Category: Culture

Forgiveness

Danny Abdallah and the Power of Forgiveness

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The power of God’s forgiveness was broadcast across Australia on 7NEWS Spotlight Sunday night. Samuel Davidson, the drugged and drunk driver who killed three of Danny and Leila Abdallah’s children, declared that he now looks up to Danny as a godfather and said, “I want to be like Danny.”

The one-hour program revealed that Danny’s extraordinary act of forgiveness has transformed Samuel’s life and brought deep healing to Danny himself.

On 1 February 2020, the lives of the Abdallah family were tragically turned upside down. Three of their children were lost to the reckless driving of Samuel Davidson, who was intoxicated and under the influence of illicit substances.

We would expect grief-stricken parents, Leila and Danny, to become angry, vengeful, and filled with resentment for this man.

But three days later, Leila told the world that she and her family chose to forgive.

7NEWS Spotlight featured this story on Sunday, 17 August. I felt encouraged to see a story like this covered on mainstream media because it forces us to wrestle with uncomfortable questions: Are we truly willing to forgive? Or do we only forgive when it’s easy or convenient? Or when we’re ready?

Danny’s Desire for Obedience

Danny and Leila Abdallah didn’t have time to be ready. They never got to say goodbye to their children. Yet, in the midst of their pain and suffering, they forgave the man who took the lives of their three children.

That’s incredibly powerful. It is only Christ-like love that can empower that readiness to forgive.

As Danny shared at the 2023 National Prayer Breakfast:

“The reason I forgave was I wanted to be obedient to our Lord and Saviour and honour Him at whatever cost”.

At whatever cost.

‘I Want to Be Like Danny’: Samuel Davidson

On 30 August 2023, Danny chose to visit Samuel in prison.

Samuel recalls what it was like to have Danny forgive him:

“I’ve now got a second chance at life here. He’s forgiven me, so that’s massive. I look at him like a godfather, I want to do everything to be like him”.

Danny has since visited Samuel several times, sharing Scripture and chapel time together. He has also reached out to Samuel’s parents. As Danny shares with the 7NEWS reporter, “What [Samuel’s parents] have been through isn’t easy. They’re grieving as well.”

This instalment of Spotlight mentions that Danny and Samuel are participating in the New South Wales Correctional Services’ Restorative Justice Program. Through this program, victims have the opportunity to meet with the offender, where the perpetrator can “confront the consequences of his crime, provide an apology and show remorse.”

But we can see that Danny’s heart for Samuel goes far beyond his participation in this program. From a Christian perspective, we understand it as a powerful form of prison ministry.

‘You Visited Me in Prison’

In Matthew 25, Jesus speaks of the Final Judgement Day when He will return in glory to separate “the sheep from the goats”. Many of us have read well-known parts of this passage, such as “I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me” (Matthew 25:35). Jesus says the sheep will “inherit the kingdom prepared for you” (Matthew 25:34).

But it’s easy to miss these words: “I was in prison, and you visited me” (Matthew 25:36).

I must admit, when I’ve read this verse in the past, I’d never really thought about what it meant to visit someone in prison.

Yes, I’d heard of those who did prison ministry, sharing the gospel with strangers in jail, including ex-gang members. But it had never occurred to me that prison ministry could involve deeply loving and caring for someone like Samuel.

What if God calls me to do the same for someone who had wronged me? Would I have the strength and compassion to go and share the hope of the gospel with a criminal? And not just any criminal, but an individual who had taken the life of someone I loved, treasured and cared for?

Why should this person not be nothing to me? Dead to me? Someone to resent and curse? How could I not harbour hate against someone who has caused me such grief? Who has made me numb, left me with a part of my life I would rather block out of my mind.

Forgive So We Can Forgive

But as Christians, we are compelled to live out a different narrative. Because “God showed his love in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8). How can we hold onto hate and refuse to forgive when God stopped at nothing to forgive us and to redeem us as His own?

Peter writes in 1 Peter 5:8, “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” And as a natural consequence of part of that process – of giving our pain and suffering over to God – God transforms our hearts to be more like His heart for us. A heart that forgives. A heart that loves. Because God is love.

This kind of love is not formed by feelings but by a selfless motivation to act. This selflessness comes from this radical action: God stepped into our world in the person of Jesus, to be spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately endure the shame and suffering of the cross so that we might have a restored relationship with Him.

Only a radical Christ-like love could compel Danny to visit and nurture a relationship with Samuel. To teach his surviving children to pray for Samuel. To call Samuel a part of the same circle of family. It is only God’s power that can bring about that restoration and healing. It is only God’s power that can “work all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).

You can see the hope in Samuel’s eyes when he talks about how the Abdallah family have forgiven him:

“He’s given me forgiveness, he’s welcomed me into his family, he’s gone above and beyond. I’d have no hope if I couldn’t have that [forgiveness].”

Out of tragedy, Samuel’s eyes have been opened to a better way to live:

“Don’t drink, don’t take drugs, don’t do any of it. Some of you might think I’m crazy, but go to a church, give it a shot, try it.”

It is incredibly awe-inspiring to witness the good work being done in the lives of Samuel and the Abdallah family. May their testimony, through the power of the Holy Spirit, convict and embolden us to embrace God’s forgiveness “as we forgive those who have trespassed against us” (Matthew 6:12).

by Louisa Tedesco

This article first appeared at The Daily Declaration and is reproduced here by permission.

Louisa Tedesco is a higher degree research student from Adelaide and is a proud Old Scholar of Emmaus Christian College. She is incredibly passionate about the intersection of faith and politics, student ministry and science communication, as well as her creative outlets, including music, reading, and writing.

The Daily Declaration is Australia’s largest Christian news site. They are dedicated to providing a voice for Christian values in the public square. Their vision is to see the revitalisation of our Judeo-Christian values for the common good. 

Phyllis Schlafly and Babette Francis

Phyllis Schlafly – friend and role model of Babette Francis

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John Morrissey gives a brief overview of the friendship between American conservative powerhouse, Phyllis Schlafly and Babette Francis, founder of Endeavour Forum.

Only months before Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, there occurred the death at the age of 92 of a hero of US Christian conservatives, Phyllis Schlafly, who gave him her blessing in his run for the presidency. This Harvard graduate and mother of six left behind her 50 years of activism on behalf of the nation itself, traditional family interests and values, and the pro-life movement in the US and abroad. Her first publication in 1964, A Choice Not an Echo, was a best seller, calling on the Republican Party to distinguish itself from the drift to the progressive Left in the Democratic Party’s reorientation away from traditional American values.

Phyllis Schlafly and Babette Francis
Babette Francis (right) with her long-time friend and political ally, the late Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, at its HQ in St Louis, Missouri, 2016.

Some Australian viewers might have been aware of Phyllis Schlafly when her character was played by Cate Blanchett in the TV mini-series “Mrs America” on Fox Showcase in 2020. The series focused on her leading the opposition of Christian conservative women to defeat the 1970s feminist campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution. In no way related to the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, ERA professed to explicitly prohibit sex discrimination, but it was a charter for the radical feminist agenda. 

Phyllis is shown opposed to a line-up of the famed feminists of the time, including Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm. The images presented of twinset-and-pearls ladies with neat coiffures lobbying legislators with packages of homemade banana-bread while urging them to reject the amendment were remarkably true to life. In contrast and despite the very attractive portrayal of Steinem by Rose Byrne, the hippy appearance and wrangling among these radical feminists made them appear more like a “coven of witches”, as one writer to the Melbourne Age Green Guide likened them. Much of the credit must go to Cate Blanchett’s superb performance in a production which was rated in the top ten of TV series that year and won numerous nominations and awards.

