It's ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake.

Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.

It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church.

It's possible to make sense of what's morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift - in this case, the child - not be wholly our own doing, our own product.

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

What intrigued me most was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don't choose the kind of child that we have.