The Mystery of Pentecost in Music – Tallis and the sound of the Holy Spirit
The Mystery of Pentecost in Music – Tallis and the sound of the Holy Spirit - YouTube
Sunday, 8 June 2025
Hospital keeps brain-dead woman alive to save unborn baby, citing Georgia law ... HURRAH!
CNA Staff, May 16, 2025 / 10:39 am
A Georgia hospital is requiring that a pregnant
woman who was declared brain dead more than 90 days ago remain on life support
until the birth of her unborn child.
In February, doctors declared 30-year-old Adriana
Smith, a nurse who was nine weeks pregnant, brain dead after discovering
multiple blood clots in her brain.
According to Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, after
visiting the hospital complaining of painful headaches, Smith was “given
medication” and sent home. Smith’s boyfriend found her “gasping for air” the
next morning and called 911. After a CT scan, doctors discovered the blood
clots and eventually determined nothing could be done.
Emory University Hospital in Atlanta
informed Newkirk that due to Georgia state law, because Smith is brain
dead and no longer considered at risk, her medical team is legally required
to keep her on life support until
her unborn child can survive outside the womb.
Smith’s family, including her young
son, visits her in the hospital regularly. Newkirk told 11Alive that seeing her
daughter, who is now 21 weeks pregnant, “breathing through machines” the last
three months has been “torture.”
Newkirk said not having any choice in the matter
has been difficult. She also said she is concerned about raising both her
grandsons and the mounting medical costs.
“They’re hoping to get the baby to at least 32
weeks,” Newkirk said of Smith’s doctors. “But every day that goes by, it’s more
cost, more trauma, more questions.”
Georgia law prohibits abortion once a fetal
heartbeat is detected, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy. While
removing life support from a pregnant woman is not a direct abortion, Smith’s
situation is not clear from a legal perspective.
The law defines abortion as “the act of
using, prescribing, or administering any instrument, substance, device, or
other means with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy with knowledge that
termination will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of an unborn
child.”
State Sen. Ed Setzler, lead sponsor of the Georgia
law while he served in the state House of Representatives in 2019, told CNA
that he is glad “the hospital is seeking to stabilize the child.”
In Setzler’s opinion, the hospital’s reading of the
law “is not inconsistent with the way the statute is crafted because of the
direct foreseeability that ending the mother’s life ends the life of the
child,” though “you could argue that the removal of the life support of the
mother is a separate act” from an abortion.
While the Catholic Church teaches that
direct abortion is always wrong, in a case like Smith’s, it is “complicated,”
Joseph Meaney, senior fellow at the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC),
told CNA.
Meaney said the Church recognizes that
in cases like Smith’s, where there is no clear teaching, a “discernment of
conscience” is required. He said these situations can “reach a threshold of
disproportionate burdens,” which can include financial considerations.
Another NCBC ethicist, Joe Zalot, told CNA that
Smith’s case is a question of prudential judgment. Removing Smith from life
support “without the direct intent to kill her unborn child” is not an
abortion, he said.
However, Zalot continued, “when a woman is
pregnant, doctors will say they are treating two patients. In this case, you
have one patient, the mother, who is deceased, and another patient who is
alive.”
“The question is, if it can be demonstrated that we
are not harming the mother,” Zalot said, “can we give the unborn child an
opportunity to live?”
In the end, Meaney said, “the state of Georgia says
it has state interest in the life of the child, and they’re stepping in.”
Emory Healthcare did not respond to CNA’s request
for comment.
Cherished moments in the married life of Delia and Detterling...
Detterling: Delia I'm furious! I took Sebastian for a haircut today and that imbecile barber once again mistook me for Sebastian's grandfather.
Delia: So? Live in reality Detters. You look as old as Methuselah. You could easily be mistaken for Sebastian's Great-grandfather.
Saturday, 7 June 2025
Thursday, 5 June 2025
The advent of Pride Month, albeit in recent years a slightly more muted affair than in the past, is an annual reminder of one of the central aspects of our modern culture. Ours is a culture not merely characterized by the death of old moral values but their intentional and exultant destruction. Anyone who has witnessed a Pride parade can be in no doubt about this. Twice I have unintentionally been in London as the parade takes place; twice my shock at the explicit nature of some of the floats has only been exceeded by my incomprehension at the parents who have brought their tiny children out to watch and cheer. Today, we apparently celebrate neither sexual modesty nor childhood.