As Phyllis was taking out a law degree and building her profile with numerous media interviews and debates – she conceded that women could “have it all”, but not at the same time – she made her mark on the Republican Party and its platform. Written in her final year, How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life (2016) tells the story of how she and her Eagle Forum followers, now drawn from many states, devised strategies to gain control of the party platform in the latter 1970s, in the wake of Roe Vs Wade. At the Republican Convention in Missouri in 1976 her motion to “protest the Supreme Court’s intrusion into the family structure” and “to seek enactment of a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children” was approved. She was also involved in Helm’s amendment to oppose accommodation and detente with the USSR, her original interest in politics having been in defence strategy.

It is difficult to pinpoint when contact was first made, but the first mention of Phyllis in the “Women Who Want to be Women” (forerunner of Endeavour Forum) newsletter was in September 1980 when Babette met the author of The Power of the Positive Woman in Chicago. By this time Babette was a regular attendee of UN and other conferences overseas, where she delivered many hard-hitting papers on her key topics of the interests of women and families.  The November 1980 issue of the newsletter celebrated the successful election of Ronald Reagan as President of the US and noted that a “platform that is solidly pro-life and opposed to the feminist ERA can WIN”. Babette also paid tribute to the “energetic” Baptists of Georgia, who showed that abortion is not just a “Catholic issue”. When The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority, a biography of Phyllis by Carol Fesenthal, was boycotted by many US bookshops and libraries, the newsletter fumed at the “censors and book-burners” responsible.        

At the invitation of Women Who Want to be Women (WWWW), in 1983 Phyllis toured the eastern states of Australia, speaking against a Sex Discrimination bill, warning of unintended consequences for women, just as she had warned concerning the ERA proposal in the US. She was described in the Catholic press as “a charmingly feminine lady …. very youthful looking, always perfectly disciplined, always perfectly groomed in appearance”. Speaking at Monash University, she never lost her cool when heckled after affirming that sex outside the marriage bond was sinful. She was guest speaker at WWWW’s first annual convention, where she delivered a paper with the title “Is the Family an Endangered Species?” on problems faced in the US which were also evident in Australia. In the February 1985 newsletter it was reported that Eagle Forum members rejoiced in the re-election of Ronald Reagan, “a vindication of the moral and patriotic values dear to the hearts of Americans”, which reflected the deepening ties. In1994, Phyllis’ sister-in-law, Eleanor Schlafly, visited Australia on a speaking tour organized by Babette. Moreover, at its annual celebrations Endeavour Forum has long awarded a Phyllis Schlafly Eagles certificate to a chosen “Homemaker of the Year”, invariably a lady active in the local pro-life movement.

Phyllis Schlafly went on to build a formidable organization with branches across the US, especially in the South and the Mid-West. As did Babette, she consistently argued that equality of the sexes does not mean reducing the innate differences between them to reproduction and social conditioning. She is credited with having much to do with the rise of the Moral Majority movement which shifted the shape of the US political landscape. 

Today the Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum maintains a large membership who play an important role in the Republican Party. Its HQ is an impressive building in St Louis Missouri and the Schlafly family still play a part in its work. The successor to Phyllis was Ed Martin, who in 2017 also visited Australia for a speaking tour organized by Babette. He is now an important member of Donald Trump’s team, having already filled in as D.A. for Washington D.C. and at present is Pardons Attorney, responsible for freeing US citizens unjustly imprisoned by the Biden administration. 

In 2018 I was invited to attend with Babette a grand Eagle Forum conference in St Louis. There 600 members thronged a Marriott hotel over a long weekend to be addressed by speakers who included members of the Trump administration, delegates from branches across the US, persons of special interest and guests like Babette and me. When she entered the dining room on the first evening she was welcomed as a VIP and invited to the top table. Before meals we said grace, recited a loyal pledge to the Constitution and sang the National Anthem. It was truly inspiring. Donald and Melania Trump were there in spirit, or rather as large cardboard cutouts on stage. It was a truly inspiring example of patriotism which shames us here in Australia.

by John Morrissey

Elliott

Vale Bishop Peter Elliott

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Peter John Elliott b: October 1, 1943; d: August 6, 2025.

Endeavour Forum mourns the death of another of our good friends in Bishop Peter Elliott, who died peacefully and went to his eternal reward on August 6. He had been in poor health for several years, but he continued to the very end his intellectual and spiritual contribution to the life of the Church in Melbourne and beyond.

Bishop Elliott had maintained a close association with Endeavour Forum for many years, and especially with our founder, the late Babette Francis, whose last public appearance, at A Tribute to Babette on November 25, 2023, he had favoured with his presence. There he led us in prayer and gave a talk on his acclaimed book, The Sexual Revolution: History • Ideology • Power (reviewed in the Endeavour Forum Newsletter, No. 177, October 2021). Over the years he attended the numerous events organised by Babette and was well known as a special patron of Endeavour Forum.

The author of many publications on the celebration of Mass and the Sacraments, such as Liturgical Question Box: Answers to Common Questions About the Modern Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 1998), he had a distinguished academic career. I recall him as a student in our History Honours group at Melbourne University in 1964, where he seemed very English. I later learned that he came from a Church of England family with links to C.S. Lewis. To my surprise a few years later, I found that he had joined the Catholic Church and was studying for the priesthood. The rest is history.

Australian journalist Tess Livingstone, in her biography George Pell: Defender of the Faith Down Under (2004), describes the late Cardinal Pell and Peter Elliott’s adventures as Oxford University students. They were nicknamed by others from a certain religious order, respectively, as the Big Aussie Bastard and the Little Aussie Bastard. The image of Elliott perched on the pillion of “Big George’s” motorbike brings a smile to the reader’s face.

In 2007 he became Auxiliary Bishop to Archbishop Denis Hart in the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese and served in Rome as consultor to the Congregation of Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments. He was particularly active in support of the Anglican Ordinariate of Catholic priests in Victoria.

Bishop Elliott will be much missed by the Catholics of Melbourne and especially by the committee and supporters of Endeavour Forum, for whom he was “our bishop”. May he rest in peace. Amen.

by John Morrissey

Higher education

Higher Education at a Crossroads

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Whereas higher education was once focussed on training our future leaders, today’s university administrators are more concerned about the bottom line.

A confluence of factors—student age demographics, high tuition costs, more young people opting out, student debt, cuts in state funding for public colleges, federal restrictions on visas for international students, threatened loss of federal subsidies, and loss of public confidence—have placed U.S. higher education at a crossroads.

Universities have responded by freezing staff and faculty hiring, while trying to expand their markets through online programs. What universities have failed to do is to lower tuition rates, or address complaints of “woke” education in the classroom, or restore public confidence that most degrees are worth it for students who want to acquire job skills.

Once the pride of the United States, higher education has lost the confidence of a large segment of the American population. A 2024 Gallup survey revealed that nearly a third of U.S. adults have no confidence in higher education, while another third said that they have “some confidence.”

This leaves only a third of Americans expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. This survey should be worrisome for university administrators and their governing boards. More alarming, though, is the acceleration of the decline in confidence in the past decade. When Gallup first measured public confidence in higher education in 2015, nearly 60 percent of Americans had great or a good deal of confidence. Only 10 percent had little or none.

Lack of confidence, as might be expected, is especially high among Republicans, with the majority in this subset telling Gallup they have little or no confidence. Similar declines are seen in independents. Yet even Democratic confidence in higher education is falling, having dropped from 68 percent stating that they had high confidence in 2015 to only 56 percent in 2024.

Many respondents expressed concerns that colleges are pushing political agendas not relevant to job skills and are overly expensive. These two concerns are exactly what is not being addressed by college administrators,
notwithstanding announcements that they are ending or renaming Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices in their
universities.

