Hiatus

This blog is going to go on a hiatus for a few months.  I have a major project I have to get off the ground at work, and family responsibilities are kicking in at the same time. So, I'm not going to have the time or the mental energy left over to do any serious blogging.  I'm not giving up on the blog -- far from it! -- but I am going to step away until the project for work is substantially complete and my relatives are in better condition.  I probably won't be back blogging regularly until August or so. So, I will see you then!

What to say about Boston?

Pray for the victims, for the wounded, and for those caring for the injured.  And read this reflection by John Hinderaker: One Word on the Boston Massacre. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) As Hinderaker writes:

News reports indicate that a number of runners crossed the finish line and kept on running to the nearest hospital, to give blood. There was remarkably little panic; instead, a well-organized rescue effort. So far only three people have been confirmed dead, one of them an eight-year-old child. Probably that number will rise. But the prompt and effective reaction by so many, amateurs as well as trained professionals, undoubtedly prevented the death toll from being much worse. We should be proud of our fellow citizens.

Amen to that.

Pope supports Vatican move to discipline LCWR

Fr. Z has the story over at his blog: Huge! CDF to LCWR.  Pope Francis doesn't appear to be backing off the efforts to ensure that the American nuns adhere fully to Catholic social teaching, particularly involving nature of marriage and the right to life.

Should Ford bring back the Ranger pickup?

Absolutely, and this report over at The Motley Fool argues that the Ford is likely to do so in the foreseeable future: Why Ford Has to Bring Back the Ranger.  I have never understood why the car companies abandoned the small truck market in the U.S. Back in the 1980's and 1990's, I drove Nissan small trucks -- an 1984 Nissan pickup (that's what it was called), and then a 1997 Nissan Frontier. They were great, practical vehicles. While Toyota and Nissan still make smaller (not small) trucks, Ford and GM and Chrysler have fled that field, although GM is set to release a smaller truck by the end of this year. There is a market out there for smaller trucks -- if I were in the market for a truck, that's what I'd want to buy. And I'm not the only one.

Obama proposes privatization of the TVA

When Obama does something right, I'll mention it and support his efforts to do that right thing. As with his administration's approach to space policy, where there has been a strong push to encourage private efforts at space exploration and utilization, it appears that the president is moving towards bringing the free market to bear on one of the largest fossils of the New Deal's command and control approach to economic development: Obama budget calls for privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) Sad to see that the opposition to this long-overdue policy shift is coming from two Republican senators.

David DeWolf on Planned Parenthood, infanticide and infants born alive

The Gonzaga Law School professor has a blog post over at First Things discussing Planned Parenthood's hesitation in condemning infanticide. Well worth a read.  As DeWolf writes:

It shouldn’t be surprising that someone representing Planned Parenthood forgot about that boundary line between a baby on that side of the birth canal and a baby on this side. It has always been an artificial distinction. At one time there were clear distinctions between babies who wouldn’t be able to survive outside the womb and those who could. If you artificially expelled a baby from the womb, in virtually all cases there was no realistic chance of survival. But now that babies are surviving at earlier and earlier gestational ages, it is harder to justify why the deliberate killing of one baby is a decision solely “between the woman and her physician,” while the deliberate killing of the other (or the deliberate failure to provide medical care, by placing the child in a closet, for example) is murder.

Read it all.

Pope Francis preparing for administrative changes

He is getting ready to make new appointments within the Vatican bureaucracy. With luck, he will clean house and appoint people committed to reforming the Curia to make it more efficient and less scandal-prone.

Update:  Fr. Z has some thoughts on reform of the Roman Curia, available over at his blog here.  He makes some very good points about the need to preserve institutional memory, as well as making some sage observations about the challenges of getting global personal sufficiently up to speed in Italian to be able to function effectively on the job inside the Vatican bureaucracy.

The HHS contraceptive mandate and secularism's march against religion

Wesley J. Smith explains the link between the two in this article posted over at The Discovery Institute's website: Birth Control Pretext for Destroying Religious Liberty. As Smith writes:

Government secularism is on the march against religion, and its generals have announced they intend to take few prisoners. For proof, look no further than the Free Birth Control Rule (as I call it) promulgated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

This rule requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide coverage for free contraception, sterilization, and morning-after pills — even if it violates their religious beliefs. A very narrow conscience exemption was carved out for churches with religious objections. But two other categories of dissenting employers must comply despite their faith objections: religious organizations (such as universities and hospitals) and private business owners.  

Smith does a very good job in a short space of explaining the dangers to liberty inherent in the government's approach to this issue.

