Hiroshima’s Children
by Sarah Terzo On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Two hundred forty-seven thousand people, over half the city’s population, were killed. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Contrary to what Americans are often told, the bombings may never have been necessary to…
Movie Review: Oppenheimer
by Rachel MacNair Oppenheimer is a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” According to its director’s custom, it has three different threads of stories that weave throughout. One tells the story of his early years and the development of the atomic bomb with care for historic accuracy, and the…
Movie Review: Sound of Freedom
by Rachel MacNair The movie Sound of Freedom is causing quite a stir. It depicts the real-life Tim Ballard, who’s portrayed doing Hollywood-movie style rescues to get children out of the grips of pedophilic sex trafficking. As a drama, it’s well done. This would be the approach that would be taken by a movie…
Abortion Supporters Connect Abortion to War
Compiled by Rachel MacNair. If you know of other good quotations that fit this theme, please send them to CLNeditors@googlegroups.com Dr. Frank Behrend, M.D., abortion doctor tape-recorded speech November 7, 1977 Reference was made to my agreeing that abortion is taking a human life, which it is. However, let us remember that war is…
Imagining a Different Type of Peace Organization
by John Whitehead Effective peace activism is urgently needed in the United States today. (Peace activism is also needed elsewhere in the world, but since I’m an American citizen, I will focus here on the United States.) Tensions between the United States on the one hand and nations such as Russia, China, North Korea,…
Applying Pacifist Insights to Abortion
by Rachel MacNair I’m a Quaker, and Quakers are pacifists. We (officially, the Religious Society of Friends) join Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren as the Historic Peace Churches. Membership in any of these churches puts a person in good shape for getting legal conscientious objector status when drafted for the military. As…
Bigotry against Babies with Down Syndrome: International Experiences
by Sarah Terzo Recently, the CLN Blog published an article about discrimination against people with Down syndrome and how it leads to abortion. The article looked at cases from the United States, but the same thing happens in other countries. Writer Says She Would Have Aborted Her Children If They Had Down Syndrome An author…
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor vs. the Worthy and Unworthy of Life: How Both Major Political Parties Pick and Choose Who They Help and Whom They Kill
by Jacqueline H. Abernathy, Ph.D., M.S.S.W Catholic social activist Dorothy Day once said, “The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor.” As I look at the current political landscape, I can see how this quote is far more dynamic than I once thought. The two parties…
Common Sense Is Not So Common
by Josephine Garnem As Matthew quotes Jesus, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You…have neglected the weightier things of the law: judgment and mercy and fidelity. [But] these you should have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!” (Matthew 23: 23-24, New American Bible)…
War Hysteria and Post-Dobbs Reactions
by Rachel MacNair The backlash to the overturn of Roe was predictable. I wrote a piece on the psychology behind Explaining Belligerency awhile back, and that’s a major way of explaining it on this issue and many others. That helps account for not just what we’re going through now, but the bits of belligerency…