A Job!

One reason I haven't posted in a while is that I've been busy with job interviews, and I'm happy to say that last week I accepted a position with the Diocese of Sioux Falls. The position I'm taking will (eventually) be Director of Evangelization and Adult Faith Formation. I ask for all of your prayers as my wife and I prepare to move to Sioux Falls and undertake this new phase of our lives.


A Belated Acceptance

As some of my (former) regular readers may recall, in June I was involved in a discussion concerning the morality of our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of those who disagreed most strongly with me was William Sulik, the Blithering Idiot. A couple of weeks after making his first remarks (which I linked to on my post below from June 4th), he publicly (on an archived blog entry which I can't get to for some reason) and privately (via email) apologized for the tone of his remarks. I immediately thanked him for doing so, but am only now following through on my promise to return his public apology with a public acceptance. Thanks, William.


Links

When I was more active on blogging (which I hope willl be possible again soon), I tried to link to the blogs I checked regularly. Unfortunately, the plethora of excellent blogs has become so numerous to make such a task too daunting for now. So instead, I'd recommend you visit the following blogs (all linked to the left) and check out their links: Amy Welborn, Fool's Folly (soon to be defunct, unfortunately), Mark Byron, and Gerard Serafin's Blog for Lovers (near the bottom of the links list).


The Risk of Pregnancy

A couple of years ago while surfing the Net for substantial arguments in favor of abortion rights, I stumbled across an essay entitled Women's Reproductive Self-Determination, whose author goes by "T.F. Barans". This was (and is) one of the more substantial arguments in defense of abortion rights I'd come across, and I engaged in an email discussion with TF which lasted the better part of four months. Speaking for myself, I found the discussion to be very helpful in learning how to articulate my own pro-life views. Much of my position in favor of the personhood of the conceptus was developed in the course of that discussion.

Every now and then I stop by TF's site, and check out her forum (the feminine possessive reflects only my intutions on the basis of our conversations). TF occasionally posts the more meaningful responses she receives (in edited form), along with her replies. Recently I found a post from an abortion rights supporter named Phil, who argues that because there is a 50% chance that a pregnancy will miscarry, engaging in natural reproductive activity is wrong because it is unsafe, as half of those persons who come to exist will die before birth. Somehow Phil sees this as an argument against the personhood of the fetus.

I wrote TF and asked her to send along my response to Phil, which ran like this: natural human reproduction is completely unsafe... every human being who comes to exist because of it (not just half) dies. Not a very good success rate, if you ask me ;-)

My point, of course, is that it's ridiculous to argue against the pro-life position by saying that half of those "persons" who come to exist from sex will die and therefore they aren't really persons, because we all die after we come to exist; whether death greets us two days or seventy years afterwards has absolutely no bearing on our moral and ontological status as human persons.

TF made her only comments in response. I'll get to them a bit later.