Author: Thomas Fleming
Poem by Lawrence Binyon
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Rationalizing Abortion
Most modern schools of philosophy base morality on the principles of reason, and the principal accounts of moral development emphasize growth in moral reasoning rather than moral behavior. To be a human person in this sense would mean that an individual is conscious of his own existence and capable of making rational decisions, including the decision to remain alive.
An Apology from the Editor
The website has been neglected for over ten days. Initially, the cause was the Summer Seminar, which went beautifully–more on that in a day or two. The past five days, another round of COVID, this one comparatively mild, has taken me out of the picture. Today, I am no longer content to lie on the sofa, coughing and groaning as I listen to a reading of The Day of the Jackal, but I am actually doing proof-reading and and attending to business that is not too taxing to my befuddled brain.
Abortion and the Laws of Nature, Part II
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
The Joke’s On Whom?
So Joe Biden got caught actually reading the script instructions his handlers had given him. In claiming it was a joke, they are asking us to believe Joe is capable of telling a joke.
Abortion and the Laws of Nature
The obligation to care for one’s offspring is a human universal, like the incest taboo or the prohibition of murder. Human and primate mothers, as a rule, devote themselves to their children, and mother-love is regarded conventionally as the most selfless and irrational forms of human attachment.
Unholy Dying, Part II: Viability–The Receding Horizon
No argument can be put forward for abortion that cannot be applied to infanticide. When does a woman’s right to control her body stop? If she gives birth in the wild, does a mother have a moral obligation to nurse a newborn and warm it with her body?
The Great Revolution: III: Equality, Part D, The Liberal Tradition
By Liberal Tradition, I am referring to an intellectual current that begins in the Renaissance, takes ideological shape in the 17th and 18th centuries and is decked out as a complete ethical, political, and economic theory by such writers as Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, and ultimately spawns its socialist mirror image in Marx.
Unholy Dying, Part I: The Abortion Debate
In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view.
