From the beginning, God entrusted His creation to man and woman. Despite our rejection of His original blessing, He continues to watch over our efforts to make this world our common home. In a special way, by the coming of Jesus His Son, He has maintained His promise (cf. Gen 3:15) to bless and protect us in every generation. May families everywhere come to know this blessing!
(Lots more on the family from him in recent months.)
2. Jason Riley: Let’s Talk About the Racial Disparity in Abortions
3. Read the New York Times Headlines That Planned Parenthood Feared
4.
And if your mom didn’t kill you in the womb (pre or post Roe), be sure to thank her. Regularly. For the gift of life https://t.co/yLZj86vRuE
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 15, 20155. In asking Jerry Brown to veto assisted-suicide, Archbishop Jose Gomez writes:
In a health care system that is so cost-conscious and profit-driven, I am afraid that lethal prescriptions to commit suicide will fast become the only acceptable “treatment option” for our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. I am afraid that in our health care environment, suicide will be promoted as the most “efficient” and cost-saving alternative.
The sad reality is that millions of Californians do not have the luxury to think about a “death with dignity.”
They are too busy struggling with low wages and not enough job opportunities; with housing costs and troubled neighborhoods; with poor health care and discrimination.
Our government’s priority should be to help make life more dignified for people, not death.
And lawmakers need to be honest in their language so we can understand what we are really doing with this legislation. We are not legalizing “aid in dying.”
What the legislature is legalizing is the ability of a doctor to write prescriptions for the express purpose of killing another human being.
6. Analysts Detail Claims That Reports on ISIS Were Distorted
7. Barton Swaim on Donald Trump’s language:
The words themselves are mostly preposterous. … they range between laughable exaggeration and nonsense. What makes them effective in their way is that they don’t sound like political speech. Politicians in modern democracies just don’t talk this way.
8.
CNN has run 2,159 pieces on Donald Trump since June 16. That equals 1 per hour…for 24 hours…for 90 straight days http://t.co/BVu9aMKNM6
— Dennis K. Berman (@dkberman) September 15, 20159. Bill McGurn’s advice to Jeb Bush:
Jeb Bush will not defeat Mr. Trump by allowing himself to be goaded into fighting on Mr. Trump’s terms and Mr. Trump’s turf. Better for Mr. Bush to take two other steps. The first is to start attacking the enemy Republicans are united against by driving home how a Hillary victory means a third term for Barack Obama, not Bill Clinton.
The other is to take the only approach The Donald cannot abide: Ignore him.
On Facebook last night, I asked folks for their top three choices in the GOP field. Fiorina came up a lot. Cruz. Rubio. Jindal and Kasich were named more than I expected. A few people are waiting it out to see who else gets in. At least one vote for “Eisenhower, Reagan, and Taft.” Which, of course, meant Coolidge talk.
10. How religion shaped Margaret Thatcher’s politics.
11. “respect, love and serve Africa in truth!”
12. Bishop Robert Barron:
the more our society drifts into atheism, the more human life is under threat. The less we are willing even to wrestle with God, the more de-humanized we become.
13. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
The New Year and the Day of Atonement are vivid enactments of Judaism’s greatest leap of faith: the belief that the world is ruled by justice. No idea has been more revolutionary, and none more perplexing. There are questions that challenge faith, and there are questions that come from faith. Those who asked about the apparent injustices of the world were not figures of doubt. They were Judaism’s supreme prophets. Moses asked, “O Lord, why have You brought trouble upon this people?” Jeremiah said, “Right would You be, O Lord, if I were to contend with You, yet I will speak with You about Your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?”They did not ask because they did not believe. They asked because they did believe. If there were no Judge, there would be no justice and no question. There is a Judge. Where then is justice? Above all else, Jewish thought through the centuries has been a sustained meditation on this question, never finding answers, realising that here was a sacred mystery no human mind could penetrate. All other requests Moses made on behalf of the Jewish people, says the Talmud, were granted except this: to understand why the righteous suffer.
Good is rewarded and evil has no ultimate dominion. No Jewish belief is more central than this.
As tenaciously as they asked, so they held firm to the faith without which there was no question: that there is a moral rule governing the universe and that what happens to us is in some way related to what we do. Good is rewarded and evil has no ultimate dominion. No Jewish belief is more central than this. It forms the core of the Hebrew Bible, the writings of the rabbis and the speculations of the Jewish mystics.
Reward and punishment might be individual or collective, immediate or deferred, in this world or the next, apparent or veiled behind a screen of mystery, but they are there. For without them life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The faith of the Bible is neither optimistic nor naive. It contains no theodicies, no systematic answers, no easy consolations.
At times, in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes and Lamentations, it comes close to the abyss of pain and despair. “I saw,” says Ecclesiastes, ”the tears of the oppressed – and they have no ‘comforter’.” “The Lord,” says Lamentations, “has become like an enemy.” But the people of the Book refused to stop wrestling with the question. To believe was painful, but to disbelieve was too easy, too superficial, untrue.
So on Rosh Hashanah, we live in the presence of this risk-laden proposition, that in goodness is the way of life. Knowing our failings, we come before God asking Him to find in us some act that we have done or that we might yet do for good. “Write us in the book of life.”
14. Q&A with Christopher Kaczor, professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, on his new book, The Gospel of Happiness, about faith and positive psychology.
PLUS: 10 Catholic things for today (memorial of Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian, martyrs.)
Make suggestions for these lists — or anything else — to klopez@nationalreview.com.