In stating his opposition to a proposed ban on the creation of human-animal hybrids, or chimeras (the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2007), Wired blogger Brandon Keim writes, “People — and, for that matter, animals — can’t be reduced to a few discrete biological parts. An embryo is not a person. Strands of DNA do not contain our souls.”

Read more on Chimeras, Personhood, and Ultimate Capacities…

It’s called Spe Salvi, or “In hope we were saved”, and was released this morning, the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. The title is taken from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans 8:24; the theme is, of course, Christian hope. This second encyclical follows Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI’s reflections on Christian charity, which was released in January 2006. You can find the English version of Spe Salvi here.

Read more on Pope Benedict’s Second Encyclical Is Out…

It has been noted in the past, both in previous PowerBlog posts and elsewhere in the blogosphere, that climate change alarmists are wont to attribute virtually any anomaly in the weather (or, frankly, in any other area of human existence) to global warming. It’s not hard to find examples of this phenomenon, but it is quite impressive to find an individual who has made an effort to catalog all of the examples on a single web page in one giant list.

Read more on Global Warming Consensus Watch – The Canonical List of Global Warming-Caused Crises…

The schedule for the 2008 Acton Lecture Series has been released. The following is a quick overview of the line-up. Detailed descriptions of these lectures as well as time, location, and ticket information are available at the Acton Lecture Series page on Acton’s Web site.

Read more on 2008 Acton Lecture Series…

In my Acton Commentary this week, I argued against government funding for stem cell research.

The developments that served as my springboard have unsurprisingly prompted a lot of other reflections from various quarters as well. A sampling:

Read more on Follow-up on Stem Cells…

When I first heard that the epic tale of Beowulf was being made into a feature-length film, I was excited. Ever since I had first seen the live-action version of The Fellowship of the Ring from Peter Jackson, I had thought that a similar project could do a wonderful job with the Beowulf epic.

Read more on Movie Review: Beowulf…

Joel Kotkin explains that the fastest growing cities are not the ones that cater to singles, but those that cater to families. Read it all here.

Cross-posted at my blog.

This article at the WSJ reviews a book that purports to be about progressive environmentalism. Doomsday is out. Nobody cares. People need material well-being before they are interested in environmentalism at all.

Read more on Pro-Growth Environmentalism?…

Von Wernich at his 2007 trial in La Plata.

Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, has an article in today’s Detroit News on the recent conviction of Rev. Christian von Wernich, a Catholic priest sentenced to life in prison for his role in supporting the totalitarian regime during Argentina’s National Reorganization Process. Rev. von Wernich, a police chaplain, was accused of sharing the conversations he received with prisoners in the confessional with the police who then used them as evidence against those prisoners and in making further arrests of accomplices.

Read more on Spilling the Wrong Beans…

Does a good education demand an appreciation for history? It would seem so. What arguments are there to support such a contention?

Neil Postman writes,

There is no escaping ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find it convenient to forget.

In quoting this passage from Postman’s Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Ronald Arnett says that history is “the metasubject needed in a good education.”

Read more on On History, Education, and Great Books…