He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday....Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation.

The failed American approach to Islamic militancy in the 1990s can succinctly be summed up in one sentence: We didn't understand we were at war.

We didn't understand for a simple reason: We didn't listen to our enemies. They told us time and again that they considered themselves at war with us. They were not nuanced about it. They did not send Delphic clues, or simply leave it for us to deduce from several monstrous attacks. No, the jihadists coupled the deeds with words. They didn't just bomb the World Trade Center, our embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole. They told us again and again, fatwa after fatwa, that this was a war and that they were committed to doing whatever it took to win -- including the annihilation of civilians.

We didn't listen. It took 9/11, finally, for dawn to break on our slumber. It was a war and we needed to fight it like soldiers fight a war, not like the FBI disrupts a stock-fraud ring.

One of the most troubling findings showed that talk about sex on TV had virtually the same effect on teen behavior as depictions of sexual activity. That's a big departure from the widespread belief that rarer portrayals of action have a more powerful impact than the nightly barrage of sex chatter.

Public health experts dislike this state of the culture because sitcoms stress sex without the consequences -- sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy and even depression among sexually active teenagers. Anyone guided by moral principles bemoans the sorry state of an amoral, relativistic society where sinful behavior is not only condoned, it's encouraged.

So what's the solution? Again, a simple truth.

Collins found that the most powerful countervailing influence on teen sexual activity is, unsurprisingly, parental involvement. Having parents who monitored their teen's activities, having parents who were more educated or who were clearly disapproving of teenagers having sexual relations, and teens living with both parents were all strong indicators of delayed sexual activity.

But if parents are the solution, they not the root problem. It is the producers of the raunch who are most responsible.

The reproductive revolution is upon us. The past half-century has seen the development of reproductive technologies previous generations could not even imagine, much less consider in moral perspective. These technologies have radically expanded human control over the biological process, and have been designed both to prevent and to achieve successful pregnancy. Some legal theorists now argue for a new human right--the right to complete "procreative liberty," ensuring an individual's right to these new technologies.

The technological basics of in vitro fertilization technologies are easy to understand. The moral issues are far more complex. In vitro literally means "in glass," for the actual fertilization of the egg takes place in a laboratory context [early on, in a petri dish], rather than in the woman's reproductive system. While infants conceived by this method are often called "test tube babies," this is a misnomer, as no test tube is generally used. The phrase does, however, underline the technological character of the conception, which takes place in the laboratory.

The moral issues are more complex. What does it mean to separate conception from the act of sexual union? To whom should these technologies be made available? What is the moral status of the fertilized embryos? Those who dismiss these questions as irrelevant or inconsequential show disrespect for human dignity and human life.

Christians in the United States should stop fighting one another about issues of sexuality so that we can focus on the deepest moral crisis of our time: our responsibility for the destruction our nation has inflicted upon the people of Iraq.

Ignoring traditional "just war" criteria, the United States launched a pre-emptive war on Iraq that has killed at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians, more than three times the number of people killed in the tragic 9-11 attacks. Additionally, more than 900 American soldiers have died in Iraq. Thousands more have been wounded and maimed on both sides of the conflict....

Remarkably, most churches in this country have turned a blind eye to these terrible facts or have remained silent. Instead, it seems all we can do is squabble about sex.

Nothing Kerry said in Cincinnati could compensate for the blunder he made the day before when he stood before cameras on the tarmac of the Cincinnati airport and expressed his sorrow for the 1,000th American casualty in Iraq. "More than 1,000 of America's sons and daughters have now given their lives on behalf of their country, on behalf of freedom, in the war on terror," Kerry said. The war on terror? Oops. The mistake was part of the natural reversion to the mean of the Kerry candidacy. After the successful day and a half of campaigning that followed his conversation with President Clinton, the usual Kerry -- the New Old Kerry -- was back. Kerry took no questions after making his mystifying "war on terror" comment. Crowley called out, "Senator, you've been saying that it's 'wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.' What does that mean about these deaths?" but Kerry, in a typical maneuver, just walked away. It's been more than five weeks since Kerry last took questions at a press conference, or an "avail," as it's called.

The other head-scratcher uttered by Kerry in the past two days came Wednesday in Greensboro, N.C. There, in response to a question from a woman about the health problems caused by mold and indoor air contamination -- and her complaint, "There's not one agency in this government that has come forward" to deal with the problem -- Kerry endorsed the creation of a new federal department. "What I want to do, what I'm determined to do, and it's in my health-care plan, is refocus America on something that can reduce the cost of health care significantly for all Americans, which is wellness and prevention," Kerry said. So far, so good. But then, "And I intend to have not just a Department of Health and Human Services, but a Department of Wellness."

When they're not promoting abortion at the U.N. or sailing to pro-life nations, "choice" advocates are blasting the Bush administration -- for taking a stand against the complete lack of choice in China stemming from the forced-abortion thuggery there.

