Tag Archives: Suffering as a blessing

Palmyra’s Earlier Attackers

From The Spectator, a review of a new book, The Darkening Age, on Christianity’s early centuries.  I haven’t read the book itself (it’s not out in this country until next year), but judging by the review  it looks interesting, no … Continue reading

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The Transhumanist ‘Threat’

The Jesuits’ America magazine is a somewhat overwrought publication, and a recent article (“Who’s afraid of Transhumanism? (We all should be)”) it ran on the ‘threat’ posed by ‘Transhumanism’ was no exception. If I had to guess, Transhumanism, a fancy word for an … Continue reading

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Mother Teresa and the Cult of Suffering

Mother Teresa has been canonized today. The new saint’s record is more complicated than either her critics or her fans like to acknowledge, but this balanced piece by Mari Marcel Thekaekara in the Guardian is worth a look. Towards the … Continue reading

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Jerry Brown Gets It Right

Credit where’s credit is due: I am not exactly a member of the Jerry Brown fan club, but the California Governor’s decision to sign his state’s cautiously drafted assisted suicide law (perhaps too cautiously: to take one example, those with … Continue reading

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The Cult of Suffering

In the course of commenting over on the Corner to a list of the ‘ten best revolutionaries’ (yes, the list was as dumb as you can expect), I included an extract from Paul Berman’s excellent Slate response to The Motorcycle … Continue reading

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Leon Kass is not alone (Sadly)

Via Andrew Sullivan we have this piece by William B. Hurlbut, Consulting Professor in the Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University Medical Center, a man of science, who is, it turns out, also a fan of the benevolently deranged Francis of … Continue reading

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Such Sweet Suffering

The Wall Street Journal has interviewed “eminent bioethicist” (itself a contradiction in terms) Leon Kass. The trigger was the Gosnell trial, but it was this aspect of Kass’s remarks that drew my attention: Dr. Kass sometimes finds himself at odds … Continue reading

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Hanging On In There

Stephen Budiansky appears to be channeling the idiocy of Leon Kass (the “suffering is good for you” guru who chaired George W. Bush’s grotesque tax-payer funded “bio-ethics” boondoggle) in the latter part of this attack on Steve Jobs’s attempts to … Continue reading

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The “Infinite Blessings” of Suffering

Andrew Sullivan quotes from a (paywalled) article by New Yorker writer Aleksander Hemon, whose daughter was diagnosed with cancer at 9 months old. He quotes the terribly bereaved father as saying this: One of the most despicable religious fallacies is … Continue reading

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