We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration.

The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. If only he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity . . . yet he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited . . .

– Thomas Merton

The New Media Frontier has been nominated for Outreach Resource of the Year in Evangelism by Outreach magazine.

William Saletan writes at Slate.com about the responsibility that goes along with the use of reproductive technologies that create embryos.  From the conclusion:

I’m a pro-choice moralist. I don’t want the government telling people what to do with their pregnancies or their spare embryos. But that freedom doesn’t eliminate moral obligation; it intensifies it. Each of us has to decide how to respect life in all its complexity. To me, embryos aren’t people, but they’re the beginnings of people. They aren’t to be created, killed, or frozen lightly.

That means, among other things, that they should never be an afterthought. Don’t have sex, at least not the procreative kind, without discussing what you’ll do in the event of pregnancy. Don’t make or freeze embryos without thinking through what you’ll do with them. And if, after talking it over, you can’t stomach the options ahead, maybe you should reconsider whether you’re ready for this. That’s a lot to ask, I know. But nobody said choosing would be easy.

While there are several things here I disagree with, Saletan makes two important and related points.  Reproductive technologies (and, indeed the full spectrum of biotechnologies) carry an intense obligation that we ensure we act in ways that nurture and support human life, and avoid uses that destroy or even imperil life.  This requires of us the hard work of determining what should and should not be pursued and by what means.