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Have you ever wondered what it looks like when a culture collapses? Have you ever wondered if past cultures that collapsed throughout history knew what was about to happen to them? Did they see it coming, or were they blindsided by it? I’ve often asked myself those questions, but now I’m also asking myself a new one. Provided the Lord chooses not to return and culminate history, I’m now wondering if future generations will ask the same questions about us? There are several telltale signs of a culture in decline, or on the brink of collapse. One of which is...

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -- John Lennon "Black Friday" was a metaphor beyond the merchants' bottom line. Headlines on last Friday's Drudge Report reflect a culture that is being trampled by the greed and me-only attitude of a growing number of us: "Mall mayhem... Suspected shoplifter shot after dragging cop through KOHL's parking lot... Brawls. .. Man stabbed over parking spot... Shopper Kicked Out Of WALMART For Filming Fight... Man shot walking home with big screen... Shoppers Trampled in Race for $49 Tablet... SALVATION ARMY kettles stolen... Woman pulls stun gun...

With dark shadows of uncertainty descending upon the hearts of so many at the conclusion of 2012, one can only hope 2013 will be a year of promise. But even in these dark days, miracles do still happen, especially when people are willing to roll up their sleeves for the cause of freedom. This present darkness has its roots in our nation's moral decline, and the further we get from our moral center, the worse off we are as a people -- and a nation. It has taken some time to get where we are today. Over the years, conservatives...

On November 6, the citizens of the United States re-elected perhaps the most anti-Catholic president in its history to a second term.Even sadder, according to exit polls a majority of Catholics voted in his favor, even after they theoretically had imbibed the bishops’ message, conveyed from the pulpit and in various other media, that no Catholic should vote for a candidate who favors abortion rights and single sex marriage and does not support religious liberty.What is going on here? Clearly, to borrow a line from the film “Cool Hand Luke,” “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”Simply put,...

Are young men of Pakistani origin really fizzing with testosterone, and do they target young white women for sex because they see them as easy meat, as Jack Straw claimed last week? The Today programme went to Bradford this morning to find out, and you got the distinct impression that no one was more shocked than the BBC to find young Asian men, by and large, confirming what Mr Straw said. ....In fact,...I’m afraid the show’s producers will have been disappointed if they hoped Aaronovitch and Nihal might offer an alternative reading of the situation. ...“It does seem that there...

A Prophecy Fulfilled Fr. Stanislas de Lestapis, a French Jesuit, died in 1999 at the age of 94. He had been a member of the Papal Commission on Birth Control and was one of the signatories of its so-called Minority Report. He had published a book on Birth Control, of which the third edition appeared in 1962, long before Humanae Vitae (1968). In Chapter 7, on The Contraceptive Civilization, he made the following bold prophecies: 'We do not hesitate to say that the acceptance of contraception will produce profound changes in our civilization. These changes are already taking place in...

One of the many beliefs — i.e., non-empirically based doctrines — of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason and reason leads to the moral good. Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more...

Same-sex couples won the right to marry in Connecticut in an historic ruling by the Supreme Court today. Citing the equal protection clause of the state constitution, the justices ruled that civil unions were discriminatory. In a 4-3 decision released at 11:30 a.m., the majority wrote that the state's "understanding of marriage must yield to a more contemporary appreciation of the rights entitled to constitutional protection." "Interpreting our state constitutional provisions in accordance with firmly established equal protection principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same sex partner of their choice,"...

Thousands of problem gamblers in have launched a $3.5 billion class action lawsuit in Ontario, saying they were allowed into provincially run casinos despite signing up for a program that should have denied them entry. According to the CBC's website, the suit was filed earlier this week in Toronto, claiming the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. did not fully enforce a "self exclusion" program that allows problem gamblers to ban themselves from casinos. Those who sign up for the program are photographed and their personal information is stored in binders at all of the province's casinos. If program members are...

