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It’s rare to attend an outdoor party in warm weather without hearing people complain about mosquitoes. They swat away, sit in campfire smoke, cover up with blankets and eventually just give up and go indoors. On the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty of people who don’t seem bothered by mosquitoes in the slightest. As a medical entomologist who’s worked with mosquitoes for more than 40 years, I’m often asked why some people seem to be mosquito magnets while others are oblivious to these blood-feeding pests buzzing all around them. Most mosquito species, along with a host of other arthropods – including ticks, fleas, bedbugs, blackflies, horseflies and biting midges – require the protein in blood to develop a batch of eggs. Only the female mosquito feeds on blood. Males feed on pla...

EDINBURGH, Ind. (CNS) — Melissa Coles received a call in the late summer of 2019. She didn’t listen long before she figured it was a prank call and hung up. When the person called back, she hung up again. “On the third call, they had all the producers on the line — Kirk Cameron and the Kendrick brothers,” she said, referring to Alex, Shannon and Stephen Kendrick, producers of Christian films such as “Fireproof,” “War Room” and “Courageous.” “They said they wanted to make (the documentary) ‘I Lived on Parker Avenue’ into a movie.” Coles knew the 2018 YouTube documentary well — she was one of its subjects. “It’s three powerful stories wrapped into one,” said Coles: the story of her decision against abortion; the story of the son she offered for adoption; and the story of the couple who adopt...

The three parables in this Sunday’s lengthy Gospel challenge conventional thinking. They describe people doing things that we most likely would not do. All three of them – especially the first two – seem crazy. Who would ever do what the shepherd of the lost sheep does or what the woman with the lost coin does? Probably no one. Likewise, the father in the Prodigal Son parable breaks all the rules of “tough love.” His forgiveness has an almost reckless quality to it. No father in Jesus’ time would ever have tolerated such insolence from his sons. So all three of these parables, on one level, are just plain crazy. But that is one of the fundamental points Jesus seems to be making here: The Heavenly Father’s love for us is just plain “crazy.” By that I do not mean that it is irrational but th...

The European Conservative describes itself as Europe’s ‘premier conservative English-language quarterly journal of philosophy, politics, and the arts.’ A quarterly magazine that seeks to defend and promote Western Christian civilization and is known for its Catholic sympathies has been removed by a major U.K. bookstore chain on account of its criticism of the same-sex agenda and for running an interview with Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. The European Conservative, self-described as Europe’s “premier conservative English-language quarterly journal of philosophy, politics, and the arts,” has been pulled from the shelves of WHSmith after two individuals waged a campaign against it on social media. Alexi Kaye Campbell, a Greek-British playwright, and his civil partner Dominic Cooke, an Englis...

By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Sep 09, 2022 Well, we dodged a bullet again. So if you are confident in our ability to keep dodging bullets, you can relax. I’m not so confident. The German bishops narrowly defeated a statement that would have put them on record in favor of a radical change in Church teaching on sexuality. Should we view yesterday’s vote as a victory for orthodoxy, a reassuring affirmation of unity within the universal Church? Or was it merely a speed-bump on their Synodal Path toward schism? The latter, I’m afraid. Because: Bishop Georg Bätzing, the president of the German bishops’ conference, and Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the most influential member of the German hierarchy, both expressed disappointment with the result. A majority of the German bisho...