Parents today are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, allowing kids online means exposure to content that threatens their mental health and their innocence. On the other hand, removing online access threatens to socially isolate kids from their friends and peer groups. What are parents to do?
Calling pregnancy resource centers “anti-abortion centers” is a form of propaganda that attempts to portray abortion as normative and having a baby as an unthinkable option.
Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, many people, trapped in a shadow world of materialism and consumerism, cannot imagine that reality extends beyond our senses and shallow desire. Blind to the light of reality and the Gospel, they miss how God continues to reveal Himself in the world He has made. God has infused the world with His presence, with signs that point to Him and His love. He can be seen, for those with eyes to see, in everything from the beautiful to the tragic to the mundane.
About 15 years ago, sociologists coined the term “abusive boyfriend syndrome” to describe the increased risk to children who live in homes with an unrelated adult. According to numerous studies, these children were much more likely to be abused or even killed than children who live at home with two biological or married parents. Because of these findings, domestic violence prevention programs routinely teach parents, especially vulnerable women, that the single highest risk factor that they or their children will be abused is whether they’re living with an unrelated, unmarried adult.
God designed family in a specific way. The biological reality, that one man and one woman are required to make a child, points to the social reality, which is that children do best with a mom and a dad. This neither makes abuse inevitable for children in other arrangements, nor does it suggest that biological parents never abuse. In fact, child abuse can become tragically epidemic within certain cultures and families.
Dads are crucial. We’ve known this for a long time. For example, former president Barack Obama, despite advancing many policies that undermined the family, remained an outspoken voice on the importance of loving, involved fathers. According to all the evidence, he was partly correct. Kids need their fathers, but do best when their fathers are married to their mothers.
Of the thousands of green-clad parade-goers, marchers, and partiers today, few know about Patrick, the man for whom today’s holiday is named. Fewer still know of the man beyond the legend, who supposedly drove the snakes out of Ireland and certainly possessed an indomitable faith in Jesus Christ.
In 2006, Chuck Colson told St. Patrick’s story in a Breakpoint commentary. Here is Chuck Colson:
Protecting religious expression is vital, not just for Christians, but for everyone. Conscience rights are pre-political rights and provide the foundation on which every other liberty is built. Protecting that foundation on college campuses requires, at minimum, allowing religious student groups to meet on campus, to use allocated student funding like every other group, to choose leaders who adhere to the stated beliefs and values that define the group, and to think and speak as freely as other students.
Please, take a minute to show support for these groups and these courageous students.
Apparently, the U.K. has decided to shift its loyalties from courageously defying tyranny in the 20th century to embracing it in the 21st. Last week, a “conservative”-led British Parliament made George Orwell’s fictional accounts of “thought crime” a reality. After establishing censorship zones around abortion clinics in England and Wales, the MPs voted 299-116 to continue criminalizing even silent prayer in the vicinity of such clinics.
As a lawyer for the U.K.’s Alliance Defending Freedom put it, Today’s vote marks a watershed moment for fundamental rights and freedoms in our country. Parliament had an opportunity to reject the criminalisation of free thought, which is an absolute right, and embrace individual liberty for all. Instead, Parliament chose to endorse censorship and criminalise peaceful activities such as silent prayer and consensual conversation.
The law is no idle threat.
Among the many hymns with deep roots in the history of the Church, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” is based on a 900-year-old poem written by theologian and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard was a towering figure in the political, intellectual, and religious life of 12th-century Europe.
In 1113, Bernard became a member of a new religious order known as the Cistercians. The group followed a strict monastic life of prayer, labor, and austerity. Two years later, he was sent by the order to found a new monastery that he named Clairvaux. Bernard quickly became one of the leading reformers in the Church of his day.
Certain ideas just won’t die, no matter how often and thoroughly they are debunked. Most of us have heard some scientist, journalist, teacher, or entertainer claim that “human beings and chimpanzees share 98-99% of our DNA.” That statistic is an example of what molecular biologist Jonathan Wells calls an “icon of evolution,” or Zombie Science. The often unstated implication of this undead statistic is that humans and chimps obviously evolved from a common ancestor, and that we are still, on a biological level, mostly the same.
