Interracial Marriage
It has become fairly common for people to make a moral equivalence between bans on interracial marriage and bans on same-sex marriage. The comparison is used to drive home the point that just as one’s race shouldn’t be used as a precondition for marriage, so neither should be same-sex pairings. Frank Beckwith has a must-read post arguing that from a legal standpoint, the analogy doesn’t hold-up. He writes: