What Happened after the Feast
Many
of us tend to think of the first Thanksgiving feast as
the official end to all the Pilgrims’ difficulties. Wrong:
Their survival would remain in jeopardy for years to come.
And yet, no matter how difficult things became, they never
failed to offer thanks to God.
As
every school child knows, the Pilgrims arrived in the
New World in the winter of 1620. As the freezing weeks
passed, nearly half their number died. It was a terrible
time, but by spring, things began to improve. Friendly
Indians helped the Pilgrims plant their crops. By October
1621, the fields yielded a harvest large enough to sustain
the colony in the coming winter. The grateful Pilgrims
invited their Indian friends to a three-day feast of thanksgiving
to God.
That’s
where the story typically ends — for us. But for the Pilgrims,
the hardships went on. The next month, a ship arrived
with thirty-five new colonists. But to the Pilgrims’ dismay,
they brought no provisions. The entire colony was forced
to go on half rations that winter. At one point, with
food running out, everyone was forced onto a daily ration
of just five kernels of corn. 
As
my friend Barbara Rainey writes in her new book, Thanksgiving:
A Time to Remember, by spring, the colony was weakened
by hunger and sickness. While the bay and creeks were
full of fish, the Pilgrims’ nets had rotted. Were it not
for shellfish, which could be dug by hand, they would
have perished. Despite the great difficulties, they thanked
God for His provision.
Chuck Colson
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/columns/chuckcolson/2005/11/24/176700.html
--
He’s Such a Character
Harry Potter and moral education.
“There are dark
days ahead, Harry," says Dumbledore, Harry's mentor
and the avuncular headmaster of Hogwart's Academy at the end of the recently released film,
Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "days when
we will be forced to choose between what is right and
what is easy." One of the most magical things about
J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and now films,
the last two of which have been just splendid, is the
way they subtly weave lessons about ethical choice and
character into their gripping plots. Indeed, the plots
themselves pivot on the crucial choices of the major characters
for good or for evil, choices that at once form and reveal
character.
Attention
to moments of choice and to the development of character,
for example, in the latest Potter film and in the wonderful
film version of Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice, can help to educate the moral imagination
of young and old alike. As Karen Bohlin,
a senior scholar at the Center for the Advancement of
Ethics and Character at Boston University, urges in her
new book Teaching
Character Education Through Literature: Awakening the
Moral Imagination in Secondary Classrooms the
challenge for parents and educators is to "mitigate
the range of negative narrative images and stimuli that
feed the imaginations and aspirations of young people."
The real danger in our culture is that many children grow
up in a moral and spiritual vacuum into which the worst
of Hollywood popular culture — film, music, and video
— marches to set up its own pedagogy, which atrophies
the moral imagination and deforms desire.
Now,
it is true that as practice in many schools character
education is no more than a fad, deployed as a quick fix
for rising violence, promiscuity, drug use, and incivility
that afflict our youth. A scholar and secondary-school
administrator at the Boston's Montrose School, Bohlin is acutely aware that much that passes for character
education never transcends "simplistic slogans."
Schools promote virtues the way Baskin-Robbins sells its
flavor of the week, with posters of nice kids being nice
to other nice kids. This is the sort of insubstantial
rot through which young people see very quickly.
Thomas
Hibbs
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/hibbs/hibbs200511280820.asp
--
Review
― The Heritage
Guide to the Constitution
It
seems only natural that we should owe the first line-by-line
exegesis of the Constitution to former Attorney General
Edwin Meese. In 1986, when Meese
first began championing “a jurisprudence of original intent,”
most conservatives still adhered to the strict-constructionist
view, which valued the literal words of the Constitution
over the Framers’ intent behind them.
During
the past twenty years, however, originalism
has steadily gained currency among conservative jurists
to the point of being the most formidable judicial philosophy
of our time. And with the publication of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, Meese has sought to make originalism
accessible to the general public.
The format of The
Heritage Guide is relatively straightforward.
Meese and his fellow editors,
Matthew Spalding and David Forte, have assigned each of
the individual clauses of the Constitution to a group
of more than 100 conservative legal scholars for explication.
Each scholar has provided a mini-history of each clause,
explaining how the Founders understood it and how it has
subsequently been interpreted. A surprising number of
clauses have remained virtually undisputed since their
inception, while many others have been distorted beyond
recognition.
The commerce clause, for instance, which grants Congress
the power to regulate trade among the states, remains
by far the most hotly contested clause in the Constitution.
The Framers seem to have intended that Congress should
stop states from unfairly burdening each other’s trade,
but their language is frustratingly vague. No one agrees
on what the words “regulate,” “commerce,” or “among several
states” mean. As David Forte, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall
College of Law, points out in his explication, Justice
Benjamin Cardozo greatly expanded Congress’s power in 1935 when he
broadly interpreted the clause to allow for the regulation
of anything that affected state commerce. As
it stands now, a whole host of far-flung issues--abortion
to gun control--could potentially hinge on how the Supreme
Court understands the regulation of interstate trade…
Originalism may be a conservative methodology, but it does not always
yield conservative results. Justice Antonin Scalia could cite numerous
examples of cases ― Texas v. Johnson, Hamdi
v. Rumsfeld, etc. ― where
his originalist interpretations
have led to outcomes he personally deplored. As such,
originalism is legally, not
politically conservative ― an important distinction
to note. If there’s one unfortunate thing about The Heritage
Foundation’s imprimatur on The
Guide, it’s that it may scare away some of
the audience across the aisle.
Thomas
Meaney
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/
opinion/books_entertainment/reviews/ThomasMeaney/176872.html
---
Repetitive Choice
Close to half of the 1.3 million abortions performed in the United States
each year are repeat abortions. ... In 2000, the Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 18 percent of
abortions were performed on women seeking at least their
third pregnancy termination. In contrast, studies have
show that rape and incest victims ... account for about
1 percent of abortions. ...
Asked about repeat abortions, a spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America declined
several requests for comment.
The reluctance of liberals and pro-choice advocates to shine a spotlight on
the troubling repeat-abortion phenomenon has obscured
a growing public health issue. ... The sad fact is that
... abortion is no longer mainly a tool women use to shape
their own destinies, but rather a symptom of larger social
problems that ought to be addressed by policy-makers.
Realizing this may just mean accepting that there's some credibility to conservative
views on abortion.
Garance
Franke-Ruta, writing on "Multiple Choice," in
the Dec. 5 issue of the New Republic
Reported in The
Washington
Times
http://www.washtimes.com/culture/culturebriefs.htm
