Dear Michael S.,

In your post below, you write that "often times human beings (myself included) will hold on to a set of very dearly held beliefs (or desires) long after the unreasonableness of those beliefs has been exposed."  Whatever one might want to say about Jean Porter's Commonweal essay, in which, inter alia, she espouses a position on the moral status of human life at its earliest stage of development different from the position of the magisterium and (e.g.) Robby George, one cannot fairly say that her essay is "unreasonable".  Jean Porter is one of the most rigorously reasonable Christian moral theologians--in particular, one of the most rigorously reasonable Catholic natural lawyers--now writing.  She richly merits her chair at Notre Dame and is a credit to the university.  The fact that someone who has listened carefully to the (reasonable) argument of a Robby George, as Jean Porter has, but still does not find the argument convincing dooes not mean that she is unreasonable.  (In a way, I think I am simply concurring here in what Lisa Schiltz has been suggesting.)

All the best,

Michael P.