Such exultant destruction of things once deemed sacred is a constitutive part of a Western culture that has transformed the rebel into a hero. Rebels need sacred rules to transgress, and as rebellion began to emerge as a heroic ideal in the nineteenth century—at least among the artistic classes—so the religion that upheld those sacred rules was bound to suffer. Matthew Arnold may have captured something of the death of religion with his image of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the ebbing sea of faith, but it does not capture the ecstatic frenzy and deicide of the sexual revolution. Transgression is fun, exhilarating fun, as thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Nietzsche, and Freud knew only too well. And the glorification of the transgressor is a hallmark of our moment.
Rereading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain recently, I was struck by how the characters’ various ideologies have remained part of the Western cultural landscape a century later. In the rarefied atmosphere of an alpine sanatorium, far above the humdrum lives of ordinary people, elite intellectuals explore modernity’s pathologies and contradictions in ways familiar today. Exclusive humanism and critical theory do battle in the persons of Settembrini and Naphta, a thinly disguised Georg Lukács. Both schools find their supporters today. But the figure who most succinctly captures the wider spirit of our age is Madame Chauchat, the symbol of erotic temptation. She declares to Hans Castorp, the central character: “It seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.”
Transgression—in this case, the tease of erotic transgression—is the hallmark of the “virtuous,” or perhaps better “authentic,” person. That is the logic of the sexual revolution that has done so much to reshape Western culture in the last sixty years, and of which Pride Month is the liturgical celebration.
In the century since Mann wrote, the basic ideas he was exploring have not changed. Postmodernity really is not that different from modernity. What has changed is the scope and location of these ideas. No longer do they only inform the entertaining conversations of those living on the cultural mountaintops. Now they are the common property of the culture at all levels, enabled both by technology and the media. Medicine has made chaotic sexual behavior less risky. Chauchat’s transgression is today cheap and easily available in the over-the-counter forms of the abortion pill and antibiotics. And social media has extended adolescence by incentivizing increasingly transgressive behavior. To keep those clicks coming, we must become ever more outrageous. Indeed, this turbocharges one of the essential dynamics of transgression as an ideal: Once a specific transgression is normalized, it too must be transgressed. The hunger is never satisfied; it only becomes more extreme. And so, while rebellion in the 1970s was having a poster of the Sex Pistols on your bedroom wall or telling your horrified mother that Debbie Harry was your ideal date, today it’s proclaiming on X or Instagram that Hitler was one of the good guys and queer people should support Hamas.
There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity. Whether it’s activists or social media users upping the rhetorical ante by insulting anyone they disagree with and demanding public affirmation of what is obviously false—that men can be women and vice versa—or whether it’s the ever-more outlandish sexualities on display in pop culture, the dynamic is the same: public discourse degenerating into infantile tantrums.
Which brings us back to Pride Month. Exhibitionism and glorying in transgressive sexuality and in the inability or unwillingness to exert self-control is the mark of an infantile society. No, children shouldn’t be taken to Pride parades. But we fool ourselves if we think that such parades are not themselves deeply childish affairs.
Tuesday, 3 June 2025
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual North American Patristics Society meeting entitled “The Future of Patristics.” This conference is the largest and most important for American scholars interested in ancient Christianity. Kannengiesser’s talk was something of a state of the union address for the discipline. With the skill of a seasoned academic, he synthesized the dramatic expansion of the study of early Christian studies in the twentieth century, which he characterized as “a patristic revival.” This renaissance of the Fathers—comparable to the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century and the Jansenist and Benedictine revivals of the seventeenth century—points to the deeper cultural longing to connect with the religious heritage that once united us. Whether we recognize it or not, the twentieth century was a widespread ad fontes movement, when Western civilization went looking for its identity in the ancient world.
