via @NYTOpinion nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opini…

‘FaithBlock’: Social media giant restricts IC posts - The Irish Catholic irishcatholic.com/faithblock…

via @NYTimes nytimes.com/2024/04/11/busin…

Uri Berliner has worked at NPR for 25 years. He still works there. And today he published this essay in @TheFP: thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-n…

The great civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the 20th century's heroes and prophets. In 1971, when the movement to legalize elective abortion in the United States was in full swing, she boldly bore witness to the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. In her speech "Is It Too Late?", she made her support for the precious and vulnerable child in the womb absolutely clear, declaring that "legal abortion is legal murder." Virtually everybody today praises Fannie Lou Hamer, yet many, alas, fail to heed her prophetic voice.

As Easter Approaches, Christian Persecution Is on the Rise | Opinion newsweek.com/easter-approach…

I have learned with sorrow of the kidnapping, in Haiti, of a group of people, including six religious sisters: in my heartfelt plea for their release, I pray for social concord in the country, and I invite everyone to bring an end to the violence.

This really needs to end sooner rather than later. Male bodies, however they might identify, do not belong in women’s sports!

Screaming and yelling to disturb patients at a hospital? Maybe arrest the mob or at least its leaders?

Bishop Rolando Álvarez and 18 other religious political prisoners (a bishop, 15 priests, 2 seminarians) have been released from prison, exiled. They are currently in Rome. In the right picture, they're with Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican's Secretary of State.

There are 19 priests, including two bishops, in jail. At least two dozen, including many foreign missionaries, in exile. Catholic charities and religious orders have been closed or banned, accused of financing terrorism. Can YOU join us in prayer for #Nicaragua?

via @NYTOpinion nytimes.com/2024/01/14/opini…

There are 19 priests, including two bishops, in jail. At least two dozen, including many foreign missionaries, in exile. Catholic charities and religious orders have been closed or banned, accused of financing terrorism. Can YOU join us in prayer for #Nicaragua?

Claudine Gay Is Only Digging Deeper… It is understandable that Claudine Gay is furious over her forced resignation, her calamitous fall from grace,  and the public consensus about the great damage done to Harvard by her presidency. But still playing the wounded-fawn is no excuse or defense. Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, "worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist. Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender. And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats. Gay knows too that in her now notorious congressional testimony, had she just offered an independent assessment of the epidemic of anti-Semitism on her campus and a Harvard plan to stop it (rather than joining in the finger-in-the-wind groupthink of the other two presidents), and had she not been guilty of long-standing, serial, and flagrant plagiarism, she would still have her job. Gay knows that other white university presidents have recently been forced to resign for far less culpable behavior than her own. Pennsylvania president Liz Magill was forced to quit after her December 5 seeming inability or unwillingness to act against blatant anti-Semitic speech and conduct on her own campus, or Stanford’s president Marc Tessier-Lavigne for co-authoring, some decades earlier, scientific papers whose results were not always based on authenticated data. Again, as for Gay’s insinuations of a cabal that took her down, she also knows that such a charge is no more true or false than the public outrage, both liberal and conservative, over Magill’s obtuseness, or the largely leftwing effort to remove the white male Tessier-Lavigne. Gay knows that she herself has disciplined and censored lots of Harvard professors, among them preeminent black scholars, such as Roland Frier and Ronald Sullivan, on speculative allegations far less egregious than her own serial plagiarism and inconsistent policies of addressing “hate speech" . Did anyone suggest she was then a “racist”? Gay knows that as president she oversaw a code of behavior that routinely severely disciplined students, staff, and professors for plagiarism of a nature far less serial and systematic than her own. Gay indeed knows that her plagiarism was far more serious than suggested by her half-hearted defense of her scholarship (“I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others.”). In fact, when anyone—again and again—copies word-for-word whole paragraphs without attribution or quotation marks, or lifts entire sentences and appropriates the thoughts of other without sufficient footnotes that is precisely “misrepresentation" and claiming “credit" where credit is not due. If a Harvard president and full professor makes such a defense of intellectual theft, what will it say in the future about Harvard? Gay knows that her claim of being proactive in correcting some lifted passages was not proactive at all. It was entirely reactive and came only in response to criticism of her scholarly methods. Gay knows that she has done irrevocable damage to Harvard, given the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, its 700 supportive faculty letter-signers, and its satellite freelancers all embarrassed themselves and further and gravely eroded the institution’s reputation and credibility by going out of their way to defend the indefensible solely on her behalf: by threatening legal action against the New York Post for airing the legitimate charges of plagiarism, by creating a new, ad hoc vocabulary to legitimize her plagiarism (“duplicative language”/“missteps”), by also echoing her charges of racism (and in surreal fashion without any self-awareness that if such charges were true, then Harvard would not have forced her to resign or at least would have refused her resignation), by claiming that anonymous complaints of her intellectual theft were somehow illegitimate by virtue of their whistleblower status, by absurdly insinuating that plagiarism is not plagiarism if the plagiarized does not complain. There was one key issue that Gay neither raised nor much less resolved: given that now Professor Gay has made no effort to explain item-by-item, all the allegations of decades-long and habitual plagiarism, does she feel now exempt from such charges as a Harvard professor of political science? And if so, is her faculty exemption of the sort usually accorded other professors and students under similar suspicion of plagiarism? In the end, was it really asking too much of a Harvard president just to do two things? 1) Explain to Congress why there was a problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard, and then outline the concrete steps she would take to stop the spread of growing anti-Semitic speech and conduct at her campus, and 2) just don’t plagiarize the work of other scholars?

Abstracting from the current controversy a bit, but "the identity of the messenger is more important than the message" is a thru-line though a lot of very bad ideas.

The DEI Rollback of 2023 wsj.com/articles/dei-wiscons…

"I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise," @EliotACohen writes: theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…