lawyer | teacher | leader | thinker
“This study suggests it is possible to hold successful elections even under pandemic conditions.” In this column, I borrow from an excellent study conducted and released by the PARTICIPATE coalition, led by the Ateneo School of Government. In that paper, the authors point out what is obvious, that the 2022 Philippine national elections, to be …
Continue reading “Toward a COVID-proof and safe 2022 elections”
‘[A]s a lifetime advocate of environmental protection and the preservation of green spaces in cities, I could not see any possibility of such advocacies being incompatible with public health’ That is why I could not understand at first what the controversy over building a mega-vaccination site in Nayong Pilipino was all about. After all, as …
Continue reading “Gaslighting in the Nayong Pilipino Controversy”
“We must not lose sight of the big picture where death is just a moment, a terrible and sad one, but not the final one in God’s plan for us.” These days, many posts in my social media threads and communication groups have been about sickness and death. One reads about friends and colleagues who …
“When will this suffering end? Where is this heading? Is there hope?” The sudden serious surge of COVID-19 infections has caught us all unaware. Most of us can hardly wrap our minds around the record-setting numbers of new infections the country is now facing. It is a punch in the gut considering that we have …
Continue reading “Entering Jerusalem as the Pandemic Worsens”
Co-authored with Christian Laluna ‘All [the Church] asks for is the ability to worship within reasonable boundaries and restrictions, for the sake of those who need a light when the darkness descends’ One would think that, by Christian standards, Manila Archdiocese Bishop Broderick Pabillo’s riposte to the Inter-Agency Task Force’s (IATF) ban on religious congregational …
“We need to inoculate ourselves with a generous dose of hope in humanity and faith in the Creator.” Throughout human history, there have been many calamitous events that have seen a multitude of deaths and widespread destruction. These may be caused by a variety of causes such as cataclysmic natural phenomena, armed conflict, or some …
The Christmas season evokes a scene of an infant on a manger, with only the child’s parents, Mary and Joseph, and a few shepherds present. The coming of Christ into the world was so simple and unannounced that nobody living that time ever realized the significance of the momentous event. The Son of God was …
Last week’s Gospel reading calls on us to be alert and vigilant because we do not know when the Lord will come. But in the Second Sunday of this season, the Scripture calls on us to prepare the way for his coming. A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of …
I continue sharing the analysis by Senator Leila De Lima of how the Duterte administration has seriously bungled the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last Tuesday, I summarized Parts I and II of “Anatomy of a failed pandemic response.” Today, I share Parts III and IV of the De Lima analysis, entitled, “Duterte administration’s …
Being unjustly detained for trumped-up charges has not sidelined Senator Leila De Lima who continues to perform her duties as elected senator of the Republic within the four walls of her detention cell. Her analysis of the government’s response to the pandemic is a searing critique on how the government is mishandling the most serious …
Tony La Viña