Catholics debate ethical bottom line of GOP budget cuts | Boom in babies born drug dependent | Households get harder to create—and more crowded | Was blind Chinese activist misled?
"Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth,” this Sunday’s selection from the First Letter of John exhorts. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan has been busy arguing that the Republican federal budget plan expresses values embodied in Catholic social teaching . . .
“Remain in me, as I remain in you,” Jesus encourages his disciples in this Sunday’s gospel. Unfortunately, narcotics a woman takes during pregnancy also remain and are passed on through the bloodstream to the developing child. . . .
“All the families of the nations shall bow down” before the Lord, the psalmist says this Sunday, as well as “all who sleep in the earth.” Fewer families in the nation are sleeping in homes they own these days . . .
In this Sunday’s gospel Jesus promises much to those who follow his counsel: “Ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.” Blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who fled house arrest and spent six days in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, was promised a new life . . .
“May we embrace the responsibility we have to each other, and rely on the better angels of our nature in service to one another. Let us be humble in our convictions, and courageous in our virtue.”
The number of prescriptions for opioid painkillers such as OxyContin has risen 400 percent in the past decade.