1.
In 2016 Lanny Cordola moved to Kabul to teach young Afghan girls guitar. I am honored to join @tmorello @BethHart @nilslofgren Victoria Williams & other artists to raise awareness for his girls and all still abandoned in Afghanistan in singing Tom’s beautiful “God Help Us All”♥️ pic.twitter.com/EYb06eJmT7
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) February 18, 2022
2. Julie Asher: New FDA head criticized for role in expanding availability of abortion pill
New rules announced by the FDA March 30, 2016, effectively expanded how pregnant women can use RU-486, a drug that induces abortion, allow them to use it later into pregnancy and make fewer visits to a doctor.
3. Fred Lucas: This Religious Prosecution in Finland Could Be ‘Harbinger’ for Other Democracies
A court in Finland heard final arguments this week in the prosecution of a member of Parliament and a Lutheran bishop for expressing opposition to same-sex marriage.
Charged under Finland’s “ethnic agitation law” are Päivi Räsänen, a member of Parliament who also is a medical doctor and former interior minister, and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. Each faces up to two years in prison if convicted.
4. Andrea Bottner: Women Are Removed From The Violence Against Women Act
This version of VAWA puts forth a new pilot program focusing upon Restorative Practices. Restorative Practices are efforts to bring those who have committed crimes together with the victims of those crimes to identify and address the damage caused by the crime. Those who support this sort of activity think that victims are empowered, because they have been given a voice. The hope is that offenders will hold themselves accountable and take responsibility for what they have done. Basically, the parties will “talk it out.”
Our criminal justice system is predicated on the notion that actions have consequences and accountability is crucial to a safe society. Many national organizations have been opposed to restorative practices being used in the context of domestic violence and sexual assault. There is very little research to show that it is effective or even safe. Survivors are often intimidated or manipulated by their abusers. This VAWA assumes that survivors would be voluntarily agreeing to go through a restorative practices process. What if they aren’t? How will we know?
5. Italy’s constitutional court blocks physician-assisted suicide referendum
Italy’s constitutional court on Tuesday blocked a referendum to decriminalize physician-assisted suicide in the country, citing inadequate legal protections for the weak and vulnerable.
The leadership of the Italian bishops’ conference welcomed the court’s decision in a Feb. 15 statement.
6. Andrew T. Walker: Religious liberty is not “Christian Nationalism”
Recently, religious liberty was haphazardly equated with Christian Nationalism in what can only be called a very superficial, cynical misinterpretation of a bedrock provision tied to the Constitution’s First Amendment. In a column for CNN, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons and Maggie Siddiqi engage in generalizations and grand pronouncements that are common in our culture wars rhetoric, especially against principles such as religious liberty which are viewed suspiciously as a means of harming others.
What’s the crux of their argument? According to Fitzsimmons and Siddiqi, and reported also in The Washington Post, a Jewish couple from Tennessee was denied participation in a foster care certification program that receives state funding because the organization — the Holston United Methodist Home for Children — overseeing the training only fosters and adopts to parents who agree with their statement of faith. To complicate matters, to facilitate the out-of-state adoption the couple sought, Holston was the only agency near their home in the county where they reside that offered the necessary foster-to-adopt training for out-of-state placements.
A statement from Brad Williams, the president of Holston, is quoted in The Washington Post noting how the organization is fully in compliance with Tennessee law, which protects religiously-affiliated adoption and foster care agencies, and the U.S. Constitution: “Holston Home places children with families that agree with our statement of faith, and forcing Holston Home to violate our beliefs and place children in homes that do not share our faith is wrong and contrary to a free society.”
However, that did not stop the couple from fostering to adopt. The article reveals that the couple in question were still able to foster-to-adopt through other agencies and are doing just that.
7. Wall Street Journal editorial: Catholic Schools’ Good Covid Year
Catholic schools have educated millions of Americans, and their decline in recent decades has been a cultural and educational tragedy. But crisis creates opportunity, and the news is that Catholic schools staged a surprising enrollment rebound during the pandemic. Imagine that: Stay open to teach children, and they will come.