Related item:  the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has set up a website detailing the threats to religious liberty in America today: First American Freedom. As the website puts it:

Religious freedom is our first American freedom. It is a founding principle of our country, protected by the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. It’s a fundamental human right, rooted in the dignity of every human person—people of any faith or no faith at all. It’s not a Catholic, Jewish, Orthodox, Mormon or Muslim issue—it’s an American issue, a civil rights issue.

Yup. Good to see the Catholic bishops getting out the message about religious liberty, the only worry I have is it might be too little too late to substantially influence the public policy debate.

Russell Kirk on the good society

Historian Brad Birzer explains Kirk's conservative thought on the topic of the good society in this post over at The Imaginative Conservative:  Russell Kirk on Social Justice. In addition to Birzer's analysis of Kirk's thinking, the post provides a generous excerpt from a 1954 article that Kirk wrote for Time magazine on the topic of social order. It's a two-for-one post!

Birzer's explanation of Kirk's thought strikes me as basically sound, although I would disagree with his characterization of Kirk's views as "rather libertarian."  Kirk's approach was definitely non-statist, and in that sense he shared a similar vantage point with most modern libertarians, but Kirk eschewed the label of "libertarian" and considered libertarianism to be an erroneous approach to political order -- one that was ideological at its core, and like all ideologies was an attempt to make up for an abandoned religious perspective on life. It is one of the intellectual problems of our time that any attempt to formulate a non-statist approach to politics is immediately labeled "libertarian." There are a variety of non-statist approaches to political order, libertarianism being only one of them (and not, in the opinion of this humble writer, the best of the lot).

Related item: Birzer has another, longer essay on Kirk's thought posted over The American Conservative: The Awful Humanity of Russell Kirk. Birzer's reflections on the Sage of Mecosta capture much of what I have come to know and admire about Kirk through Kirk's writings. I particularly appreciate Birzer's discussion of some of the ecclectic aspects of Kirk's approach to writing and ideas.

National Review on the Gosnell case

National Review Online is doing the reporting that the national news media won't do about the criminal trial of late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell:

• Charles Krauthammer provides analysis of the case, and why even pro-choice folks should be outraged at the allegations involving Gosnell's medical practice, allegations regarding the delivery and then killing of live babies, while also killing or endangering the lives of women patients.

• Wesley J. Smith explains why the mainstream media is avoiding reporting on the Gosnell case, linking the media's refusal to impartially report the story with previous media reporting on things like stem cell research and assisted suicide. 

• Jonah Goldberg excerpts and links to the grand jury report in the case, providing details into the allegations against Gosnell.  As the grand jury report states:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

• "The horrible truth that the National Abortion Federation or Planned Parenthood or any other abortion apologist wants to hide is that Kermit Gosnell is not an outlier." So writes Shannen W. Coffin pointing out that Gosnell's medical practice is hardly unusual when it comes to late-term abortion.

Update: and why won't the national media report on the Gosnell story? This post over at Get Religion provides the answer. Mark Shea has a post on this as well, with a suggestion about how ordinary people can draw attention to Gosnell's case. Justin Green, writing over at David Frum's blog, asks for the mainstream media to "get reporting." Seth Mandel over at Commentary tackles the underlying reason why the mainstream media is avoiding the Gosnell case, and it has to do with the culture wars: Why They Won't Talk About Kermit Gosnell. As Mandel observes:

There is no area of American politics in which the press is more activist or biased or unethical than social issues, the so-called culture wars. And the culture of permissive abortion they favor has consequences, which they would rather not look squarely at, thank you very much. The liberal commentator Kirsten Powers has written a tremendous op-ed in USA Today on Gosnell and the media blackout. Powers writes of the gruesome admissions that Gosnell’s former employees are making in court, some of which amount to “literally a beheading” and other stomach-turning descriptions.

Two anniversaries and two different approaches to natural law

• First the good one. As reported over at The Pittsford Perennialist: The Lth Anniversary of the Good Pope's Last Encyclical. The title of the blog post, of course, references the incredible social teaching encyclical Pacem in Terris by Pope John XXIII. Issued in 1963, a time of war and rising global tensions, Pope John sought to call the nations to pursue peace and justice rather than war and oppression. The Pope began his encyclical by explaining that the orderliness of creation should cause men to realize that there is an orderliness in human life, including the life of nations. From there the Pope explained the proper idea of rights, and linked rights to the idea of duties, linking the preservation of the natural rights of man with the duties that men own one to another.  In a passage that almost perfectly encapsulates the traditional conservative idea of rights and duties, Pope John set the stage for his primary argument, that true peace can only come when man embraces the transcendent moral order reflected in natural law -- an order that provides not only rights but also responsibilities:  

The natural rights of which We have so far been speaking are inextricably bound up with as many duties, all applying to one and the same person. These rights and duties derive their origin, their sustenance, and their indestructibility from the natural law, which in conferring the one imposes the other.

