When Clarence Thomas and I were wandering around Worcester, our daily travels would begin by visiting the campus center to check our mail, and maybe get a cup of coffee. I don't normally sign petitions, and probably won't start doing so again. I knew all this because my inbox was staggering under the weight of requests, actually demands for my signature and, probably, demands for $5 or 10 or whatever amount I could send whomever was asking for that signature. Because if Roe goes, and it is in fact now gone, the modern legal concept of privacy is dead. Justice Thomas (Holy Cross, Class of 72) seldom publishes an opinion but his opinion says that other aspects of life - contraception, same sex marriage, and anything covered by the concept of privacy - are now open for re-evaluation. Long before I got to this article, I knew that the Supreme Court had published its ruling on Abortion, and that it was as draconian and out of sync with American society as it is possible to imagine. Gerson's approach is to help all of us to understand how it came about as well as why it is a mistake yet perhaps as much an opportunity. The union between MAGA and 'What would Jesus do?' is troubling for many reasons. The systemic and Existentialist theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich wrote in his most approachable text, 'The Dynamics of Faith' that 'faith is about ultimate concerns.' Michael Gerson's lengthy but readable column on the abyss that Evangelical Christianity now straddles that Christians should read and consider while those of us struggling to understand how they got into this position should read with sadness, hope and charity. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.' Francis of Assisi

To understand, than to be understood to love, than to be loved.įor it is by self-forgetting that one finds. 'Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism - an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy.' Michael Gerson, WAPO, 9-1-22 But as a religious person (on my better days), what concerns me are the perverse and dangerous liberties many believers have taken with their own faith. 'Much of cosmopolitan America holds to a progressive framework of bodily autonomy, boundless tolerance and group rights - a largely post-religious morality applied with near-religious intensity.

Against the State by Crispin Sartwell