Rising tuition, staggering student debt and misalignment with the labor market are not going to be any easier for
college administrators to address than “woke” education in the classroom. Nor is the problem of large numbers of
college-eligible students concluding that college isn’t worth the cost. Moreover, nearly 42 million U.S. adults who
started college never finished. Some 94 percent of those students who do graduate have regrets about their degrees.

An overwhelming number feel that they received better training from their employers than from their undergraduate education. Nearly half say that they feel “doomed to fail because I chose the wrong degree.”

Demographic Headwinds

At the other end, employers are finding that recent college graduates lack the right skill sets and are deficient in appropriate business etiquette. As a result, nearly half of human resource managers say they prefer to recruit a retired former employee. Nearly a third say they would rather go with a robot or artificial intelligence, or just leave the position unfilled. These trends are already affecting colleges’ financial viability. Forbes magazine reports that colleges are closing at the rate of approximately one per week.

The larger problem for administrators is a demographic one. After decades of expansion in the 1960s and 1970s when post-Second World War Baby Boomers were entering college, colleges now face a looming severe drop in the college-age population.

Using the latest available census figures, the educational consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz projects that by 2029
there will be 650,000 (or 15 percent) fewer students than now. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher
Education estimates that the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year will erode by 13 percent—nearly a half million students—by 2041.

Today, American higher education spends about $700 billion a year, enrolls nearly 25 million students, and employs approximately 3 million people. Tuition represents only a portion of the total cost of providing college courses, but still remains the major source of revenue. Tuition accounts for 16 percent of public institutions’ total revenue. Public institutions also receive state government funding and generate income from investments and student services such as campus housing, meal plans and parking fees. On average, public universities charge tuition close to $10,000 annually per undergraduate, with higher tuition for out-of-state and international students.

Additional revenue comes from federal funding, which stands at around $59 billion for private and public institutions. Top federal funders are the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defence, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In addition, the Office of Federal Student Aid indirectly funds higher education through grants, loans and work-study programs for students.

State funding provides another source of revenue for public universities and colleges, totalling $129 billion in fiscal year 2025. State funding varies by state but is falling overall. Half of all public colleges and universities receive less funding from their states than they did before the Great Recession of 2008 (adjusted for inflation).

Hiking Tuition

Confronted with a restrained budget, public and private universities are responding in various ways, from cutting budgets to expanding their enrollment through online courses. At the same time, higher education continues to hike tuition, and student debt continues to escalate to unsustainable levels. Some public universities have raised their undergraduate tuition nearly 30 percent over the past decade. University administrators claim, with some justification, that increases in tuition are necessary because of rising costs of data security, technological services and employee benefits.

In response to rising tuition, the Iowa legislature has stipulated that state universities must develop three-year
bachelor’s degree programs. Tuition hikes only exacerbate U.S. student loan debt, which has more than tripled since 2006 and now approaches an astronomical $1.6 trillion.

Budget Cuts

Faced with rising costs and declining funding, universities across the country have announced hiring freezes. Many university administrators blame these cuts on the Trump administration’s call for reduced federal funding of grants. The Trump administration has announced deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health grants to research universities.

In March, the administration pulled $400 million from Columbia University over its failure to address the problem of antisemitism on campus. This was followed by the Department of Education warning 60 other colleges that they face the loss of federal funding unless they make their campuses safe for Jewish students. Universities are also bracing for a tax hike on their endowment income under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Trump on July 4.

Dozens of schools have announced hiring freezes, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, Emory, University of Vermont, North Carolina State University, University of Washington and University of California, San Diego. In March 2025, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was eliminating more than 2,200 employees because of a loss of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Although the full impact of the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to federal grants for higher education is unclear, universities have undertaken other cost-cutting measures as well, including freezes on raises, placing capital development projects on hold, and scaling back graduate programs.

Promoting Online Education

Colleges and universities are using online education as a way to subsidize their other programs. These programs frequently charge students more for online courses and degrees than for in-person classes. In fact, 83 percent of online programs in higher education cost more than in-person classes. As a result, these colleges are spending significant amounts on marketing and advertising their online programs.

Even though online courses and degree programs usually cost more in tuition, more students are learning entirely online than from in-person classes. Online instruction for in-state students at four-year colleges averages $341 per credit, while in-person classes for in-state students average $325 per credit. This adds up to about $41,000 in revenue for an average online degree at a four-year university, compared to about $39,000 for an in-person degree. But for out-of-state students taking online classes, the costs are considerably lower than for in-person classes—$30,545 lower over four years.

Many students find online courses convenient because they fit easily into family and work schedules. Also, online
students save substantially by avoiding other costs of inperson education including dorm and housing charges, parking permits, books and various student fees. Universities offering online courses and degrees claim that online students will learn as much as in-person students. Yet studies show that online students are less successful in completing courses and degree programs. And student surveys disclose another side to the story.

‘It’s super easy’

Interviews of students at the University of Arizona by the campus newspaper found that students choose online
education because the courses are easier and they can expect a high grade. As Karsyn Breiman, a pre-business freshman, described her online class, “It’s super easy. The professor does not live here. All I have to do is take a quiz on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the questions come directly from notes that he posts. It takes me five minutes, three days a week.”

After the unhappy global experiment of lengthy Covid-19 classroom shutdowns, which forced students to go online, few people argue anymore that online learning is as effective as classroom instruction. For universities and
colleges, however, online learning is big business. Online programs expand the market, often use cheap adjunct
professors or other non-tenured faculty, and subsidize other programs.

Universities offering online programs appear hesitant to provide full reports on grade inflation, failure to complete
courses, and knowledge gained in online programs. Universities tend to focus their reports on in-person student
figures and class enrollments, even as a major part of their programs is now online. Boards of regents and state
legislators should insist on full reports from universities on graduation and retention rates, costs and profits, and other data for online education.

Foreign Students: A Cash Cow

Colleges and universities, private and public, have found international students to be a cash cow—at least until recently. As the demographic pool of eligible American students began to decline, and universities faced rising costs, many institutions turned to recruiting international students. President Trump’s threat (and actions) to scale back visas for international students, and to penalize universities that won’t implement policies to protect Jewish students, has sent shock waves throughout higher education.

Today there are about 19 million students enrolled in U.S.degree-granting colleges. At state institutions, international students pay on average three times the tuition rate applicable to in-state students. Close to 6 percent of the total student population—about 1.1 million—are from another country. Approximately three quarters of these students are from Asia. Nearly half come from India or China.

The top five schools that have the most international students are New York University, Northeastern University, Columbia University, Arizona State University and University of Southern California. Over half of the students at Illinois Tech are international. At Carnegie Mellon, 44 percent of the student body is international, at Stevens Institute of Technology 42 percent, at Northeastern 40 percent, at Columbia 40 percent and at Johns Hopkins 39 percent.1

Most of these foreign students major in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering or math). The U.S. State Department has paused accepting visa applications for international students—and this has caused panic among university administrators across the country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement that the Trump administration is aggressively moving to revoke visas held by certain Chinese students, as part of an effort to crack down on research theft, has only heightened this fear among college administrators. U.S. higher education has a large revenue stream at risk if there is a decline in the foreign student population.

The legacy media and university administrators insist that international students make major contributions to the American economy. If this population is reduced, the entire American economy will be damaged. At least this is the claim.18 As the education reporter for the Washington Post put it, “International students contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2023-2024 school year. Their loss could hurt more than just universities’ bottom line.” But why should taxpayer-subsidised elite institutions allocate so many of their highly sought-after student slots to foreigners?

The Bottom Line

The real issue for universities is not about national security, or even education, but the bottom line.
University administrators today seem more concerned with making money and less with good education. Universities continue to hike tuition, contributing to the student debt crisis. They rely increasingly on offering online courses, without much attention to their educational effectiveness or retention rates.

