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‘Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one place—lived, worked, and passed on a holding that is rightly called a homestead. Today homesteading is much talked of, and indeed we might even call it a movement. This, I think, is a very good and telling reality. Clearly, as a society we are realizing we have lost something we need to recover. The tricky thing is to discern just what it is we’ve lost and then how, and also why, to get it back. Here it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees; or perhaps rather, to miss a certain way of life for the field on which it was once lived,...

In vitro fertilization (IVF) is back in the headlines. In February 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen human embryos constitute children under state statute. The nine-judge court said in an 8-1 ruling that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is “sweeping and unqualified,” and extends its provisions to children “regardless of location.” This decision, along with the debate it has prompted about the legal status of frozen human embryos, invites us to revisit events from 1989. It was then in a Tennessee courtroom that the nature of such embryos was investigated with expert witness testimony given by the eminent French pediatrician and geneticist, Dr. Jérôme Lejeune (1926-1994), the scientist who discovered the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. The case in questio...

2 days ago 2 days ago “It’s a beautiful life that we could be living in each moment, but what many of us decide to do is to drown ourselves in false electronic contentment,” said Michael Toscano, executive director of the Institute for Family Studies. In his new First Things article “Recovering our Memory” Michael writes, “It became quickly apparent to me that smartphones and social media were beginning to subject the people around me—smart, disciplined, hard-working people—to a profound change. They were more hunched over, prone to glancing at the device during conversations, and scrolling. Always scrolling.”  Michael is a leader in efforts nationwide to adopt laws to make technology safer for kids. He has written on family pol...

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CNN  —  Tyler Anbinder didn’t know what he’d find when he started digging into a vast trove of records that had been locked inside a bank — and inaccessible to the public — for nearly 150 years. One detail immediately caught the historian’s attention: The accounts described in the bank’s ledgers had much more money in them than he expected. As he first combed through files from the Emigrant Savings Bank at the New York Public Library that day about 25 years ago, Anbinder was working on a book about the city’s famed Five Points neighborhood. That 19th-century enclave, portrayed as a battleground for warring criminals in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film “Gangs of New York,” was “notoriously overcrowded, run-down (and) impoverished,” Anbinder notes. It was also “home to ...

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of San Diego greets Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, retired archbishop of Los Angeles, during a consistory led by Pope Francis for the creation of 20 new cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Aug. 27, 2022. (CNS photo/Paul Haring) Cardinal Robert McElroy, in his recent remarks to the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, stated the following: It is essential to safeguard the deposit of faith.  But how do the doctrinal tradition and history of the church restrict the church’s ability to refine its teaching when confronted with a world where life itself is evolving in critical ways, and it is becoming clear that on some issues the understanding of human nature and moral reality upon which previous declarations of doctrine were made were in fact ...

Tag1/Tag2 (automatically injected) Jonathan Bender When you start a new job, the first thing you might think about is where are you going to sit. It turns out presidents are the same. There have been only six desks in the 113 years that a president has worked in the Oval Office. Each desk was designed with a specific purpose, a reflection of the style and moment in history that they were made. This is how each piece arrived at the White House. Let’s go back to 1909. Cars raced at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the first time. Alice Huyler Ramsey became the first woman to drive across the United States (It took 59 days.). The Manhattan Bridge opened on the very last day of the year. In October of 1909, President William Howard Taft began working in a newly built spot in The White House...

Catholics should not be content to be trapped in our own age, unable to look outside this time and place for good and heroic companions. Back in 1991, The Jerry Springer Show debuted on American television. The show was presumably intended to shock viewers, as the host paraded out bizarre guests engaged in even more bizarre situations — most of them falling within the realm of weird and multiple violations of the sixth and ninth commandments. A 2020 article in The Guardian aptly described the show: “On a daily basis, it served up a clumpy gruel of screaming and fistfights that first defined and then accelerated the concept of the Ugly American across the world. It was a low-rent, knock-down, barroom brawl of a show that splashed around in humanity’s very worst excesses. And people couldn’t...

Editor’s Note: Hartford Archbishop Leonard Blair wrote the following homily for Laetare Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, and delivered it March 10 at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. His homily begins at around the 20-minute mark in the video embedded below.. As a bishop, I have conferred the sacrament of Confirmation many times. As part of their preparation the candidates for this sacrament are expected to attend classes, go on retreats and do service projects. This is all well and good, but I feel the need to tell them at the Confirmation liturgy that ultimately, Confirmation is not about what they have done or are doing — it’s about what God has done and is doing. Confirmation, like all the sacraments, is a gift freely and mightily conferred by God. It will be powerful in ...

Seven hundred and fifty years ago Thursday (March 7), St. Thomas Aquinas died, having written some 8 million words in two decades of intensive work, including his masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae. He was only 49. His admirers over the ages include many in North America. The Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, memorable for her gritty realism, famously read a passage of Aquinas’s Summa every night, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision inspired a nation, drew from his thought while in prison. Advertisement Aquinas, too, was incarcerated. His parents objected to their teenage son’s religious vocation and locked him in a tower. Aquinas’ older brothers thought they could undermine his resolve by tempting him with a prostitute, but Aquinas pulled a hot poker from the fire and chas...