The Decalogue, dangerous? The commandments certainly are regarded as hazardous by the Irritable-American community, which successfully petitions the courts to banish them from public life. At least these stalwart secularists give the Decalogue its due; most of us admire the Ten Commandments just enough to avoid taking them seriously. If we grasped how radical they truly are, we'd find them an offensive stumbling block to us middle-class moderns, who live in a rebellious age characterized by sociologist Daniel Bell as "the rejection of a revealed order, or natural order, and the substitution of the ego, the self, as the lodestar...

What if hospitals could put a sign over their doors stating, “We reserve the right to refuse life-sustaining care?” People would be outraged. Yet that is precisely what Texas law explicitly grants to hospitals — namely, to say no to wanted life-sustaining treatment, on the basis of subjective judgments about the quality of the patient’s life. It is an example of a bioethical concept known as Futile Care Theory, a.k.a. medical futility. How did Texas, of all places, become ground zero for futile-care impositions? Back in 1996, a group of Houston hospitals adopted internal administrative protocols, called the Collaborative...

Homosexual acts are a moral aberration, yet the drive to have them accepted as normal by society continues full steam ahead. Egregious recent examples can be found in two bills under consideration in Congress which would grant special privilege to those embracing the homosexual lifestyle, and intimidate and punish those citizens whose values and principles are opposed to the moral revolution advocated by the homosexual movement. The first bill is H.R. 2015, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007; the second is H.R. 1592, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. "Sexual Orientation," a Set of...

Our columnist, who has opted to have a termination since the birth of her two children, argues that it is a moral duty not to bring unwanted offspring into the world: On Wednesday, More4 broadcast Travels with My Camera — A Matter of Life and Death, a “personal journey” by the journalist Miranda Sawyer. This was heralded by a piece in The Observer, written by Sawyer, explaining the purpose of her quest. Sawyer’s dilemma has been that, until recently, she had been a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, pro-choice feminist. After the birth of her son last year, however, she began to have...

Amanda Onnis just wanted a nice wedding. That's why, when the 33-year-old unmarried cosmetics saleswoman discovered she was pregnant last November, she panicked. She had known her boyfriend only a few months and recently moved from Boston to the Denver area to live with him. He immediately asked her to marry him. She figured they'd better elope. After all, it wouldn't be long before she would start to show. Still, a part of her heart broke to give up her girlhood dream of a lavish ceremony and a really great dress. But, in the end, she didn't. On April 21,...

BYU students wanting an alternative commencement speaker to Vice President Dick Cheney could get their wish, thanks in part to a local filmmaker. The Deseret Morning News reports shortly after director Steven Greenstreet posted video footage online from a protest April 4 at BYU, the donations came pouring in. By Monday afternoon, students, faculty and alumni received more than $12,000. The money should be able to fund an alternative commencement at Utah Valley State College. Meanwhile the uproar has drawn national attention because it's seen as a sign the Bush administration's support is waning. Cheney will speak at BYU's commencement...

ROSIE O'Donnell's blue humor made faces red when she emceed the Matrix Awards in front of 2,000 feting New York's most accomplished women in media at the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom yesterday. The loose-lipped lesbian dropped the F-bomb as Barbara Walters lowered her head on the dais and covered her face with her hand. O'Donnell concluded a rant about Donald Trump by grabbing her crotch and shouting, "Eat me!"

New York-Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nations collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine.

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

"I would ban religion completely," British pop-music star Elton John said in a much-noted interview last November. "It turns people into hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate." It isn't exactly news that many people find religion odious, but what is being called the New Atheism has lately become a booming industry. Books, articles, and lectures in profusion extol secularism and deride faith in G-d as pernicious and absurd. Such antipathy to religion was once relegated to the edges of polite society. Today it shows up front and center: A California congressman is cheered for announcing that he is an...

Defense attorney Bernard Shelton argued there was no evidence the girl knew Grocesley was a coach until after most, if not all, of their seven sexual encounters. They occurred from December 2005 to February 2006. "He wasn't in a position of trust with respect to her," Shelton said in closing arguments. "She decided to have sex with him because she liked him, not because he hung out at the school." Fillipitch argued it did not matter whether the girl knew he was a coach. "You don't have sex with students," she said, pointing out Grocesley knew the girl was a...