The National Catholic Educational Association reports that enrollment in U.S. Catholic schools increased by 62,000 students—3.8%—from fall 2020 to fall 2021. That’s the highest one-year increase the organization has recorded and the first enrollment upswing in two decades.
8.
The Archdiocese of Washington is making masks optional in Catholic schools in DC—and calling on @MayorBowser to do the same for children in public schools.
It’s time to put parents back in charge and end mask mandates. https://t.co/LD3pfbs3YW
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) February 18, 2022
9. Peggy Noonan: San Francisco Schools the Left
What was astonishing as you followed the story is what seemed the board members’ shock at parental pushback. They seemed so detached from the normal hopes of normal people. They seemed honestly unaware of them. It was as if they were operating in some abstract universe in which their decisions demonstrated their praiseworthy antiracist bona fides. But voters came to see their actions as a kind of woke progressive vandalism that cleverly avoided their central responsibility: to open the schools.
10. Evagelos Sotiropoulos: Moscow’s Expansionism Is Destroying Orthodox Church Unity
At the same time that Moscow is extending its ecclesiastical footprint, it is also escalating its communication and misinformation warfare, specifically targeting Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. One tactic deployed by Moscow, and especially Hilarion, the Russian metropolitan responsible for external relations, is to focus on popular Greek-language church news websites in order to divide and thus weaken the Greek-speaking Orthodox world.
This approach is not new: in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, for instance, articles were fabricated and published in Russian-connected websites embellishing Patriarch Bartholomew’s connection to Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish president attributed the coup to, to increase animosity towards the Patriarchate.
10. Stephen Elde: Crime and Mental Illness in New York City: Framing the Challenge for the New Mayor
11. Milo Boyd: Chinese political prisoner saved from organ harvesting by chance comment to guard
12. Clare Morell: What States Can Do to Combat Big Tech to Protect Children
13. Nicole Gelinas: New York City’s War on Women
Kristal Bayron-Nieves, Michelle Go, Dorothy Clarke-Rozier, and now, Christina Yuna Lee—four women, all making their way in the big city, all murdered by strange men in the first six weeks of 2022. Over the past two years, New York City has become increasingly unsafe for everyone—men, women, and children. But an explosion of horrific male violence against women in public spaces is a particularly acute sign of the city’s failures. Textbook urban policy holds that cities thrive only when women feel safe in public spaces; no sane woman feels safe in New York right now.
Early Sunday morning, Lee, a 35-year-old producer at a digital-music firm, took a cab home to her Chinatown apartment after a night out. A stalker followed her from the curb, trapped her in her apartment, and stabbed her to death. Just a week earlier, Clarke-Rozier, 50, walking to her job at a Brooklyn supermarket, was stabbed to death by another stranger. Clarke-Rozier died just a month after Go, a 40-year-old professional at Deloitte, was pushed to death in front of a Times Square subway train. Just a week before that, on January 9 of this year, Bayron-Nieves, a 19-year-old aspiring nurse, was shot to death during her shift at a Harlem Burger King. The four killings represent an acceleration of a trend that emerged last year: Maria Ambrocio, a 58-year-old nurse, killed last October in Times Square; Than Than Htwe, 58, a garment worker, pulled to death down a set of subway steps last August. Though no woman should feel safe in the city, Asian-American females are in particular peril: Lee, Go, Ambrocio, and Htwe were all of Asian descent.
Even with New York’s City’s overall murder rate up 53 percent in two years— from 319 in 2019 to 488 last year—these murders are especially dislocating. In each case, there was nothing the victim could have done to prevent her death. There’s no excuse for any murder, but most murder victims, now as always, are men who know their killers, and many, if not most, are engaged in high-risk criminal activity. Nor does robbery appear to be the motive behind any of these recent murders, save for Bayron-Nieves’s. (Ambrocio’s killer was allegedly fleeing an earlier robbery). Even in Bayron-Nieves’s case, the alleged killer shot and killed her after she had complied with all his requests, implying an extra level of malice. It’s impossible to recall so many fatal stranger-on-stranger attacks on women in such a short time, seemingly motivated by nothing other than misogynistic and, perhaps, racial hatred. We all like to think we have some measure of control over our own public safety, but what could any of these women have done to remain alive, besides not go outside?