Higher education used to be about training future national leaders, imparting civic values and developing informed citizens. Today’s college administrators seem less concerned about the purpose of higher education. Many of these administrators never enter the classroom. Instead, they stay in their offices complaining about politicians and objections to woke ideology. Meanwhile, these same administrators ask their state legislators, the federal government and donors for more and more money.

Amid the eternal quest for more funding, college administrators rarely ask, “For what?” This is exactly the question being asked by students, parents, employers and much of the public. It is a question that demands an answer.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/upshot/harvard-trump-international-students.html ↩︎
books are good for us

In praise of print

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As digital media continues to encroach on our time and harm our mental faculties, perhaps it’s time to revisit the benefits of traditional print media.

Fragmented. Distracted.

So often, that’s our experience of the internet. Whenever I launch a browser, I am assaulted by an overwhelming mudslide of information, headlines, graphics, photos and videos splashing and splurging across the page, each vying for my attention. Clicking over to social media, I’m inundated with a new firehose of topics, tags, talking heads, and Tweets – many of them bitter, angry, or calculated to instill some form of panic, and all written in short, shallow spurts that stymie deep thought and meaningful dialogue.

Only a few minutes into my internet usage, I’ve been exposed to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of distinct ideas and images, flashing before my eyes in mesmerizing and stupefying glow. My mind is diffracted, torn, disorganized. Twenty minutes later, I come to myself after spiraling down a YouTube vortex of people pretending to construct complex swimming pools in dense jungles. How did I get here? What was I supposed to be doing? Ah yes, writing. I settle down to compose, but in a moment of mental block, I take a “break” by checking my email – which is like dynamite blowing up the tracks of my previous train of thought. The human mind is not designed to handle so much information so quickly.

In their classic work “How to Read a Book,” Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren wrote:

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

It may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has really enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

Often, to understand a subject more deeply, we need to slow the pace of our thinking. We need to mull, consider and linger. Human wisdom is born of the patient process of contemplation, not the accumulation of “facts” at a rate faster than a machine gun can shoot.

Of course, for most of us, cutting out internet usage entirely is out of the question. But we can place certain limits on it, finding alternative sources of information. There’s another way to think and read, counter to the digital world. It’s called print.

Reading print materials – whether books, magazines, newspapers or journals – is a fundamentally different way to consume information compared to digital media. It makes you think differently, more slowly and methodically. It lowers blood pressure, as it isn’t interactive and can’t bombard you with updates and notifications. There’s also something about holding a physical book in your hands, feeling the texture of its spine and pages, smelling the sweet smell of paper, that grounds and calms you.

Research shows that people engage differently with text on a page as opposed to text on a screen. Reading print significantly improves comprehension – up to eight times more than digital reading – according to researchers at the University of Valencia. “The association between frequency of digital reading for leisure and text comprehension abilities is close to 0,” one of the study’s co-authors, Professor Ladislao Salmerón says.

Why? Salmerón theorizes that “linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts,” and that people have a different mindset when consuming digital texts, which often contain less depth than their print counterparts. The reader “doesn’t fully get immersed in the narration, or doesn’t fully capture the complex relations in an informative text.”

Considering this, I’ve recently begun an experiment to try to recover a better way of thinking and reading. I am attempting (more or less successfully) to use the internet only for necessary activities. To replace all the web surfing I used to do, I’ve subscribed to a handful of quality print publications and turned my attention to eating through my massive collection of great books.

Already, I’ve noticed a change. The pace of life feels slower. I’m less stressed because I don’t read all the headlines predicting this or that encroaching disaster. I accomplish my work more quickly, have more free time, and I can concentrate for longer periods of time. I find myself looking forward to the evening hours when I settle on the couch with my stack of books and magazines. And, for the most part, the articles and chapters I’m reading are of a much higher literary and scholarly quality than most of what I’ve encountered online. It’s hard to see a downside.

Let me be clear: there’s a wealth of wonderful content accessible on the internet – like the website you’re currently reading – but, at the same time, most of us could benefit from a little less surfing of the unpredictable internet tides, and a little more time with a book in hand.

By Walker Larson

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Men have gone

Where all the men have gone – and how to bring them back

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A concerted effort is needed to undo the harms wrought by feminism on men, particularly the damage caused by the promotion of the concept of ‘toxic masculinity.’

In a recent “New York Times” article titled, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” Rachel Drucker laments what she calls “a collective shift” in men, a “slow vanishing of presence.” So many single men, she writes, aren’t “sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect.” Instead, they “have retreated from intimacy, hiding behind firewalls, filters and curated personas, dabbling and scrolling.” She adds, “We miss you.”

Drucker – a single, 54-year-old Chicagoan – hints that pornography is at least partly to blame. She mentions that she herself spent years working as the custodian of records for Playboy and its affiliated hardcore properties, working closely with marketing teams to understand “what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back.” She learned that it wasn’t intimacy or mutuality, but “access to simulation.”

Now many men, she believes, have “quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability” into “indifference.” The sexes have moved, she observes, into an era when traditional courting has devolved into “directionless orbiting,” “men circling intimacy but never entering it… ‘seeing where it goes’ without ever going anywhere.” She even mourns the “unscripted contact” of one-night stands.

“You can still come back,” she pleads with men. “We’re still here, those of us who are willing to cocreate something true… And we haven’t stopped hoping.”

The male retreat from the courting dance of days past is a tragedy but so is Drucker’s obliviousness to the reasons for it. Yes, pornography is a huge factor; the ubiquitous availability of the most explicit imagery imaginable (and even unimaginable) to anyone with an internet connection is a terrible scourge in our society – and not only for males, but for girls as well, in a variety of ways.

But the broader explanation for the intimacy wasteland Drucker describes is more than a half century of radical feminism and its ruthless war on masculinity, femininity, and the nuclear family. She is finally noticing, but apparently not understanding, the blasted landscape left by the Sexual Revolution’s tornado of destruction since the 1960s and ‘70s that pushed aside old-fashioned courtship and sex roles in its self-indulgent wake.

If men have retreated from those traditional roles and social practices, it is because the culture has been weaponized against men – disrespecting, devaluing, and even demonizing generations of them as “toxic.” Feminist thought leaders, with the complicity of many opportunistic male feminists, railed against the chimeras of “patriarchy” and “rape culture.”  They demanded that men deconstruct their masculine nature to be more like, well, stereotypical women: vulnerable, emotional, and deferential to the opposite sex. They marginalized men as literally unnecessary, celebrating females as capable, courageous, girlbosses who can and should do everything men can do. Anything less is seen as diminishing female capabilities and value. Meanwhile men are failing by almost every social metric, from education to the workplace.

Another factor is that the notorious and often cruel bias of family law against husbands and fathers has driven many men to see marriage as grossly inequitable and undesirable. Boys and young men have watched their fathers destroyed in family court, reduced to the indentured slavery of permanent alimony. They are now rethinking what they see as a no-win conventional lifestyle of marriage and family. Why volunteer to doom yourself, they ask themselves, to a system designed to bleed men dry of their money, health, and ambitions?

In recent years a backlash has begun swinging hard against the ravages of feminism, unfortunately driving millions of young men into the embrace of such online influencers as former kickboxer Andrew Tate. Tate flaunts a cartoonish vision of masculinity centered on flashy materialism and the violent domination and sexual exploitation of women. This backlash also includes an entire subculture called MGTOWs – Men Going Their Own Way – by swearing off long-term relationships with women, whom they see as nothing more than greedy vampires who drain one husband, then trade up to a wealthier one.

