De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Regular readers of my blog will recognise that former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks is one of my great contemporary heroes. A man of huge integrity, intellectual thought, and an advocate for civilisation and society. I see him as a real leader: someone I can really look up to and admire. He is a man of vision and courage, who takes his responsibilities as a leader seriously and is always prepared to speak out about important issues with great intelligence and in a way which only ever contributes to the debate. In an interview with The Telegraph , Lord Sacks has made an important intervention, high-lighting some vital issues for our society today. Among his insights, he points out that: Societies have taken the trend towards outsourcing to new extremes by delegating responsibility even for moral decisions to companies or governments. The current crisis in the west is caused by falling birth-rates, our addiction to debt, the breakup of the family unit and a growing gap between the super-...

Right, now I have your attention... Caroline Farrow has written a really interesting reflection on the Catholic theology of the family and fertility. It raises many important points which will resonate with Catholics who are in engaged in the melee of family life. For example, the term Natural Family Planning could have negative connotations with contraceptive over-tones. Indeed, it is a fact that such secular institutions as the NHS and the BBC both refer to NFP as a method of contraception. Caroline points out that some non-Catholics consider that NFP is a method of contraception and to say it is not is merely to enagage in semantics. Of course, Catholics argue that there is nothing in any way contraceptive about natural family planning because a couple practicing NFP do nothing at all to prevent procreation or to render the act infertile either before, during, or after sexual intercourse has taken place . The sexual act may in fact be infertile (i.e. it may not be possib...