16 Things That Caught My Eye: Family First, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Getting Medicine Right & More

1. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik in the Wall Street Journal: The Deeper Meaning of ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’

Perhaps the best recent interpretation of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” comes from Makoto Fujimara, an artist whose life and career offer a striking parallel to Leutze’s. Born in Massachusetts to Japanese immigrants in 1960, he spent part of his childhood in Japan and part in the U.S. In a 2014 commencement address at Cairn University in Pennsylvania, Fujimara reflected on how Leutze sought to “capture the very essence and ideal of democracy itself,” embodying a “diverse coalition of unlikely heroes gathered together in a boat cast into the icy waves.”

Fujimara argues that Leutze deliberately depicted the Delaware as if it were the Rhine because he was asking his fellow Germans to embrace the American example. The painting, on this view, expresses the same idea that Abraham Lincoln voiced in a speech in Trenton in 1861: that Washington’s crossing of the Delaware embodied “something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”

This idea allows us to understand other alleged errors in the painting as deliberate artistic choices. If Washington’s journey is shown taking place in the early morning, rather than in the dead of night, it is to suggest that the American experiment could herald the dawning of democracy elsewhere and a new birth of freedom for many in America. The flag held by Monroe calls America to embrace its founding principles.

Putting so many soldiers in a tiny boat was also a symbolic choice. At a time when many in Europe were excluded from civic life and many in America were enslaved, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” urges Europeans to embrace democracy while reminding Americans, as Fischer put it, that they were all in the same boat.

2. Christianity Today: Opening the American Heart

More than three decades ago, philosopher Allan Bloom wrote the unexpected bestselling nonfiction book of the summer, The Closing of the American Mind with the provocative subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.

A generation later, Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, moves the focus to what he describes as the closing of the American heart. “The American heart is closing before our very eyes,” he writes. “Our civilization is in the midst of an epochal shift, a shift away from marriage and all the fruits that follow from this most fundamental social institution: children, kin, financial stability, and innumerable opportunities to love and be loved by another.” Wilcox argues that “so many of the biggest problems across America are rooted in the collapse of marriage and family life.”

3. Leah Libresco Sargeant: Punished for Getting Married

4. Crux: New poll shows Irish mothers of young children prefer to stay at home

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7. Nigerian bishop says the country is one wide funeral home because of the persecution of Christians

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https://twitter.com/AlexanderPayton/status/1757525651748258261

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10. National Right to Life Releases Eleventh Annual Report: The State of Abortion in the United States

*Based on data from the CDC and the Guttmacher Institute, National Right to Life now estimates that 65,464,760 abortions have been performed in the United States since 1973.

*In the months following Dobbs, several states moved to enact laws designed to provide maximum protections from abortion to unborn children and their mothers. However, according to the National Right to Life Department of State Legislation, as examined in the report, 26 states and the District of Columbia have guaranteed a right to abortion by court decision, constitutional amendment, or state legislative statute.

11. Dr. Kristin Collier: The Dark Kenosis of Medical Education

If medicine is no longer working from a divine anthropology, what then happens when learners are given big terms and concepts that are important to patients and medicine: terms like “justice,” “humane,” “dignity,” “compassion,” “ethics,” or even “person?” Modern medicine, with only a mechanistic anthropology, cannot possibly have any idea what these terms really mean because they are no longer rooted in the source that renders them intelligible concepts. These words are often thrown around during professionalism lectures, but they are mostly understood, if at all, only in a vague, hollow sense. Additionally, certain words like “humanity,” “dignity,” and “compassion” have been used as pretexts to encroach on the conscience rights of religious physicians who are compelled to opt out of procedures like elective abortion or physician-assisted killing. Afraid of anything having to do with God, medical professionalism and even ethics have been reduced to following a set of superficial professional rules, maxims, and administrative tasks.

12. Ethics and Public Policy Center: Abortion and Mental Health

While there remains disagreement among researchers regarding the frequency and severity of, and risk factors for, mental health problems following abortion, there are substantial areas of concurrence among the major studies: (1) abortion is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental health problems compared to women without a history of abortion; (2) the abortion experience contributes to mental health problems for at least some women; (3) there are risk factors, such as pre-existing mental illness, that identify women at elevated risk of mental health problems after an abortion; (4) it is challenging to conduct research in this field in a manner that can definitively identify the extent to which any mental illnesses following abortion can be causally attributed to abortion itself, however, available research is strongly suggestive of a causal link between abortion and poor mental health outcomes; and (5) most important, no available research demonstrates that abortion improves mental health outcomes for pregnant women.

13.  ABC News: Mom’s love helps woman wake from coma after 5 years

14. Catholic prison ministry makes good use of large donation of Bible study materials

“The majority of the prisons that we go into are high security, maximum security units. And for many folks, until they’ve gone in once or twice or three times, they can be a little uncomfortable.”

Perhaps in part because it is such a challenging call, Catholic prison ministries across the United States have struggled for years to attract volunteers and, with often meager financial resources, provide the materials needed to ignite or nurture the faith of men and women in prison after the volunteers leave.

But that changed — at least in Texas — in March 2022, when Catholic publisher Ascension connected with KPM to coordinate a donation of $338,000 worth of Bible study materials related to Ascension’s flagship Bible study, “The Bible Timeline: The Story of Salvation,” a 24-session program presented by Jeff Cavins. Ascension is known, among other things, for producing Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year” podcast.

Thanks to the blockbuster donation, Kolbe says it now has nearly 400 inmates participating in “Bible Timeline” Bible studies at facilities across Texas and other states. Trzeciak said they had been using the “Bible Timeline” before the donation and that he has seen the course foster “amazing” growth in the faith of incarcerated men and women. He said the inmates are often interested in talking about forgiveness — both for others and for themselves.

15.  Nora Kenney in City Journal: An Atmosphere of Joy

Inspired by the concept of localism, the Chesterton Schools Network, based in Minneapolis, helps its schools navigate the curriculum and provides continuing education and resource materials for marketing, hiring, teaching, and fundraising. Crucially, however, it leaves many decisions — like a school’s name or choice of “head of school” — to the discretion of the parents running the individual schools.

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