New York City, Sept. 11, 2001, 8:51 a.m. The usually urbane voice of WNYC’s news anchor rang with rare urgency. A plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
President Aquino may be chuckling behind his hand at the way in which his remark about “responsible parenthood” put a cat in the chicken coop. Amid the excited cackling that followed the President’s remark, it took Prof. Bernardo Villegas of Opus Dei to remind listeners on Radio Veritas that responsible parenthood is part of the Catholic moral tradition. Popes and bishops around the world as well as Philippine bishops have many times used it in insisting that, while a new life is a gift from God, parents should not procreate indiscriminately. Rather, they should strive, using natural family planning (NFP) if called for, to have only the number of children that they can provide for properly.
Today’s complex and competitive markets offer many opportunities for innovation. Two Sundays ago, the Inquirer’s Talk of the Town featured ways to produce consumer products from three coconut byproducts—candies and desserts with coco sugar, buko juice and sports drink from coconut water, and various food preparations using coconut oil. Such innovative products not only present [...]
Some criticisms of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program actually provide good arguments for continuing it. That is, they raise valid questions best answered with empirical evidence that can only become available if the program is given a chance to run for a good length of time. Given the huge investment the Aquino administration is [...]
World Youth Day always evokes for me memories of a narrowly averted disaster. As a not-so-youthful seminarian teaching at the Ateneo de Manila High School back in 1995, I was tasked with shepherding my homeroom students during the overnight vigil and concluding Mass for the World Youth Day celebration in Manila. That final Mass at [...]
