The value of a college degree may or may not be diminishing, but we’ve known for a few years now that there is a growing gender imbalance on college campuses. Colleges are attracting more women than men.

Where are young men to go? One answer: into trades where they can integrate mind and body in something closer to what the ancients would have called a real (meaning holistic) education.

I learned recently of the founding of the College of Saint Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, and their aim is just this sort of mind/body integrative experience:

The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build.

Their vision statement is worth reading in its entirety. I’ll highlight just this:

Students of the College of St. Joseph the Worker will graduate with a BA in Catholic Studies as well as a solid foundation in the skilled trades. Our goal is to produce faithful Christians who are virtuous citizens, intellectually formed, and capable of building up the Church in their communities. 

Another integrated institution I learned about recently is Harmel Academy of the Trades, which is “a residential, Catholic, post-secondary, trade school for men” in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their mission in

– Helps students grow in holiness through a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.
– Prepares students to be technical experts in their chosen trade.
– Supports business and industry by providing well-trained, hard-working, dependable and ethical workers.
– Helps students understand and apply Catholic Church teachings on work.
– Equips students with the skills and support to lead their future families.
– Creates associations of Catholic tradesmen, with mentorship, fellowship, and social action.

We need colleges and schools like these in every state. The more of these we have, the more the gender imbalance will, on the whole, resolve.

Dr. Christina Francis and Catherine Glenn Foster write in Newsweek that physicians can save pregnant women’s lives without abortion. I think this is an important piece, because it helps to clarify what abortion is.

Abortion is a specific intervention whose direct and intentional purpose is to end the life of a preborn child. This is why abortion laws hinge in intent.

If a medical intervention is not done with the primary intention of ending a child’s life—even if the foreseen but unintentional result of that intervention is the demise of the child—then it is not an abortion:

We are now living in a post-Roe v. Wade America, and women are already being bombarded by heavy-handed pro-abortion messages suggesting that abortion bans will block access to authentic medical care and treatments. Women in states that enact legislation protecting life, fear-mongering pro-abortion voices shout, won’t be able to receive treatment for pregnancy complications that thousands face every year—from ectopic pregnancy to miscarriage. …

The main problem for the pro-abortion narrative is that abortion is, in fact, not necessary to treat pregnancy complications. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an induced abortion is a procedure intended to terminate a pregnancy so that it does not result in a live birth. In other words, the specific purpose of an induced abortion is to end the life of a preborn child. From a medical standpoint, this is never necessary. This fact is clear in the case of miscarriage management, which in no way involves ending a life, only the removal of an embryo or fetus who is already deceased.

Other difficult pregnancy conditions may require doctors to separate a mother from her preborn child to save her life—but this is not the same as an abortion. For example, even Planned Parenthood acknowledges that managing an ectopic pregnancy—in which the embryo implants outside of the uterus, often causing life-threatening hemorrhage—is not an abortion. Other pregnancy complications, such as chorioamnionitis—an infection of the fetal membranes potentially leading to sepsis—must be treated by separating the mother and preborn child via premature delivery. These treatments are done with the explicit intent of saving the woman’s life. They allow doctors to attempt to preserve the child’s life—or, if that’s not possible, to treat them with the dignity they deserve. Abortion offers preborn children no such respect.

There is a crucial disconnect between how abortionists define abortion, and how physicians and lawmakers define abortion, and this piece speaks in to that to connect some of the dots for folks who wrongly believe, for instance, that miscarriage management involves abortion.

Peter Thiel once famously observed, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” referring to Twitter. “We are no longer living in a technologically accelerating world,” Thiel said nearly a decade ago. “There is an incredible sense of deceleration.”

Despite so much happening in the world of software and information technology, there has been relatively little in the way of transformation innovation—little in the way of truly new technology. We appear to be in an area of iterative change, of mimicking, of competitive copying. But even Amazon, as Gladden Pappen notes in the talk I’m sharing today, is little more than an iterative take on the mail order catalogue, reimagined in light of changed circumstances:

I notice when it takes nine months for construction workers to replace one worn-out escalator, as it did this past year at the Brookland-CUA WMATA Metro station near my home. This is an example of Pappen’s observation that, letting alone entirely the question of new technologies, we seem to be struggling simply to maintain past innovations.

“The point, I think, that is the one I’m attempting to make in response to modern innovation,” says Pappen at the 39:30 mark, “is that for Aristotle, aiming at innovation causes destruction. Aiming at preservation, allows and requires the right kind of change, or fosters the right kind of change.”