The language of “revival” is no overstatement. Those who participated, and are participating in, the patristic revival of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century were motivated, whether consciously or subconsciously, by something Kannengiesser termed “a hermeneutic of European foundations.” The two World Wars, coupled with the dramatic technological revolutions and other social disruptions of the twentieth century, caught traditional institutions in the crosshairs and sparked a cultural gravitational pull toward the ancient church. The fruit of the larger “hermeneutic of European foundations” has also manifested in a variety of more practical movements, such as the classical education movement and the rise of civics centers that are popping up at universities across the country. These kinds of movements suggest that the revival of patristics was “only an episode in a far more outreaching shift of Christian life to something beyond post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment modernity.”
We can see Kannengiesser’s prophetic words coming true as the membership of various denominations has slowly evaporated. Some have expressed hope that the tide will turn in the other direction—I pray that is the case—but for the past fifty years, there has been a slow, steady decline of religious communities and institutions. A parade of recent publications have documented the decline of the mainline denominations and the fracturing of evangelicalism into a thousand shards. In the modern period, all the major post-Reformation denominations are experiencing massive ruptures, with dwindling numbers and delayed maintenance of their crumbling institutions. Traditional evangelical institutions are struggling too. The recent news of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School closing its doors and relocating to a school in Canada is symbolic of the larger transitions happening; one of the most important evangelical seminaries of the twentieth century can no longer survive as an independent institution.
But what are the prospects of this return to the ancient church? One key feature that characterizes this modern revival is a return to the Bible. While this has taken the form of debates about methods of interpretation, the fundamental question for the early Church Fathers was not “how do we read the Bible,” because they lived outside a Christendom, where the patterns of life were pagan. They were much more concerned with demonstrating why we read the Bible. For the Fathers, the Bible provided the reality that governed them. The Fathers gathered around the table of the Scriptures and feasted together on the Word of God.
For the Fathers, the Bible was a culture-shaping text that envisioned a flourishing community looking to the Bible for a rule of life and living in the love of God and neighbor. The secret ingredient in the revolutionary rise of Christianity in the ancient church was the Bible—a point Kannengiesser recognized too. Modern critical interpreters of the Bible have analyzed it to death and imposed a chasm between what Kannengiesser called “today’s scientific exegesis of Scripture” and “the real people in all the churches.” While many have tried to traverse this chasm, the postmodern world is ushering in new challenges, especially technological ones, that are widening this divide.
For the past twenty years, I have lived in both the worlds of evangelicalism and patristics, trying to make sense of both communities amid the complete revision of the institutions of Western civilization. When I look to the Fathers, I find that the Bible is, to borrow Northrop Frye’s phrase, the “great code” of Western civilization. The Bible in the early church, Kannengiesser concluded in his lecture, “served, in fact, as one of the irreplaceable keystones of Western traditions.”
Looking back to the early centuries of the church, it is easy to see that the Bible is a culture-shaping text; it creates a vision of life and community that promotes human flourishing. The Scriptures were absorbed into the lives of the faithful, and through their lives, they became the leavening agents that transformed society. This story is told in countless books: Just skim Tom Holland’s Dominion, and you’ll see how much the church has shaped the West. Dependence upon the Bible is the underlying thread uniting all the essential institutions of Western culture.
Through a unified reading of the prophets and apostles, the Fathers imagined a vision of life, or what Charles Taylor has called a social imaginary, with a synthetic view of God, the world, and the human person that are all journeying together toward the coming kingdom of God. The ancient Christians called others to join them on this journey because they recognized that only those who conform to the vision of life offered in Scripture will experience true human flourishing.
This is where the Fathers can help us. For too long, we have been beholden to what Michael Legaspi calls the “academic Bible” and have ignored the “scriptural Bible.” The academic fixation on critical methods has dissected Scripture, killing the vibrant, holistic vision of life offered in its pages. We need the vision of biblical theology to bind us once again. When the people of God gather around the Bible, they share a common confession, a common metaphysic, and the patterns of a spiritual and liturgical life that performs the teachings of the Scriptures. “The church,” R. R. Reno observes in The End of Interpretation, “schools us to read Scripture well.” Through careful catechesis, liturgy, and preaching, the people of God learn how to inhabit the world as Christians and, consequently, shape our inherited cultural institutions in virtuous ways. This is what I hope the revival of patristics will ultimately produce. I hope that it will lead us back to the Scriptures, for there we find the story of the coming kingdom of God, and our place within that story.
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