US Birthrate Falls Below Replacement Level; 41% of Births to Single Mothers

From Catholic World News

The birthrate in the United States has fallen to 2.01 children per woman, which is below the replacement rate of 2.1.

The birthrate plunged from 2.08 to 2.01 between 2008 and 2009; the decline affected all races and age groups except the 40-44 age group. “For the first time in years, the rate of births to unmarried women declined,” observes Mary Mederios Kent of the Population Reference Bureau. “However, births to married women declined even more, which pushed the percentage of all US births to unmarried mothers to 41, an all-time high.”

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Debt and the Birth Dearth (Acton Institute)

• U.S. Fertility in Decline (Population Reference Bureau)

• Demographics of the United States (Wikipedia)

Victor Hanson and Peter Berkowitz on Revolution in the Arab World

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian, professor of classics, and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, which Professor Hanson edited, and The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, a volume of his essays.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  He is also cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, has served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, and is a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In Tunisia on December 17, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi protested the harassment he had suffered at the hands of police by committing suicide by setting himself ablaze. Since then, the governments of Tunisia and Egypt have been overthrown. A civil war has broken out in Libya. The king of Jordan has dismissed his cabinet and protests have taken place in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. What has happened? Hanson and Berkowitz analyze the causes of these events (including the role of social networking) and discuss possible outcomes for the Middle East states enmeshed in popular unrest. They evaluate the implications for Israel and conclude with an assessment of President Obama's handling of these events and how the United States should respond to the ongoing unrest.

 

Huckabee Wins South Carolina County GOP Straw Poll

From Fox News

By L. A. Holmes

 

 Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has won a 2012 GOP presidential straw poll in the key early primary state of South Carolina.

Huckabee topped the York County Republican Party poll Saturday with 23 percent of first-choice votes according to the party, followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 11 percent and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann at 10 percent.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney garnered eight percent of the 152 votes cast; Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Donald Trump each won seven percent.

The rest of field--including Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum--earned between one and four percent of the vote.

Half of the 149 convention attendees who voted on the issues ballot said that reducing government spending and reducing the size of government were the biggest concerns going into 2012.

'AdoroTe Devote' by Saint Thomas Aquinas

Devoutly I Adore Thee

O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

Sight, touch, and taste in Thee are each deceived;
The ear alone most safely is believed:
I believe all the Son of God has spoken,
Than Truth's own word there is no truer token.

God only on the Cross lay hid from view;
But here lies hid at once the Manhood too;
And I, in both professing my belief,
Make the same prayer as the repentant thief.

Thy wounds, as Thomas saw, I do not see;
Yet Thee confess my Lord and God to be:
Make me believe Thee ever more and more;
In Thee my hope, in Thee my love to store.

O thou Memorial of our Lord's own dying!
O Bread that living art and vivifying!
Make ever Thou my soul on Thee to live;
Ever a taste of Heavenly sweetness give.

O loving Pelican! O Jesu, Lord!
Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy Blood;
Of which a single drop, for sinners spilt,
Is ransom for a world's entire guilt.

Jesu! Whom for the present veil'd I see,
What I so thirst for, O vouchsafe to me:
That I may see Thy countenance unfolding,
And may be blest Thy glory in beholding. Amen.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by E. Caswall

From the Pastor - 'Faith Comes Through Hearing'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

Christ Healing the Blind Man

Eustache Le Sueur (1616-1655)

The Gospel account of the man born blind (John 9:1-41), speaks of hearing four times. Liturgically, it is not appropriate, save for reasons of hearing loss, for the faithful to read the Scriptures from some text as the lector is reading them. Such individualism is alien to Catholic sensibility. The Living Word said to His disciples, “Let him who has ears to hear, hear” (Mark 4:9). He did not say, “Let him who has eyes to read, read.” The Word of God is not literature. His voice makes a personal contact. At the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene could see the Lord, but she recognized Him only when He spoke her name, and Cleopas and his companion saw Him on the Emmaus road, but their hearts were moved when He “opened” the meaning of the Scriptures to them, and they recognized Him only when He broke bread.

Jesus is not content with giving the blind man physical sight. Of course, He deals with the pedantry of the Pharisees like someone flicking a gnat, but His attention is toward that man who suddenly can see with his eyes, but needs yet to see with his soul.

At the behest of Pope Gregory X, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote his glorious Eucharistic lines so that they might be heard: Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur; Sed auditu solo tuto creditur. “Taste and touch and vision, to discern thee fail / Faith that comes through hearing pierces through the veil.” (From Adoro te devote.)
     

One discipline of Lent should be to unplug the I-Pods, turn off the television, and listen for the Voice. It is easier to be aware that something is hard to see than hard to hear. But the Voice is all important, and explains what the eye may see but does not understand.

The salvific suffering of Jesus began when Philip and Andrew told Him that there were Greeks who wanted to see Him (John 12:21). We do not know what those Greeks made of Him when they saw Jesus. Just as hearing is not listening, so seeing is not perceiving. The virtue of Faith transforms the physical sensation into a moral fact. So our Lord said to His apostle in Easter: “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed” (John 20:29). As the soul understands Christ through the heart, the cure needed is not for hardness of hearing, but hardness of heart. When the human heart wills what God wills, then blindness and deafness both are cured. Having given sight to the blind man, Jesus asked him if he believed in the Son of Man. The man did not know what that meant. So the Voice spoke: “You have seen Him, and it is He who speaks to you.” In that moment the man born blind understood and worshiped Him, “Lord, I believe” (John 9:35-38).

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, is available from Crossroads Publishing.

Obama Ready to Seek Another 4 Year Vacation Package

President Barack Obama could officially launch his campaign for re-election in 2012 as early as Monday, according to reports in Washington.

 

From The Telegraph

By Philip Sherwell

Obama confidants told The Wall Street Journal that the president is expected to make the announcement to supporters and then embark on a series of high-profile fund-raisers across the country.

The Intellectual as Courtier

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

By Paul A. Rahe

Throughout history, intellectuals have been linked to tyrants, says the historian Paul A. Rahe. Here, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi (left) listens during a debate on democracy with the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (far right) and the American political scientist Benjamin Barber.

What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant's notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.