To his credit, President Bush has taken a hard line against the United Nations Population Fund and yanked U.S. taxpayer funding from the agency because of its tolerance of and participation in brutal Chinese population-control policies.

Groups that claim to be pro-choice couch their rhetoric in pro-woman terms. But when it comes to women and their families fleeing forced abortion in China, there's no lifeboat for them -- at least, none offered by the so-called advocates for women and choice.

U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf of Lincoln said that Congress ignored the most experienced doctors in determining that the banned procedure would never be necessary -- a finding he found "unreasonable."

"According to responsible medical opinion, there are times when the banned procedure is medically necessary to preserve the health of a woman and a respectful reading of the congressional record proves that point," Kopf wrote. "No reasonable and unbiased person could come to a different conclusion."

The abortion ban was signed last year by President Bush but was not enforced because three federal judges, in Lincoln, New York and San Francisco, agreed to hear constitutional challenges in simultaneous non-jury trials.

How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by Muslim terrorists, but by generic "militants" or "guerrillas" or "rebels" or, as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes noted the Pakistan Times called them, "activists"?...

The mainstream media pounded President Bush for trying to explain that the War on Terror is unwinnable in a conventional sense. The mainstream press itself proves the president's point every time its reporters disguise the deadly fanatical nature of our opponents in this global war. How are we to win a war against blood-spattered enemies whom our own free press continues to protect through politically correct sanitization?

It wasn't no-name militants or wayward guerrillas who have butchered, beheaded and slaughtered thousands of innocents over the last three years alone.

"For the government this is not a moral issue. It is a legal issue," wrote Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard Hicks in his ruling, posted Tuesday on the court's Web site.

Hicks acknowledged that the intent of the state's 1998 Defense of Marriage Act was very clear: Legislators wanted to limit marriage to a union between one man and one woman. But, Hicks said, that law directly conflicts with the state constitution.

"What fails strict scrutiny here is a government-approved civil contract for one class of the community not given to another class of the community," Hicks wrote. "Democracy means people with different values living together as one people. What can reconcile our differences is the feeling that with these differences we are still one people. This is the democracy of conscience."

Liberal justices have no problem imposing their personal beliefs onto the law. According to legal theory, as taught in most prestigious law schools and legal journals, a law has no objective, permanently fixed meaning, and so interpretation involves constructing a meaning. In practice, this justifies seeing the Constitution as an open-ended, evolving document that can be creatively applied to the needs of the time.

Conservative jurists, though, disagree. They believe that the law does have an objective meaning and that a judge's job is to apply that law. The meaning of the Constitution is to be found in the original intention of its authors. Judges are not supposed to impose their own values or beliefs and to rewrite the law accordingly. Rather, judges should see themselves as being under the law, not over it, as liberal legal theory would place them.

This puts conservatives at a significant disadvantage. Liberal jurists can throw out laws they do not like, while insisting that people follow the laws they do like to the letter. This puts conservative jurists, who on principle follow all laws, at their mercy....

If all judges had the integrity of Richard Casey, including every member of the Supreme Court, our legal system would work as the Constitution intended. Until then, who gets to make judicial appointments -- along with who will be willing to ratify them -- is one of the most important issues in the upcoming presidential election.

Roberts was approaching the fight against AIDS by doing what she knew best: selling something by making it trendy.

Her goal is to stop the spread of the disease by changing the behavior of the people most likely to get infected: 15-to-24-year-olds. In today's celebrity-driven world, that requires the use of big names to tell young men to put on a condom, to tell young women to insist on it.

"It's a sad state of affairs when you have to make it [condom use] sexy, bring in Hollywood, but you do," she says.

The prison data cries out for an AIDS-prevention strategy that would encompass all of the nation's jails and prisons. At a minimum, the program would give inmates free and open access to condoms. The American prison system is now dominated by the dangerous notion that distributing condoms would encourage prisoners to break the rules by having sex. As a result, condoms are unavailable in an overwhelming majority of jails and prisons.

The connection between the prison experience and the spread of AIDS outside prison is especially clear in poor communities, where a great many men spend time behind bars at some point in their lives. But with millions of people regularly exposed to H.I.V. in the prison system, the entire country has both a moral and a medical obligation to confront the sexual realities of prison life.

In the face of such horror, who can offer up any shred of justification? Yet that is precisely what has happened in the wake of every terrorist event the world has seen in recent years. By such lights, terrorism is viewed as a political act, intended to draw sympathetic attention to a cause -- in this case the brutal Russian occupation of Chechnya.

Post-9/11, there were those who "explained" the attacks by blaming U.S. policy in the Mideast as behind the "desperation" of the hijackers. After the Madrid bombings, half the Spanish electorate effectively blamed their nation's participation in the war in Iraq by voting out the government that supported the U.S. In the wake of every suicide bombing in Israel, that country's policy on Palestinians is deemed responsible in many quarters, especially in Europe. Post-Beslan, who is prepared to blame the children?