Abortion
Rational Disgust by Peter J. Leithart
Nothing to See Here? – Why Planned Parenthood Will Never Be “Transparent” by Eric Metaxas
The Planned Parenthood Videos Just Keep Coming
Abortive reasoning evident in Planned Parenthood videos by Sheila Liaugminas
Rev. Matt Harrison on Planned Parenthood controversy: “God is not silent”
Family Living
Plumber Who Felt Something Brush Against His Feet While Swimming Now Being Called A Hero
A Letter to My African-American Daughter, and a Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates by David French
Losing Faith: Tips for Christian Parents Whose Teen Is Not Interested in Church by Gregory and Marina Slayton
Fetal Development
“Hi, Mommy” video goes viral by Kristi Burton Brown
Worldview and Culture
The killing of a lion in Africa: Fr Fleming reflects by John Smeaton
Sometimes It’s Just Easier To Care About Dead Lions Than Dead People by Matt Walsh
Jesus Is Calling, But He’s Not on Your Phone by Emily Walton
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The Ongoing Story of Ruth by James M. Kushiner
www.fsj.org
The teen group of my local parish most years puts on a play based on the Book of Ruth. Every year a different setting is used. We’ve done Ruth in settings ranging from a silent movie, Shakespeare, Country Western, Jane Austen, Pirates of Penzance, and this year, Casablanca. The story adapts well, with a bit of humor (“of all the barley fields in all the world..”). The story is universal.
In an upcoming Touchstone article about Cecil B. DeMille (“Scandals, Sandals & Biblical Epics”), I discovered a 1960 film, The Story of Ruth. I watched it, expecting a B-movie with sandals and bathrobes. It was actually a bit better than that. I liked it.
To stretch the Book of Ruth into a feature-length film, it added new details, concocting story lines to explain or set up various events in the Book. Yes, Ruth was a Moabitess. “And Israel … began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab.” (Numbers 25:1) Ruth is raised from childhood to be a virgin-priestess of the god Chemosh. “Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh.”(21:29) As priestess, Ruth helps prepare a young girl every year for Chemosh, who requires a human sacrifice.
Ruth meets Mahlon, son of Naomi from Bethlehem. When presented with the God of Israel and his mercy, Ruth repents. She deserts Chemosh, becoming an apostate traitor. The leaders seeks to punish her.
She escapes with Naomi to Bethlehem, declaring, “Your God will be my God.” But Ruth is maligned when the townspeople find out she was a Moabite priestess, an idolater. But the conflict is resolved and all ends well. And Ruth becomes the great-grandmother of King David.
Ruth leaves falsehood behind and clings to the truth. She repents of idolatry, knowing that she helped to kill innocent children. She bears suffering from all sides.
In the movie, anyway. As a Moabitess, the real Ruth would have been a devotee of Chemosh. The real Ruth rejected him for Naomi’s God. بيت 365 In this, she was repentant. Her descendant David is also a model of those who repent, who admit serious error, seen in the quintessential hymn of repentance, his Psalm 51.
Repentance before the Truth is not a given and will cost something. Before repentance, a great divide must be crossed. In “Looking Away from Abortion” in the New York Times, Ross Douthat describes and examines the difficulties faced by those who confront the ugly facts of another bloodthirsty deity, served by millions of Americans, Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. The truth about abortion is there for anyone who really wants to discover it. Acknowledging the aborted babies and the selling of their body parts brings you to a “tipping point”
— that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.
That’s a hard thing to accept. It’s part of why so many people hover in the conflicted borderlands of the pro-choice side. They don’t like abortion, they think its critics have a point … but to actively join our side would require passing too comprehensive a judgment on their coalition, their country, their friends, their very selves. …. This reluctance is a human universal.
Ruth faced such a decision and repented, choosing Naomi’s Lord over her devouring Chemosh.
Life is most dramatic not in physical combat but in those battles waged in the heart between good and evil, between truth and falsehood. The battle can be fierce because not every truth is welcome in our fallen hearts, which are “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Many are desperate in their denials of the evil of abortion, as desperate as a baby reacting against the tools of an invading abortionist. They do not want the lie to die.
We call a victory won by truth in the heart “repentance.” A society repenting of abortion is no longer ruthless and becomes Ruth.