My caller was taking me to task for publishing an article that he felt involved the Church in politics. "Your newspaper should stay out of politics. Stick to evangelization."

Those of us who are or have been members of families – that's all of us – realize there is more to family life than making babies and raising babies to become good adults.

The central and most challenging function of the family is the responsibility of parents to raise their children to be good people and good Christians. It is far more important than the goal of so many families in our affluent society – to maximize their income and increase their level of comfort.

People should be treated like subjects, not objects. That's another of those "motherhood statements" - a statement that everyone can agree with but one that is so often violated.

As the father of four young girls, I have been the witness to innumerable weddings. Our living room has seen marriages between puffalumps and dolls, between a wide variety of stuffed animals and even between two of my daughters (one of them pretending to be a man, of course).

My visitor came to talk about doing business with the WCR. But once we finished that chat, he became even more energized by talking about the threats to the family in society.

An addiction is any process or substance that begins to have control over us in such a way that we feel we must be dishonest with ourselves or others about it."

At 82 years, life expectancy in Japan is the highest in the world.

A person can expect, on average, to have a healthy life of 75 in Japan before the ravages of disease and infirmity take over.

If the 18th and 19th centuries in the Western world represented the growth of industrialization, the 20th century included serious attempts to overcome the human exploitation of the Industrial Revolution and to try to establish social justice.

The Catholic Church's teaching has long seen the right to property as the basis of any society rooted in the common good. A person makes part of the earth – or the goods of creation – his own through work and intelligence. That effort legitimizes his special claim to that part of creation.