I don't know if we have a topic for thursday yet -- any interest in discussing President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame this past weekend?  A few questions I had after reading some news articles:

"Fair-mindedness"
- How should we (as Christians) engage in open-minded discussions (on abortion for example)?  Was graduation a wise context?
- Was President Obama open-minded, or was he calling for one-sided compromise?
- What is required to find "common ground?"

"the science of life"
- is abortion a moral/social problem or a scientific problem?
- why can't scientists define the beginning of life?  (is it that they don't like the answer?)
- as a scientist (or pretending to be), how would you define the beginning of life?

News article sample:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090517/pl_politico/22611

Here is the full text of the speech:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/17/obama-notre-dame-speech-f_n_204387.html

Side note: the news people really latched onto the abortion debate, to the discredit of the whole of the President's speech.

- Andrew

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Hi All,

      Last week, I promised you some statistics on abortion, so 
here's a link.

  http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5713a1.htm?s_cid=ss5713a1_e

     These are US Gov't statistics on abortion from 1973-2005.  I 
believe this is our topic of discussion today, so if you have 10 
minutes, go to the link and check out Table 1 for age/race breakdowns 
of people who get abortions.  Table 1 has multiple panels; the last 
is the most recent.  Anyway, see you all soon.

~Lauren


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Here's 2 links for added debate:
http://eileen.250x.com/Main/Einstein/Brain_Waves.htm
http://www.prolifephysicians.org/lifebegins.htm