Observatório de NUNC COEPI

OBSERVANDO

A misteriosa ordem e beleza da criação

From the Editor

Hi there,

We have taken up a new hobby in our household: running a butterfly nursery. The Monarch butterfly, a handsome creature with orange and black wings edged by a stylish white-spotted trim, is plentiful in Auckland during the summer but, left to itself in the garden, it often becomes food for predators. So my sister brings them into our sunroom (conservatory) at the caterpillar stage on branches of swan plant (which they devour at an unbelievable rate, creating a mess at the same time) and we visit them at regular intervals to try and catch them just turning into chrysalises or just hatching out. I never have.

This morning I brought one that was at the point of hatching (its wing markings clearly visible through the transparent pupal case) to the breakfast table, determined not to let it out of my sight. Alas, I returned from some necessary distraction to find the newly hatched butterfly nonchalantly hanging upside down, drying out. Despite the fact that it had tricked me, I admired it for a couple of minutes, complimenting it and discovering all over again the mysterious order and beauty in nature, and the way life asserts itself according to its own inner laws, unless we actively prevent it.

We humans have become rather good -- in a bad way -- at interfering with life, as a couple of our new articles illustrate.Michael Cook writes about a horrible discovery in the vault of a Bangkok temple that confronts Thailand's Buddhist culture with the consequences of Western birth control technology, and Bill Muehlenberg looks at an example of Australian ambivalence about abortion.

The unprovoked killing of people after birth is still universally regarded as an outrage, as it is, and so America has been in turmoil this week over the deadly shooting spree that took place in Tucson, Arizona, last weekend. On the day that the youngest victim is buried, Christopher Blunt in his article explains how limiting free speech would be precisely the wrong response to this tragedy.

Still on the theme of death, in a way, Joe Infranco of the family values-aligned Alliance Defense Fund points out the irrationality of an appeals court decision on a memorial cross at the Mt. Soledad veterans' memorial in San Diego. In other articles we have George Friedman's take on the role of Turkey in the Middle East, Martyn Drakard on the religious free market in Africa, and Paul Rogers on how the rich world still ignores the hardships of the poor.

I can't close without another word of sympathy for the suffering of the tens of thousands of Australians affected by the devastating floods there... and the Brazilians overtaken by flash floods and mud slides... and the Haitians who still live in misery a year after their catastrophic earthquake... These disasters seem to remind us that nature in the end will have the upper hand, and it is always better to work with it than against it.

Happy reading,

Carolyn Moynihan, Deputy Editor, MecatorNet