If a Russian priest can do anything, it’s to find himself a wife. We stayed in Father Vadim’s house for several days, before and after little Vasily’s christening, and I was able to observe firsthand what a force of nature a good popadya, or matushka, or priest’s wife, becomes when pushed to extremes.
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.
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
“And should Trump get an encore, look to pre-World War II Germany for a mirror. A failed coup in 1923 taught Hitler a better route to dictatorship nine years later.
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.
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.
“Not those eat caviar who can afford it,” goes a Serbian proverb of what I have always thought is great perspicacity, “but those who are accustomed to eating it.” In some roundabout way, this saying explains why the less money I have in the bank, the more unanimous the general opinion that I am and have always been rich.
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?
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.
Back in November 1972, I was 17 years old and seven months shy of voting. But I campaigned against Proposal B, an initiative in Michigan that would have legalized abortion. We defeated it, with 61% voting Nay.