In sum, feminism promised to liberate women from what Karl Marx called the “slavery” of motherhood and marriage by pushing them into competition with men, and the Sexual Revolution granted them the freedom to indulge their sexual appetites as promiscuously as any man. The consequence has been a family-destroying disordering of society at home, in the workplace, and between the sexes. So now, women like Drucker, who worked in the porn industry and who confesses to many relationships including one-night stands, are left wondering why so many men have chosen to disengage, to guard themselves emotionally, financially, and physically behind a variety of walls.

If women want men to return so that both can get off the sterile treadmill of dating apps and one-night stands, resuming the imperfect but genuine human dynamic of romance, it will happen only if the failed social experiments of the past are rolled back. This will require a concerted, grass-roots, long march through the institutions of the culture – from education to the news media to the entertainment industry – to undo the ruinous narratives that have brought us to this point.

We must stop smearing traditional masculinity as toxic and oppressive, and quit devaluing traditional femininity as demeaning and imprisoning. We must cease pitting the sexes against each other and reclaim a culture that honors and celebrates their complementary nature. The decades-long push to eradicate any differences between masculinity and femininity, to blur even their very definitions, has wrought nothing but misery, confusion, and resentment, and must be abandoned.

Sometimes societal progress can be made only by acknowledging we have taken a clearly destructive path, retracing our steps to where we first lost our way. It’s the only hope for men and women to – as Drucker put it with such yearning – cocreate something true.

By Mark Tapson

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Truth and Courage

Truth and courage in an age of deception

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Truth is the foundation of trust, and spreading misinformation, disinformation or keeping the truth hidden undermines trust in an institution or society.

Though I’ve never read J. K. Rowling – fantasy has rarely attracted my attention, a flaw in my literary tastes – I am fascinated by her courageous stance regarding sex and gender. Labeled “transphobic” by many on the left, Rowling has stood her ground, refusing to buckle to her attackers and receiving death threats for her belief that biological sex is a reality. As two hostile Rowling critics wrote, she believes that “womanhood is fixed, intrinsic, and anatomically fixed.”

Her tart rejoinders to some of her assailants rouse both my admiration and laughter. Recently, for example, when trans activists wrote that the writer looked like a trans man, that is, a woman who believes she is a man and wishes to display as such, Rowling responded tongue-in-cheek:

Attention all men telling me I look like a trans woman: I’m sensing that this isn’t meant as a compliment. In fact, the implication seems to be that trans women look male, or odd, or ugly. This is appallingly transphobic and I’ll thank you to take your bigotry off my timeline.

For me, as for Rowling, men and women are fixed entities in their sex. A glassworker can shape molten glass into a miniature tree, but that tree remains glass. Similarly, our chromosomes except in rare cases, determine our sex. Surgery, drugs and dress alter appearance, but not essence.

In the 21st century, particularly during the Covid pandemic and the presidency of Joe Biden, all sorts of politicians and government officials have attempted this sleight of hand, from those who promised a “vaccine” that would prevent Covid, to those who protected a president clearly suffering from dementia. They hid the truth while reimaging reality. Many in the corporate news media followed, some because of their political leanings, some from ignorance or sloth.

During that time those who spoke out, who dared proclaim, based on facts and evidence, that the emperor was naked, were pilloried, tarred-and-feathered with mockery and disdain, driven from social media, and even fired from their jobs. Like the press, the mob who attacked these truth-tellers were often too lazy to track down any evidence contrary to the government’s propaganda.

Because of such subterfuge and hokum, American trust in major institutions – government, media, science, universities and schools – has either declined precipitously or remains where it already was, in the basement. To reestablish that trust will likely take years, if not decades.

And herein lies a lesson for all of us. Truth is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of successful human enterprises. Businesses, marriages, the relationship between parents and children, friendships: all fail when deceit enters the equation and erases trust, often forever.

Just as bad, or even worse, is when we deceive ourselves, as did so many in their advocacy for the Covid pandemic policies. In “The Many Ways We Lie to Ourselves,” Shahram Heshmat looks at such deceits as reality denial, as in alcoholics denying they have a problem; overconfidence – “90 percent of all drivers think they are above average”; and the “me and others” syndrome, as in “You failed, because you did not try hard enough; I failed, because I had a headache from staying up all night with my son.”

Of course, social lies are another matter. When a hostess asks what we thought of her exotic but horrible tasting dessert, good manners demand that we nod and say, “Delicious.” When my five-year-old granddaughter asked me if I was going to die soon, I laughed it off, saying, “Nope. I want to be there for your wedding.” Sticking around that long is within the realm of possibility, but death doesn’t run on a timetable, a fact she’s too young to understand. That deceit was intended to set her mind at ease and protect her innocence.

Those instances aside, when we rail against our leaders for deceiving us, we might consider glancing in the mirror and reflecting on those lies we’ve told, to others and to ourselves. Small matters, yes, compared to matters of state, but sooner or later deceit always delivers pain and mistrust.

“Don’t deal in lies,” wrote Kipling in his poem, “If.” Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live Not by Lies,” was aimed at the citizen vis-à-vis the state, but his admonition to avoid lies can be easily applied to individuals as well. Later, in his Nobel speech, he ended by citing a Russian proverb, “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

And as J. K. Rowling stated in 2020, “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

By Jeff Minick.

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

The Arrogance of Transhumanism

The arrogance of transhumanism

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Technology has many benefits, but some high-tech fads like transhumanism, seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

Christian faith teaches us humility in light of the mystery of God’s creation of life. Today, as we enter a brave new world of elite technocrats calling for “transhumanism,” this faith is being tested.

We have been warned about the fate of those who seek to become gods on earth. Warnings found in Greek mythology (Prometheus and Icarus), Jewish tales (golems) and Western literature (Frankenstein) are being ignored in today’s secular world of rapid technological advancement. This advancement is evident in artificial intelligence (AI), which places “knowledge” at the fingertips of every person with a phone or a computer; experimentation on human embryos; and technological tools such as CRISPR that can select for human genetic traits. Hubris is a natural consequence. For many, we have become gods.

Technology can be a great boon for human progress, but caution is warranted for some of the latest high-tech fads, which seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is the call for three supers—super intelligence, super longevity and super happiness—all gained through technology. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are the biggest promoters of transhumanist thinking. While they debate whether transhuman beings will be organic beings with increased lifespans and mental capabilities enhanced through drugs, or inorganic machines uploaded with individual personalities and enhanced thinking ability, they hope that technology will enable humans to design our evolutionary futures.1 Some transhumanists predict that the human mind will be uploaded into digital form; others believe that the future rests in designer babies, artificial wombs and anti-aging therapies.

Transhumanists could be dismissed as computer geeks who have read too much science fiction. But designing babies has become a reality and will become more refined with technological advances. American companies already screen the genetic traits of embryos, discarding the ones with high risk of disease or unwanted traits (such as being male or female), then implant the chosen embryo into a womb. Other researchers are pursuing the development of artificial wombs.2

Technocratic transhumanists believe in using drugs to enhance human cognition. This includes the use of psychedelics, long promoted in Silicon Valley. In the 1980s, the psychedelic drug MDMA, known popularly as Ecstasy, was touted as enhancing feelings of love and social connection that would heal “global trauma” and usher in world peace. This faith in MDMA as a wonder therapeutic drug has continued into the 21st century. In 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned down an application by Lykos Therapeutics for MDMA therapy, arguing that more data was needed. Lykos remains, however, a favorite of Big Tech investors who see psychedelics as the future.

The tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel is a major investor in Atai Life Sciences, which is testing ketamine-related drugs. Elon Musk has publicly mentioned his use of small amounts of prescription ketamine, an anesthetic. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has talked about how his son overcame grief following the death of his mother by using ayahuasca, an Amazonian plant psychedelic.3 In a Cabinet meeting on April 30, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told President Trump that his team was looking at psychedelics as an option to combat veteran suicide.4

Big Tech gurus such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, however, understand some of the dangers of the new age of transhumanism. For example, Musk has warned that AI poses the greatest threat to humanity. It does not take a tech billionaire to see that the promise of bringing people closer together through social media technology has failed. People seem more divided and lonely than ever even though they regularly use TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat or Facebook. And who is not worried about government control of information and enhanced surveillance through technology? Many of our youth are living in an augmented reality through phones, screens and earbuds. We live in an age of in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation and transgender surgeries.

The pernicious fad of transgender treatment through hormones and mutilating surgery, even on children, could be seen as an offshoot of transhumanist ideology. Probably no worse example of playing God with the natural order may be imagined. However, we should not blame it on Silicon Valley tech titans. Musk is vehemently opposed to transgender treatments of children, having seen one of his own sons “transition” by means of this Frankensteinian perversion of modern medical practice.

Equally Frankensteinian is gain-of-function manipulation of dangerous pathogens, which likely caused the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic with the involvement of U.S. tax dollars in a Chinese lab. President Trump acted to restrict such research in May. He previously signed several orders to counteract transgender ideology.

Longevity and Immortality

Medical clinics are popping up promising to help clients live longer and better—for a hefty price.5 The goal of these longevity clinics is to extend and optimize a patient’s health for years through early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies and socalled biological-age testing. Their efficacy is unclear. Venture capital is investing in longevity research, more than doubling the investment between 2021 and 2022 from $27 million to $57 million globally.

While aiming for longevity, scientists have explored the physiological dimensions of death itself. For transhumanists following this work on death, hopes of human immortality have arisen from attempts to keep the brain alive after the human body has failed.6 In 2018 the Silicon Valley AI billionaire entrepreneur Sam Altman reportedly paid $10,000 to join a waiting list to upload the contents of his brain to a cloud computer, on the chance that his consciousness could live on after he dies.

Transhumanists believe that true human immortality is only a speck on the horizon, but some are convinced that the future lies in detaching oneself from one’s physical body. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, seeks to capitalize on this vision of brain life after death through cryonics, the freezing of human bodies and brains in liquid nitrogen after legal death, to be revived (resurrected) once new technology becomes available.

Within the scientific community, cryonics is regarded as quackery and a pseudo-science, but this has not prevented the nonprofit from enlisting close to 2,000 members. More than 200 have already died and had their bodies frozen. Another 116 members have had only their heads preserved. Pet bodies have also been preserved. Immortality does not come cheap, though. Alcor charges $200,000 for freezing a human body or $80,000 for just the head.7

Stéphane Charpier, a professor of neuroscience at Sorbonne University who is a leading scientist in studying brain death, dismisses cryogenics as a “pipe dream.” He acknowledges that humans are capable of “tinkering with brains,” but considers it unimaginable that a machine could replicate complex neural processes.8

New Frontiers in IVF

In vitro fertilization (IVF) offers a devil’s bargain to humanity. It is popular for helping infertile couples to have children, but is also used in ways that lack an appealing justification, including reproduction without both a legal father and mother, eugenic selection of embryos, or careerist postponement of childbearing.

IVF works by extracting eggs from a woman who has been primed with injections of powerful drugs, then fertilizing the eggs with a man’s sperm in a laboratory. After a fertilized egg (zygote) undergoes embryo culture over two to six days, the embryo can be implanted in the would-be mother. Women can freeze dozens of their eggs—a practice sometimes encouraged and paid for by large corporate employers in the U.S.—while they wait to make the decision to get pregnant. After eggs are combined with sperm to form embryos, surplus embryos may be frozen or discarded. How many frozen embryos exist in America is not known.

Embryos may be subjected to experimentation. Research on fetal tissue is permitted on a state-by-state basis. New York state has no limit on how long embryos may be grown for experimentation, while California has a guideline of 12 days.

Embryology has made huge advances in the last three decades, but we are still at the beginning of a wave of unforeseen consequences.9 In the 1990s researchers pioneered preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). An embryologist took single cells biopsied from embryos and identified their sex, as well as certain chromosomal abnormalities. PGT subsequently became increasingly refined, and today nearly half of IVF cycles are tested, at a cost of $3,000-$5,000 per batch.

Eugenics Based on ‘Risk Scores’

There are questions about PGT’s accuracy, but in any case this testing goes beyond the promise of improved health. Newer polygenic embryo studies have identified genes linked to traits ranging from height to likely educational attainment to propensity for mental health disabilities such as depression and schizophrenia. Unlike earlier PGT, which focused on single-gene disorders, polygenic embryo screening (PES) examines the likelihood of developing more complex traits that depend on many genes.

PES provides “risk scores” that rely on identification of hundreds or thousands of genetic variants that can be linked with certain human attributes. PES lends itself to eugenics, the selective breeding of children. Companies have been created to screen embryos for hundreds of conditions. One such company is Orchid, headed by Noor Siddiqui, in Silicon Valley. Orchid provides polygenic screening that produces a risk profile of each embryo’s propensity for certain health conditions. This risk profile aids the selection of which embryo(s) to implant.10

PES has not yet gained wide acceptance, but some surveys show that nearly 4 in 10 people said they were “more likely than not” to use it if it could increase their child’s chance of getting into a top college.11 Several European countries have banned this procedure or limited its use. Britain, for example, does not permit PES, but does allow screening for an approved list of roughly 17,000 single-gene disorders. In the U.S., such screening is not subject to any regulatory oversight. Genomic Prediction, based in New Jersey, has provided risk scores for at least 420 clients involving more than 1,600 embryos.

Legal and Ethical Conundrums

The advances in embryo research have given rise to ethical and legal problems. In one among many similar disputes, a Tennessee divorce court in 1992 concluded that embryos “are not, strictly speaking, either ‘persons’ or ‘property,’ but occupy an interim category that entitles them to special respect because of their potential for human life.” Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the father who wanted to destroy seven frozen embryos, while his wife wanted to donate them to others. The court upheld the father’s claim, based on a contractual provision, that he should not have to father children against his will.12

State legislatures have only begun to address the status of embryos. In 2018, the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring judges to award disputed embryos to bring in vitro human embryos to birth and not keep them frozen in storage, regardless of preexisting legal contracts.13

Spurred on by a controversy that arose from an Alabama court decision during his 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump signed an executive order this year that calls for policy recommendations to protect IVF and lower its costs. Many around his administration support his pro-natal perspective and are strong supporters of IVF. Despite having experienced no known infertility issues, Elon Musk has used IVF to produce most of his many known children (some with the assistance of paid surrogate mothers). Peter Thiel has invested in multiple fertility-related companies.14

There is widespread concern in the developed world about declining birth rates, as described in the May 2025 Mindszenty Report. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see IVF as a policy solution to this problem or to push governmental support of the $25 billion global IVF industry. IVF is very expensive and unpleasant, has a low success rate, and poses significant health risks for both the mother and the offspring.15 There are obvious ethical problems with destroying embryos, practicing eugenic selection of embryos, experimenting on embryos, and engineering children who may never know both of their biological parents. IVF is contrary to Catholic teaching.

Enter the Brave New World

Couples can be infertile for various reasons, but both eggs and sperm decline in quality with age. Therefore, IVF is less effective for older would-be parents. Changing the culture to encourage more marriage and childbearing for women in their 20s would be a preferable way to boost birth rates. And we certainly do not want the government to promote IVF, or related assisted reproductive technologies such as purchased eggs and surrogate motherhood, for gay couples or single parents.16

We are at a point in embryo science that allows for the culling of the population. Whether it is called positive or negative eugenics, it is all eugenics in the end. Although it is possible to do IVF without destroying embryos, IVF in the U.S. commonly entails the rejection and elimination of at least several embryonic human beings.17 Designer babies culled from a herd of subsequently discarded sibling embryos may not appreciate their commoditized origins.

