Victor Borge tells the story of a friend whom he had not seen in 50 years who asked him, rather excitedly, “Was it you or your brother who passed away?” The captain of a four-engine plane alerted his passengers that one of the engines had conked out. He assured them forthwith that there was nothing to worry about, although flying time would [...]
Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, in a statement released on March 14 urged that women should not be allowed to have abortions until they are counseled on the procedure’s risks to their mental health. The College recommended adding details about the risks of depression to abortion leaflets. “Consent cannot be informed,” it claimed, “without the provision of adequate and appropriate information.” More [...]
Baseball augurs the beginning of spring, but be careful in listening to the sports’ announcers. Donald Demarco considers the joys – some unintended – of baseball The truest harbinger of spring is not the appearance of crocuses or the arrival of swallows at Capistrano, but the reverberating crack of bat meeting ball. Winter was long and dreary. Her characteristic sounds – the [...]
Michael Polanyi changed his career path from science to philosophy so that, paradoxically, he could help protect science from being absorbed into a narrow ideology. In his 1962 Terry Lectures at Yale University, he recounted a conversation he had with Nikolai Bukhanin in 1935. At that time, Bukhanin, whom Lenin called the “Golden Boy” of the party, was a leading theoretician for [...]
I have a friend in Quebec who wrote to Canada’s top environmental guru, David Suzuki, asking him to consider how the “moral environment” impacts on the “material environment,” a point that is missing from Suzuki’s voluminous statements about the environment. He received a terse response in which the celebrated doctor stated that he had neither time nor interest to pursue the matter. [...]
St. Alphonsus Liguori makes the comment, in his b ook, The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ, that Jesus was born "in poor ragged clothes, in a stable lying on straw in a manger for animals," because "he came to destroy the pride which had been the cause of man's ruin." Pride is the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins. It directs [...]
The spring 2007 issue of Conscience, the publication of a nefarious group of abortion promoters who call themselves, strangely enough, “Catholics for a Free Choice,” has announced its new president. Jon O’Brien, who worked as program manager at the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s European Bureau in London, replaces Frances Kissling. Kissling steps aside after spending 25 years at the helm of CFFC. [...]
Rhetoric is simply the art of persuasion. As Socrates discovered, however, to his great dismay, not all rhetoric is accompanied by knowledge. The sophists of his day made it incontrovertibly clear to him that their style of rhetoric required no knowledge whatsoever. And without knowledge, reason, not having anything to sink its teeth into, cannot operate. Socrates could not begin to understand [...]
Jan. 21, the date that President George W. Bush chose for his fellow Americans to honour the sanctity of human life, is significant for two reasons. First, it falls on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Secondly, it is one day prior to the 34th anniversary of the infamous Roe v Wade decision that drove a sword into the nation’s commitment to the [...]
Jan. 21, the date that President George W. Bush chose for his fellow Americans to honour the sanctity of human life, is significant for two reasons. First, it falls on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Secondly, it is one day prior to the 34th anniversary of the infamous Roe v Wade decision that drove a sword into the nation’s commitment to the [...]
Student governments at three Canadian schools of higher education – Carleton University, University of British Columbia at Okanagan and Capilano College in Vancouver – have voted to deny funding and services to any campus group that opposes abortion. Pro-life students are nonetheless obliged to provide financial support for all other student activities. One wonders how many more Canadian colleges and universities will [...]
Freedom presents the chief problem in moral education I have been a teacher of ethics at several institutions of higher learning over the course of the past five decades. While I cannot assess the impact I have had on my students, I can easily assess the impact they have had on me. One problem, central and challenging, remains. It is, I would [...]
Members of the pro-life movement are always eager to embrace encouraging news. A recent Gallup Youth Survey (Nov. 24, 2003), conducted through a scientific methodology to ensure a representative sample of the U.S. population, showed that 72 per cent of youth between 13 and 17 believe that abortion is morally wrong. An elated Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and [...]
Commentary by Donald DeMarco The Interim We like to think that scientists are people of unswerving integrity who report what they find without being unduly influenced by current fashions. Politicians, journalists, educators, religious leaders, businessmen, and sales personnel of every stripe may blow in the wind, but scientists, so we want to believe, are pillars of professional integrity. Unfortunately, though it should [...]
Our immune system, certainly one of the great marvels of nature, equips us with 100 billion (100,000,000,000) immunological receptors. Each of these tiny receptors has the uncanny natural capacity to distinguish the self from the non-self. Consequently, they are able to immunize or protect our bodies against the invasion of foreign substances that could be harmful to us. Marvelous as nature is, [...]