• Now the bad one. As reported by Paul A. Rahe over at National Review Online, today is the anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson's imposition of racial segregation on the federal civil service: Progressive Racism. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) As Rahe explains, the vast bulk of progressives of that day, including Wilson, were deeply committed to using the power of government to socially engineer society to discriminate against African-Americans, basing their positions on bogus scientific arguments about the nature of race: 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary Americans may generally have been in the grips of ethnic prejudice of one sort or another. The Progressives of that time were not, however, ordinary men, and they knew it. Like their successors today, they dominated America’s universities. With some justification, they thought of themselves as an intellectual elite; and, with rare exceptions, they enthusiastically embraced eugenics and racial theory. That the inchoate racial prejudices of their contemporaries were grounded in fact they took to be a truth taught by science; and, being devotees of rational administration to the exclusion of all other concerns, they insisted that public policy conform to the dictates of the new racial science.

The new season of Mad Men is here

It started last Sunday, and the Young Fogey over at A Conservative Blog for Peace has posted his own take on the first episode of the season:  The show goes on. The first episode brought the show into 1968, the year when it became clear that the decade was revealing itself to be a considerably skuzzier period in American life than many had hoped for. That year was a horrible one in American history, a time when society seemed to be coming off the rails, with crime rampant, the war in Vietnam taking a turn for the worse, and political assassinations tarring the country. It will be interesting how the show deals with this year in the life of its characters.

Of course, 1968 was just a bit before my time -- I didn't arrive until the following year.

What police officers actually think about gun control

The results of this survey don't fit the narrative at all:  11 key lessons from officers' perspectives. (Hat tip to Instapundit.)  Police officers as a whole appear to be far more skeptical of gun control efforts than the political elites within the Democratic Party.  Which, for some reason, doesn't surprise me.

Happy Divine Mercy Sunday!

Today is the feast of Divine Mercy in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar.  Some thoughts for today's celebration:

• Kathryn Jean Lopez has a very nice reflection posted over a Patheos on today's feast -- her description of today as "Easter without the logistical challenges" is quite apt: Is This the Sunday When Easter comes Down to Earth? 

• The importance of today's feast in the life of grace is difficult to overstate -- as Catholic theologian Taylor Marshall explains over at his blog, if one carries out the devotions attached to today's feast, the effects are like a second baptism: Why Divine Mercy Sunday is Better than a Plenary Indulgence. 

• Towards the end of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II reflected on the mystery of God's mercy during a visit to the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Poland. His thoughts can be found here: Pope John Paul II's Reflection on Divine Mercy. As the pope notes, "There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy -- that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights of the holiness of God." Amen to that. 

• Over at Fr. Z's blog, there is an lengthy excerpt from a sermon from St. Gregory the Great for the 1st Sunday after Easter.  Well worth a read, as Gregory reminds us that along with God's grace should come a great and holy fear of God's judgment:  On Mercy Sunday, a sobering thought from a Pope about fear and that terrible day.

• The lectionary readings for Mass today can be found over at the United States Conference of Catholic bishops website: Second Sunday of Easter (or Sunday of Divine Mercy). The first reading for Mass today is taken from the Acts of the Apostles, and is a powerful reflection on God's mercy manifested as cures for physical and spiritual ailments: 

Many signs and wonders were done among the people
at the hands of the apostles.
They were all together in Solomon’s portico.
None of the others dared to join them, but the people esteemed them.
Yet more than ever, believers in the Lord,
great numbers of men and women, were added to them.
Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets
and laid them on cots and mats
so that when Peter came by,
at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them.
A large number of people from the towns
in the vicinity of Jerusalem also gathered,
bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits,
and they were all cured.

A non-interventionist foreign policy does not equal isolationism or non-engagement

That's the take-away from this post by Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative discussing Grover Cleveland's foreign policy:  Anti-Imperial Presidency.   As Larison describes it, Cleveland's foreign policy was not motivated by a desire to shut out the world or to refrain from exerting American power. But it was motivated by an overwhelming desire to avoid war and imperial overreach. Cleveland's foreign policy was designed to limit expansion by both Britain and the kaiser's Germany, while upholding the independence of developing nations. A good model and one that used to be far more mainstream than what is on offering from either major party today. A reminder that the wisdom of men like the 19th century's Grover Cleveland and the 20th century's Robert Taft needs to be remembered.