No Such Thing as Mom

Our 13-year-old son doesn’t have a phone, but he does have a new used CD player. And two weeks ago, we added a landline to our home for the first time in 20 years. Which is to say, our embrace of technology is running in the wrong direction. Then I topped it off by doing this past Friday something I hadn’t done since last century. I went to an actual store and bought an actual album on the actual day it came out. That would be Switchfoot’s Forever Now! Compact discs have done away with jewel cases, apparently, but the rest of the experience was gloriously 1990’s. And then there are the songs.

I made an uncredited reference to Forever Now’s first single in my last article, but it’s track 11–“Two Twins”—that contains a metaphor so simple and profound that it hardly seems possible I could go 50 years without having heard it before. Or thought of it myself. For those of you who didn’t buy the record at Barnes and Noble last week, or listen via more traditional means—Click here to read the rest.

The Old Vices Were Better Than the New

Back in the olden days, when I was in junior high school, I got a subscription to Sports Illustrated—a luxury afforded me by my mom’s remarriage. Prior to that, there had been no money in the frivolous expenditures fund, but wealth has a way of introducing new temptations. I’m speaking, of course, about the swimsuit issue. All the way through high school, it would confront me with a moral dilemma each and every February. By way of context, I had been baptized into the faith on April Fool’s Day, 1990, and I was committed. I was also a hormone-laced teenage boy. Though my mom didn’t restrict my access to SI’s famed swimsuit issue, my own moral compass was something of a tyrant. I was fairly convinced I had to get rid of it, but that was easier said than done. As soon as I would pull it from the mailbox, the reasons for not disposing of it came flooding in. I would stand with it hovering over the garbage can like Frodo overlooking the fires of Mordor. My precious!

In the pre-internet world of my youth, pictures of beautiful women in revealing swimsuits were almost sacred for their scarcity. Social media has made the…

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Whom Do We Charge? Mom, Dad, or the Abortionist?

Last week, the Gospel Coalition published an article by Scott Klusendorf titled “Why Equal Protection Bills Harm Pro-Life Efforts.” His basic premise: charging aborting mothers with murder will lead to more abortions in the end. Two days later, Seth Gruber posted a response via Substack in which he publicly took Scott to task for his “poorly reasoned” position. Though these are not names that will mean anything to the average American, both men carry significant clout within pro-life circles—which is why it’s distressing to see them publicly at odds. Distressing, but not surprising. This is the era of ideological infighting, after all. Schisms are the new black.

For my part, I’ve known and admired Scott Kluesendorf since the beginning of my pro-life career some three decades ago.…

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The Problem of Faith in a World Full of Evil

The existence of evil has never been a philosophical problem for me. How can there be wickedness in a world created by a good God? Because he gave his creatures the freedom to rebel. Or at least the angelic and image-bearing ones. We did (rebel, that is) and here we are. That’s enough explanation for me. It’s the problem of faith that I struggle to get my head around. If you have the faith of a mustard seed (ie a very little), Christ told his disciples in Matthew 17, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will obey you. Or in the less poetic and well-known rendering from Luke: If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be planted in the sea, and it will. Though we might question the practical value in transporting mountains or planting trees in the ocean, the basic takeaway seems pretty clear. If you have faith, the normal laws of nature are no longer binding.

Some years ago, my wife and I planted a small tree in the corner of our backyard. But then we decided we wanted it smack dab in the middle. So with tremendous faith, I approached the tree and told it in no uncertain…

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Move Over, Kansas & New Mexico, Massachusetts Has Gone All In on Out-of-State Abortions

When I first saw Massachusetts’ abortion total for 2024, I assumed there was a mistake. Based on historical data, it simply wasn’t plausible. In 2023, a reported 20,008 abortions took place in Massachusetts. For 2024, Guttmacher put the state total at 20,990—and their estimates are almost always too high. In fact, among the 23 states where abortion remains legal and 2024 abortion totals have already been reported, the Guttmacher estimate was higher than reported 23 times. That’s 100%. Their overall abortion estimate for those 23 states was inflated by 27%. But all that changed last week with the publication of the 2024 Massachusetts Induced Termination of Pregnancy Report. Guttmacher’s estimate, it turns out, was 81% too low. The actual 2024 abortion total for Massachusetts was 49,450. That’s more than twice what it was in 2023 and three times what it was in 2020.

In 2020, there were roughly 16,000 abortions in Massachusetts against 66,000 live births. In 2023, it was 20,000 abortions versus…

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Amidst a Catastrophic Fertility Crisis, England Paid for 272,000 Abortions

I have never been to England. In fact, I have never set foot on any continent but my own. I am neither young enough nor rich enough to travel the globe, but I’ve always been rich enough for books and television—which have allowed me to vicariously cross the pond for going on half a century. I have almost religious affection for Austen and Dickens and hold C.S. Lewis in even higher regard—as does virtually every literary Christian of every liturgical stripe. Only Jesus is more popular among the brethren, by a hair’s breadth. I never turn down an invitation to 221B Baker Street (on screen or on the page), and though Agatha Christie lacks the critical acclaim of her compatriots, there’s a reason she’s outsold everyone to ever walk the planet. Then there’s J.K. Rowling, the once broke single mom who is so talented that she built a global empire with nothing but her words. And if streaming television has added anything to my life, it’s been a slew of British crime dramas that have taken me across Jolly Old England, both past and present. Like many Americans, I have a fondness—or even a reverence—for Great Britain. Which…

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