Michaela O
A little while ago Bill 52, the Bill aimed to define euthanasia as a form of healthcare, was reintroduced in Quebec. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada legalized euthanasia across the country. There are many viewpoints on this “freedom.” There are certain people who believe it is their right to choose when they want to die. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who believe that life and death are matters that should be out of our control as humans. Continue reading
Rachel Maria
“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”
Alicia J
This article is part one in the “Generation Why” series.
Marcus Otte
This is the winning piece in The Search magazine’s “What’s the difference?” writing contest. Congratulations to Marcus Otte on this thought-provoking, creative look at government and the common good.
The many good things which people value can be sorted into two types: first, there are some goods that are instrumental – they are valuable as means to an end. Money is an obvious example, as is technology.
Other goods, however, are rightly valued for their own sake. Though they may also have instrumental value, such goods are inherently good even if one were to subtract instrumental considerations. Among the classic instances of intrinsic goods we could include: speculative knowledge, happiness, and friendship. These things do not stand in need of justifying ends. They can appropriately be ends in themselves.
Morgan Elizabeth
I have nephews. Two identically adorable bundles of fragile, budding, smiling, drooling, chubby manliness.
Their mommy has to go out into the big wide world to work, and since I study from home I help watch them during the day. I hold them, feed, cuddle, play, bounce, laugh, and love them. But I always have to be careful with their heads.
Babies have disproportionately large heads. For the first few months their necks weren’t strong enough to support that developing noggin. Now they’re about five months old; they can hold up their own heads and look around at the world with big, bewildered eyes. But I still have to be careful—I cradle their heads in my hands, and it’s like holding a couple of heavy eggs. But I can’t drop these eggs. The secret they have inside is of far, far more value than unfertilized yolks.
For the first few years of their life, my nephews have “soft spots” on their scalps—holes where the skull hasn’t joined together, because their heads are still growing with their brains. My fingers try to stay as far from those spots as possible—that is where the precious baby is most vulnerable. The head. The soft spot.
Brantael
The current crises in western culture are centred in a profound disagreement about the nature of truth. This conflict is expressed almost without exception in areas sexual. And the family, founded upon the sexual relationship of man and wife, sits at the front of this culture war. In his excellent papal biography, Witness to Hope, George Weigel writes that four factors fuel this conflict: practical atheism, an unconscious rationalism, a distortion of freedom, and radical individualism. Each is a deformation of things human, and especially those maternal.
The 1990s saw an ongoing attempt to change the definition of what a mother is. Today the term may apply variously to a male or female one feels nurtured by (the former albeit sentimentally), one’s father’s wife/current lover, the one who produced the ovum for conception, the one who carried the child or gave birth or raised or nursed him, the one who supplied (some of) the genetic material, or even assumed still other tasks.
It is no trifling point to determine what a mother is since only the family can effectively deal with all the problems of individuals, and by extension of the societies they form. Mothers, as all of (and more) the above labels, are central to the mission of this most basic social unit. In living family love women lead men to father. While she may lead him as the heart of the family, she submits to him in love as head, both sharing in the revelation of God through the family. The culture war while obviously not exclusively internal finds its most important focus here.
Mothers and fathers each respond to its attacks in unique ways. Men, as active participants in their environs are concerned with the activity of life. Women, by no means incidentally, contribute (when not seeking to imitate men) by their very existence, their being. Women in being mothers help men to do fathering. Continue reading
Rachel Maria
Perhaps it is the language, or perhaps a Russian-ness in the authors not present (for obvious reasons) in Western writers, but there is something very wonderful about Russian literature. I don’t have wide experience to draw from, but my very little bits of reading here and there make it hard for me to believe that someone could read Russian literature and not love Russia.
Rachel Maria
An argument could be made that the joy of the artist is actually an instrumental element of the art itself… But I am not the one to make it (not least because of looming exams) and can only provide a few examples of the joy of the artist. Does it affects the art?
Of course the happiness of the singers in these videos makes them more enjoyable to watch and listen to. The question, then, is whether enjoyment and joy are significant enough to be counted as serious factors in the evaluation of art. And what about tragic art – does it require the same joy, or is it an exception? What do you think?
Rachel Maria is The Search magazine’s Relationships and Creative Arts editor.
Morgan Elizabeth
From his youth, Socrates was intrigued by natural philosophy – the study of the causes of things. When he discovered Anaxagoras’ claim that the nous, intelligence, was the ultimate cause of everything, Socrates was ecstatic. However, Anaxagoras quickly and greatly dissatisfied Socrates, because though the former said that the nous was the cause of everything, he was not consistent with this in his following proofs. He only explains the material causes of things, and ignores the influence of the nous.
The Search 