Essential to any discussion of transhumanism or IVF is the importance of understanding God and the mystery of our creation and His design for the world. Removal of God from the human equation tends to breed nihilism and hopelessness.18 Transhumanism and Christianity present divergent value systems. For the transhumanist, the highest virtue is intelligence and the highest goal is to defeat death. Christians believe that the greatest ideal is love—love of others, including one’s own children, in their flawed humanity, and love of God. Transhumanism is a new religion, which should not replace God.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. Alexander Thomas, “Transhumanism: Billionaires Want to Use Tech to Tech to
    Enhance Our Abilities,” The Conversation, January 16, 2024. ↩︎
  2. Mark Legg, “What Does the Bible Say About Transhumanism?” Denison Forum, June
    20, 2023. ↩︎
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/tech-billionaires-psychedelics.html. ↩︎
  4. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/va-secretary-tells-trump-about-psychedelicspotential-to-combat-military-veteran-suicide-crisis-at-cabinet-meeting/;
    https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/va-sec-doug-collins-says-agency-willlook-at-psychedelic-other-alternative-treatments/85-d90e6b9d-a705-4f09-aeda5b839879bd03 ↩︎
  5. Alex Janin, “The Longevity Clinic Will See You Now—for $100,000,” Wall Street
    Journal, July 10, 2023; Alex Janin, “Want Better Health and Status? For
    $250,000, Longevity Clinics Promise Both,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2025. ↩︎
  6. https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/health-andbiotech/immortality-an-ancient-fantasy-revived-by-transhumanism/. ↩︎
  7. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-19/see-inside-alcor-lifeextension-s-cryogenics-facility-in-arizona. ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. This discussion of IVF and the current state of embryo research draws heavily from
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/opinion/human-embryoexperiments-timeline.html; and https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-oflife/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-owe-clustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gt. ↩︎
  10. Anna Louie Sussman, “Should Human Life be Optimized?”
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/ivf-gene-selectionfertility.html. ↩︎
  11. https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-oweclustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gtd. ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/FS268.pdf. See also n. 17. ↩︎
  15. See “A Comprehensive Report on the Risks of Assisted Reproductive Technology” by
    Katie Fell for the Center of Bioethics and Culture Network, https://cbcnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Comprehensive-Paper-on-ART-Final.pdf. ↩︎
  16. For an in-depth discussion of surrogate motherhood and purchased eggs, see
    Mindszenty Report, December 2019. ↩︎
  17. Kayla Bartsch, “Eugenics Gets a Modern Facelift, with Investment from Peter Thiel,”
    National Review, April 4, 2025. See also
    https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/12/96647/. ↩︎
  18. https://firstthings.com/the-impossibility-of-christian-transhumanism/. ↩︎
Legal Marijuana

Legal marijuana is bringing new dangers

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by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation

Unintended consequences are being ignored as the fad for legal marijuana gains in popularity.

In Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932, the ruling class distributes a calming recreational drug called “soma” to control society. One of the main characters, Linda, uses the drug as it was most likely intended, but she becomes addicted and it leads to her death.

Marijuana has become such a drug in America today. Its dangerous effects in its current forms, especially on the youth, are being revealed by researchers. Recent studies suggest a strong connection between daily use of highly potent marijuana by adolescents and young adults, with addiction, depression, mental illness and changes in brain development affecting memory and reasoning skills.

As more evidence of the hazardous effects of marijuana use appears in scientific studies, politicians and the public continue to favour the legalisation of marijuana. In April this year, the Biden-Harris administration announced it was seeking to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. This historic shift in federal policy, away from the days of the 1930s when marijuana was equated with “Reefer Madness”, would make it easier to sell marijuana and make the multibillion-dollar industry more profitable.

Pot is far more potent now
In late August, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump moved toward supporting a Florida ballot measure to legalise “recreational” marijuana. “Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of the voters, so it should be done correctly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “We need the state legislature to responsibly create laws that prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go, like we do in many of the Democrat run Cities.” On September 8 he confirmed he will vote for the ballot measure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opposes the measure.

We need not believe that there is a Huxleyesque conspiracy to dumb down our populace to control it. What we do know is that today’s marijuana is much, much more powerful. Vaping allows quick delivery to the brain. Daily use has serious behavioural consequences — and marijuana use has increased dramatically as it has become legal in more and more states. According to a Gallup survey, the number of Americans who have smoked marijuana has more than doubled since 2013.

The percentage of Americans using marijuana is worrisome, with 22 percent of people age 12 or older (61.9 million) reporting that they did so in 2022. High-frequency cannabis use is now more common than high-frequency drinking of alcohol (17.7 million vs. 14.7 million daily or near-daily users). Another survey conducted over a two-year interval from 2017 to 2019 showed that those reporting vaping marijuana over the preceding 30 days rose among high school students, nearly tripling among high school seniors. In 2020, 35 percent of 12th graders and 44 percent of college students reported using marijuana over the past year.

As of today, 24 states have legalised recreational marijuana, and 38 states and the District of Columbia have provided for medical use of marijuana. The widespread availability of marijuana is promoted as safe. How many times has one heard, “Marijuana is safer and less harmful than alcohol. If you want to get high, marijuana is better”? Or parents who, finding their child using marijuana, say, “I’m glad they’re not on cocaine or heroin, which are really addictive.”

In a feel-good age when ideally no person should feel unhappy, anxious, socially awkward or without self-esteem, marijuana appears to be a panacea. Why take a serotonin inhibitor like Prozac when marijuana is available? In fact, why not do both?

The marijuana being used today is not the same weed being used in the 1960s and 1970s. The potency of marijuana comes from THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive compound found in the plant. The THC found in today’s selectively bred plants and extracts has steadily risen. Vaping marijuana drugs might have THC levels as high as 80 percent.

Even more potent are concentrated products that contain more than 90 percent THC. These concentrated products come in various forms and are small, easily concealed. The forms include crystal (“shatter”), buttering spread (“budder”), wax-like (“wax”), sugar-like (“sugar”), crumbly (“crumble”), a distillate (“distillate”), and chalky (“live rosin”). Teenagers especially like being in on knowing the names. These concentrates are produced in high-tech labs and then wrapped in slick, convenient, discreet packaging for use in electric devices.

The use among teenagers of highly potent marijuana in its various forms has increased. Those “dabbing”, that is, using a concentrated product delivered through a heated device, more than doubled between 2015 and 2019. Although the Covid shutdowns decreased teenage usage, the percentage of teens using marijuana has again begun to creep back up.

Addiction, schizophrenia, dulling effects
About 1 in 10 people who use marijuana will become addicted, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Health Services Administration. When marijuana use started before age 18, the rate of addiction rises to 1 in 6.

Dr Daniel Mamah, a psychiatrist and the director of the Washington Early Recognition Clinic at Washington University in St Louis, has observed in his clinical practice how serious psychiatric disorders are often associated with early and frequent marijuana use. Pointing to studies showing a link between early and frequent marijuana use and schizophrenia, he notes that young people who overuse marijuana “tend to have schizophrenia at increased rates, anywhere from two to four or five times as high a rate, depending on how much cannabis has been used”. Moreover, marijuana dulls attention, memory and learning skills, and reaction time, movement and coordination, which can impair driving and athletic performance.

Neurological science has made great advances in the last two decades. This science is still in its infancy. The brain is an extremely complicated organ, but scientists are figuring out its basic hardware. Scientists know that the adolescent brain is developing and undergoing momentous changes until at least age 25.

