In museums, libraries, galleries, and concert halls, one can watch a similar drama unfold. An incipient style—of a period, of an artist—begins uncertainly, but it promises something more, an as-yet-unachieved maturity. Eventually, as the career of a style progresses, something permanent and distinctive is added to the sum-total of cultural achievements. One need only think of the qualities conjured by eponymous adjectives—like [...]
Poland’s family centered values The European Union constantly pushes EU countries into passing laws which devalue the family, increase abortions, and remove parental guidance by parents. Poland, like Hungary, is repeatedly attacked for its family affirming policies. Recently, Poland launched Education for Family Life, a required course in the standard curriculum of primary education. The objectives of the course are to teach [...]
Mother’s Day always comes in May, a celebration which seems as permanent as the cycle of the seasons. Yet, as our culture continues to fissure its very bedrock of self-understanding, it increasingly seems like the calendar will outlast the category of motherhood itself. May will always come—but when it does, will we still have mothers? The question admits no easy, automatic answer. [...]
Heterosexual students happier, healthier than LGBQ+ students The U.S. Centres for Disease Control has completed and released its annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey. High school students were grouped into heterosexual and LGBQ+ categories. (Subsequent assessments will include transgender students.) Here are a few of the disturbing results. Among heterosexual students, 22 per cent experienced poor mental health, in contrast to 52 per [...]
Mary Zwicker: The family, the basis upon which society is built, is faced with challenges and threats like never before, as an over-reliance on technology can leave families estranged while at the same time exposing its members to harms such as pornography, even at a young age. The Institute for Family Studies, an organization that is dedicated to strengthening marriage and families, [...]
Rory Leishman: Josh Alexander is the Grade 11 student in Renfrew, Ont., who was expelled from his Catholic high school for insisting that transgendered females -- that is to say, boys who think they are girls -- should not be permitted to use the girl’s washrooms. Alexander, of course, is correct. However, it is regrettable that in explaining his position to the [...]
How do contraception, abortion, transgenderism and euthanasia fit in? Paul Tuns Editor’s Note: Part I appeared in the March edition of The Interim. Technology, as the writer Sean Haylock points out in a 2017 essay in Crisis “is mechanistic (reductively focused on efficient causation), utilitarian (reasoning by a calculus and willing to treat persons as means to an end), and voluntaristic (taking [...]
By Angelica Vecchiato: Occupational licensing bodies— originally intended to uphold professional standards by regulating and overseeing work in a particular field— are increasingly being used as self-righteous vessels to quash dissenting, minority opinions. In the name of “holding people accountable,” the tyranny of regulatory bodies such as nursing associations has ramped up, especially over the past couple of months. Canadian academic Jordan [...]
Paul Tuns: Calgary city council voted to clamp down on protests in the wake of public opposition to drag events in the city. The new law, the Safe and Inclusive Access Bylaw, was passed 10-5 and prohibits protests within 100 metres of an entrance to a recreation facility or library. The council also amended an existing bylaw to add the word “intimidation” [...]
Brain-dead women as ‘baby machines’ We have learned that a German molecular biologist, Hashem Al-Ghaili, is developing Ectolife, transparent artificial wombs where babies will be conceived and “housed” until birth, while their parents can look on as spectators. He said the technology could be used to reverse declining birth rates in countries such as Bulgar, Japan, and South Korea. LifeSiteNews reports that [...]
Interim Staff In a late-January interview with the Associated Press in January, Pope Francis said that homosexuality should not be criminalized. Meanwhile, on Feb. 9, the governing body of the Church of England voted to bless same-sex couples while leaving unchanged the Church’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Pope Francis told AP reporters on Jan. 25, that, [...]
The totally understated pro-life message in the 2023 Super Bowl Angelica Vecchiato: The 2023 Super Bowl-- a close game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles-- went down in history for several reasons: the Kelce brothers clashing against one another other on opposite ends of the field, star player Mahomes’ strained ankle, and Justina Miles, the first female “deaf performer,” signing [...]
Interim Staff: Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) trustee Mike Del Grande lost an Ontario Superior Court decision in his petition to quash sanctions imposed on him by the majority of the elected school board for using rhetoric supposedly “offensive” to LGBTQ activists and students in his defense of Catholic sexual and gender teaching. In 2019 and 2020, Del Grande opposed a [...]
The Abandoned Generation by Gabriele Kuby (St. Augustine’s Press, $21, 195 pages) Angelica Vecchiato, Review: In a modern world driven by individualism, where the immediate prioritization of the self has been valued over care of the other, humanity has been pulled apart at its seams—and forsaken children are the unfortunate byproduct. The young generation has been pushed to the margins of society, at best [...]
Religious Freedom After the Sexula Revolution: A Catholic Guide Helen M. Alvaré (Catholic University of America Press, $32.95, 243 pages): Helen M. Alvaré, the Robert A. Levy Chair in Law and Liberty at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, has written a primer, Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution, on how to think about a genuine freedom (freedom of religion) in [...]