14.
“If a cis woman gets caught taking testosterone twice, she’s banned for life, whereas Lia has had 10 years of testosterone,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a three-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming and the president of the advocacy group Champion Women.https://t.co/Hk7IpYLOFc
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) February 17, 2022
15. Virginia Allen: Far Left Attempts to Dehumanize Pregnancy
16.
Virginia has withdrawn from an unsuccessful lawsuit that disrespects our nation’s constitutional amendment process, and threatens women’s rights and opportunities 1/2 https://t.co/CfrNMj1Q7v
— Kristen Waggoner (@KWaggonerADF) February 18, 2022
17. Bipartisan Missouri legislation aims to provide a year of health care for new moms
18. Vatican speaker says palliative care is a ‘revolutionary endeavor’
19. Priest who gave life to save teen among Spanish martyrs to be beatified
20. Paul Melley: Church Renewal Can Only Emerge From Love
Karl Rahner once wrote, “There are things that can only be understood by someone who loves them. The Church is one of these.” But if we are to talk about loving the Church, what do we mean? It has become understandably easy for Catholics to imagine that the Church is the hierarchy or Magisterium or its ritual forms of expression—and it certainly includes all these things. However, it must be emphasized that love for the Church is first an encounter not with something, but someone—Jesus Christ in the presence of the Spirit.
21.
“There is a willingness, and even eagerness, to bring the weight and power of government to bear on controlling classroom speech. And as is always the case in such times, students will be the ones to pay the price.” @PENamerica @JeffreyASachs @jzfriedman https://t.co/UQusBT3e4D
— Heterodox Academy (@HdxAcademy) February 17, 2022
22. David Mills: What to Read to Know Dorothy Day Better
23. Fr. Timothy J. Cusick: Priestly Poverty
Perhaps a story told by Cardinal Dolan can explain the kind of poverty to which priests might be called. Dolan, visiting a Dominican friar, noticed that his room was austere. He asked the friar where he kept the rest of his belongings. The friar said that this was all he had, and then remarked that Dolan himself had only a suitcase with him. The Cardinal responded, “But I’m just passing through.” The friar replied, “Aren’t we all?”
Indeed, Vatican II stated that the spirit of evangelical poverty is something to which all Christians should aspire. Evangelical poverty begins with the understanding that all created objects are ephemeral, and the desire to use them for the glory of God and the aid of our brothers and sisters. As Ignatius of Loyola expressed the matter, “I should use these things to the extent that they help me toward my end, and rid myself of them to the extent that they hinder me. To do this, I must make myself indifferent to all created things, in regard to everything which is left to my freedom of will and is not forbidden.”
This dedication can deepen when we consider that we pursue evangelical poverty in imitation of Christ, who, St. Paul tells us, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). In the Incarnation, Christ stripped himself of his glory, accepting what Christopher Franks has called his ontological poverty: his self-abasement in humility before his heavenly Father in accepting the human condition. The French School of Spirituality describes this form of poverty as anéantissement, our “nothingness” before God. We should not take this to mean that we are worthless—not at all!—but rather that we are constantly receiving God’s gift of being. We adopt an attitude of trustful dependence in the face of our vulnerability in a fallen world, commending ourselves to God’s providential care.
Spiritual poverty must, however, be reinforced by some form of material poverty. Perhaps my possessions don’t “own” me, but that doesn’t mean that I am virtuous in my use of material goods or my openness to the poor. Jesus’s example is helpful here as well. He was born in a stable, and when he was presented in the Temple, his parents offered the gift of the poor. He told a would-be disciple, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:57). He and his disciples were dependent, too, upon a group of women as they journeyed from town to town. And he ended his earthly life stripped of everything that could be called his.
24. Karen Swallow Prior: The Puritans Were Masters of Rhetoric Because Rhetoric Wasn’t the Point
25.
Say a prayer for this young man! https://t.co/aeEfz97wPl
— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) February 15, 2022
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/twenty-five-things-that-caught-my-eye-today-remembering-the-abandoned-in-afghanistan-the-catholic-school-rebound-more/