During adolescent brain development, connectors are getting reinforced and being pruned. One of the key effects of marijuana on the brain is that THC binds to one of the brain’s major receptors called CB1, which plays a major role in regulating anxiety, pain, memory and motivational behaviors. Studies in animals show that exposure to THC reduces CB1 in the brain. Research published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2021 suggests that cannabis use is associated with the thinning of teens’ prefrontal cortex, which regulates emotions and problem-solving (executive) skills.

Depression, suicide, vomiting
Many medical studies report that recreational and heavy use of cannabis is associated with depression, suicide and addiction among adolescents. A report in published in the JAMA Network Open in May 2024 found that adolescents who are unable to stop using cannabis (medically known as “cannabis use disorder”) were between 2.5 and 3 times more likely to have depression or suicidal thoughts than those who did not use cannabis.

Even worse, female youth aged 12 to 24 living in states with legalised medical or recreational marijuana between 2000 and 2019 had higher rates of death by suicide than youth in states with no such laws, with nearly 5,000 excess suicide deaths during that period, according to a report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in March 2024.

Another study that appeared in JAMA Pediatrics in 2021 concluded that those using cannabis as teenagers were more likely to become addicted. Eleven percent of those between ages 12 to 17 progressed to cannabis use disorder within 12 months. After three years, the prevalence was 20 percent of adolescents.

A Danish study of 6.9 million people aged 16 to 49 found an association between habitual cannabis use disorder and schizophrenia, as reported in the May 2024 issue of Psychological Medicine. The association was stronger for males overall. The researchers estimated that in 2021, up to 30 percent of schizophrenia diagnoses (about 3,000) could have been prevented if men aged 21 to 30 hadn’t developed cannabis use disorder.

We know that some teenagers become highly dependent and dangerously physically ill while using marijuana. One of the consequences of habitual use among teenagers is called in scientific terms “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome”, a condition that causes recurrent vomiting that can last hours.

The New York Times reported in 2022 on a girl named Elysee who first started vaping cannabis at the age of 14. She recalled that “It was insane. Insane euphoria”. She turned to oil and waxes that she bought from dealers. Typically, these products were 90 percent THC. She began using it multiple times a day. Her parents found out about her use about a year later. Then she began having mysterious bouts where she would vomit over and over. In one two-hour period she threw up at least 20 times. Her doctors could not figure out what was causing the vomiting. After more than a half dozen trips to the emergency room and hospital stays, she was diagnosed with a condition that causes recurrent vomiting among heavy marijuana users. She finally got clean.

Other stories are more tragic. One mother in Colorado told the New York Times that she first found out about her son Johnny using marijuana when he was 14 years old. Her first reaction was, “Oh well, it’s just weed. Thank God it was not cocaine.”

She thought of marijuana as what she had tried a couple of times in high school. She told her son that marijuana was not good for him, but overall she was not terribly concerned about his use. “I used it, I’m fine, what’s the big deal?” After all, Johnny was doing well in school and did not have any signs of mental health problems.

Delusions, paranoia, threats
Then things got worse. He started using high-potency marijuana products multiple times a day. He became delusional. He was placed in multiple treatment programs by the time he reached college. In his first year in college, he became completely delusional. He thought organised gangsters were after him andhis college was a base for the FBI. After he moved out of his home, he threatened to kill the family dog unless his parents gave him money. Then his mother discovered he had obtained his own medical marijuana card, available to anyone over 18 under Colorado law. He began dealing to younger kids. He had become a threat to his parents. Doctors prescribed an antipsychotic medication, which seemed to help, until he stopped taking it. In 2019, Johnny, once a promising boy with a good future ahead of him before he began using marijuana, jumped from a six-storey building. He was 19.

States that have legalised marijuana typically prohibit sales to minors. Nevertheless, anecdotes like those related above illustrate that minors can readily obtain cannabis, and it seems inevitable that legalisation will increase minors’ access as a practical matter. Even now, very young children are ingesting THC through unregulated hemp-derived intoxicating “gummies”, which resemble legal candy. “They are simply targeting children,” Missouri Governor Mike Parson charged on September 10, calling for new laws to address the problem. “We need to put an end to it.”

National poison control centres have stated that about two in five exposures to hemp-derived THC products are occurring in children. Julie Weber, director of the Missouri Poison Center, said the total number of poisoning cases linked to the products involving young children has doubled each year since 2018. “At the Missouri Poison Center, we have seen a steady increase in exposures related to accessibility and misidentification by children 5 years or younger consuming cannabis,” Weber said.

Horrific violence, spike in car crashes
For a deep dive into the horrific violence that can result from marijuana-induced psychosis, read Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Psychosis, and Violence (2019) by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who cites research showing that “cannabis-dependent psychotic patients were four times as likely to be violent”.

He recounts true story after true story of inexplicable, unspeakably gruesome killings by people high on pot with no other known contributing factors, such as a California young woman audiologist with no criminal history who, following her first ingestion of marijuana, given to her by her accountant boyfriend, fatally stabbed him more than 100 times and then turned the knife on herself. Or a 35- year-old comic book artist and screenwriter who scalped his girlfriend, drained her body of blood, then hid in their condo with her corpse for more than a week.

The illegal alien who suddenly, savagely attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the U.S. House Speaker, with a hammer in front of policemen in 2022 reportedly had a history of heavy pot use plus mental illnesAnother major threat from marijuana use is fatal car crashes. A recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that the percentage of car crash deaths in the U.S. that involved marijuana has skyrocketed since 2000. The percentage of car crash deaths involving cannabis alone rose from 4.2 percent in 2000 to 11.2 percent in 2018. Over that same period, the percentage of car crash deaths involving both cannabis and alcohol rose from 4.8 to 10.3 percent. So the total percentage of car crash deaths involving cannabis, either with or without alcohol, rose to more than a fifth of all car crash deaths in the U.S. And this happened before the general spike in car accidents that has occurred since 2020, when political considerations compelled police to pull back on traffic enforcement.

Monitoring the Future, a survey funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, found that the percentage of those aged 19 to 30 who use marijuana on a daily basis rose from 3.8 percent in 2000 to 7.8 percent in 2018 — more than doubling. That closely tracks the rise in car crash deaths involving marijuana over that period.

The latest evidence of risks of marijuana is a brand-new large study from the American Head and Neck Society, finding that cannabis use disorder may increase the risk of developing any head or neck cancer by 3.5 to 5 times.

The lure of freedom to choose
The campaign to legalise marijuana was promoted by progressives and libertarians — an odd coalition. Progressives sought to turn out the youth vote by placing legalised marijuana referendums on state ballots. For libertarians, legalisation of marijuana was a principle based on a belief that the state should not control our bodies. Politicians saw new ways of bringing in revenue through taxing marijuana dispensaries.

Many voters, young and old alike, agreed that marijuana should be legalised. Rhetoric that our prisons were full of people busted for holding a few ounces of marijuana became commonplace. This was not the case. Most prisoners committed serious crimes. Furthermore, those in prison for drug possession were often drug dealers who had been arrested for selling large quantities of drugs, but had taken plea deals admitting lesser crimes in order to reduce their sentences.

The marijuana industry is now big business. Any changes in state marijuana laws will confront a powerful marijuana lobby. It is unlikely that marijuana prohibition will be brought back in states that have legalised weed, any more than alcohol prohibition will be brought back. The cat is out of the bag. As the perils of marijuana use come more and more to the public’s attention, maybe marijuana use will eventually go down — just as it has for tobacco. We can hope, anyway.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article, complete with references and footnotes, is available from the foundation’s website: http://www.mindszenty.org https.mindszenty.org. The  Mindszenty Report  is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.