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Back in the late 1990s, a close friend — a mentor, even — died of cancer. Through the years I had learned that he loved music but didn’t know very much about music. So I kept giving him music.
A British philosopher, and former faculty member at my alma mater, published a small paper recently that argued that practitioners of natural family planning cause “massive” early embryonic death. Incendiary! So I guess I should not be surprised that major media are picking up on the study.
There’s an interesting story coming out of Wisconsin about a woman who was fired from her job as a Roman Catholic school teacher because she conceived her children using in vitro fertilization.
I remember hearing a joke about a Sunday school teacher who was telling her young students about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. This teacher was more learned than the average Sunday school teacher so she explained that the Moses hadn’t miraculously parted the water to enable the crossing. Rather, the sea was actually very shallow — only a couple of inches or feet deep, in fact. So while God did rescue his people, he didn’t use supernatural means.
A $2.4 million study on the effect of intercessory prayer came out last week and received a bunch of coverage. Researchers studying 1,800 heart-bypass patients at three hospitals found that intercessory prayer by strangers has no effect on the health of the person being prayed for. They also found that people fared worse — in the short-term at least — if they knew they were being prayed for.
The FDA announced this week that another two women who had undergone abortions using pills had died. It is important for reporters to be very specific about what is and is not known about life and death issues such as these, and many reporters did a fine job. But there was one component that was sorely lacking. Let’s look at this sample coverage from Andrew Bridges with Associated Press:
A few years ago I was in Czech Republic to witness the baptism of a dear friend. We went to Kutna Hora, home to the beautiful Sv. Barbory (Saint Barbara) Cathedral, one of the most famous Gothic churches in Europe. From Jan Svankmajer’s film, I knew of an ossuary nearby that I wanted to visit. Hana repeatedly told me that I shouldn’t go, but I insisted.
According to Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon was brought forth when God provided 22-year-old church founder Joseph Smith with special glasses and seer stones that enabled him to translate writings — from “Reformed Egyptian” — on golden tablets found in New York. Mormons believe these scriptures restored the church and left the rest of Christianity in apostasy.
In his recent opinion in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board, Judge John Jones accused members of the Dover Area School Board of being closet Christian creationists. In fact, he more or less painted the entire Intelligent Design community as creationists. And I bring this up because one wonders what Jones and his bedfellows would call folks like Ken Ham, profiled yesterday in the Los Angeles Times.
