Tomorrow night the NBC hit comedic show The Office will air its final episode.

Andy Greenwald has a reflection on what he calls “the most influential comedy of the last decade.” Since Steve Carell left, the show has not been the same, but that does not mean it wasn’t great in its prime.

Greenwald says:

It may not be pretty, but it’s somehow fitting that The Office should end this way: humbled, overlooked, and, increasingly, unloved. No one was paying much attention when the series debuted in 2005 and, in retrospect, it’s easy to see why. It was a prickly, initially slavish adaptation of a culty British comedy, shot in a jarring, shaky-camera style that appeared more suitable for Cops or a drunk uncle’s home movies than Must See TV. NBC thought so little of it that only six episodes were ordered and then promptly dumped in the midseason swamps of late March. The pilot featured a cast of relative unknowns ventriloquizing Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s cringe-inducing dialogue and, when subsequent episodes lost half the audience, the show’s prospects seemed thinner than Steve Carell’s pre–movie star hair. It was a fluke box office smash that kept it alive; it was a network-wide dearth of better options that eventually made it a hit.

Greenwald goes on to speak of what made The Office great.

When it was good, The Office was truly great. In contrast to the aspirational noisiness of other sitcoms, this was a show that celebrated the smallness of everyday life, the quiet indignities and tiny failures that mar our days and the shy smiles, raised eyebrows, and harmless pranks (well, mostly harmless) that give us the resilience to do it all again tomorrow. The Office thrived on the paper-thin edge between resignation and giving up, a task that would have been impossible had showrunner Greg Daniels not made the key decision to declare total independence from the English source material after the uneven first season.

There had been romantic sitcoms before The Office, and workplace sitcoms, too, of course. There had even been sitcoms starring Steve Carell.⁴ But no comedy before or since better captured the temporarily inflating rush of impractical desire, probably because no American comedy has ever been so unafraid of acknowledging desire’s black sheep cousin, regret. It’s what made Michael’s hapless quest for happiness feel heartfelt, not foolish, and imbued Dwight’s slow rise to power — and last week’s achievement of it — with the sort of recognizably human emotions the black-belted beet farmer would never cop to feeling.

And it’s what fueled the show’s essential story line for the best years of its life: the gradually romantic evolution of Jim and Pam from work spouses to actual spouses. Yes, the ham-fisted shenanigans of the final season made it plain that The Office had punted for years on the inevitable flip side to this fairy tale: Jim and Pam had gotten each other but they’d given up their hopes and dreams in the process. But I think it’s worth remembering just how bracing and essential those flirty looks and missed connections once felt, how understated and remarkable Jenna Fischer was in a role that so easily could have rankled with cuteness or veered into doormat. The end of Season 3 remains one of a handful of perfect television moments from my lifetime: Pam is doing a talking head to the camera assuming Jim, whom she’s lost to the wiles of Rashida Jones’s Karen, has gotten a corporate job in New York. Then Jim bursts into the room, a little flustered and a lot excited. He asks Pam out on a date. She accepts. He leaves. She turns back to us, asking “I’m sorry, what was the question?” And her skyscraping smile fills the screen in a way that standard sitcom laughter never could.

There are more than a couple ways to influence the pro-life movement. Sometimes it takes thinking outside the box. A recent story tells of how some kids with a van are influencing the pro-life movement.

On March 13, in Dallas, TX, an organization you’ve probably never heard of is going to revolutionize the pro-life movement.

It starts with a kid from Philly, a bus in New York, and an idea that brought him quite by accident to the city where Roe v. Wade started — the city where he hopes abortion will finally meet its match.

David Pomerantz, 23, does not look like a pro-lifer or a practicing Christian. He looks like a vegan hipster with emo hair. As a matter of fact, he sort of is a vegan hipster with emo hair. If you visit his loft apartment in an industrial section of downtown Dallas, he will offer you fermented tea with organic honey. You can lounge in a beanbag chair and talk about art while he surfs his Macbook and plays indie music and talks about Jesus.

The article goes on to describe how the ministry began.

He hails from Philadelphia, but he was attending Word of Life, a two-year Bible institute in New York, when he met Chris Slattery and Julie Beyel of EMC (Expectant Mother Care), a Manhattan pregnancy resource center. He was astonished to find that EMC had formulated a “new model” for approaching women outside abortion clinics.

EMC had a bus equipped with a sonogram machine. By approaching women outside the clinic with the offer of free help, with no mention of a pro-life ideology, they were able to see a staggering success rate. In fact, by their estimate, about 70% of women who got on the bus for a sonogram decided not to abort. In one day, they saw nine women decide on life for their children.

They did some simple math, and realized that if this success continued, 15 to 25 women a week, or about 800 a year, would choose life.

Excited by the possibilities inherent in this new approach, Dave contacted his friend and mentor Joe Baker, who flew in from Philly to see the results firsthand. Equally impressed, the two began to ferment the idea that would become Save the Storks.

Dave was already planning on attending Southwestern Theological Seminary in Dallas, so he headed down south. With Joe Baker developing the art and marketing, and the generous help of Dallas-based organization Get Involved for Life and other private donors to bring to life a sleeker, smaller, more mobile ultrasound vehicle, they were off and running.

Save the Storks was born. Or, if you prefer, flown in through the window.

Here is what the ministry looks like.

A woman is walking up to an abortion clinic. She is approached by Dave or Daryl or another member of Save the Storks.

“Hi, how are you? Would you like a free ultrasound?”

This is the approach. There is no dangling rosary, no graphic pamphlet, no doom-and-gloom. Just an offer of free help from a non-threatening, friendly, smiling young person.

And then there is the Stork bus.

The stork was chosen as the mascot because of its comforting, unoffensive, nostalgic connection to motherhood and pregnancy. We can all remember old cartoons where a smiling stork would fly in a window and lay a swaddled baby in a crib.

The Stork bus, however, is free of all Old Testament references. It is a bright, lovely blue on the outside, and the inside is clean and free of clutter, with a welcoming but no-nonsense clinical feel. There is a little couch for the mother to sit on and speak to a counselor, and a padded bench where she can lie comfortably.

It is an abortion clinic’s worst nightmare.

I re-read R.R. Reno’s reflection on the current state of religion and public life in America. His conclusion is worth sharing. After detailing the current antagonism against religion he closes with this word of hope.

In conclusion, I want to focus not on fury but on the remarkable capacity for communities of faith to endure. My wife’s ancestors lived for generations in the contested borderlands of Poland and Russia. As Jews they were tremendously vulnerable, and yet through their children and their children’s children they endured in spite of discrimination, violence, and attempted genocide. Where now, I ask, are the Russian and Polish aristocrats who dominated them for centuries? Where now is the Thousand Year Reich? Where now is the Soviet worker’s paradise? They have gone to dust. The Torah is still read in the synagogue.

The same holds for Christianity. The Church did not need constitutional protections in order to take root in a hostile pagan culture two thousand years ago.

Right now the Nones seem to have the upper hand in America. But what seems powerful is not always so. If I had to bet on Harvard or the Catholic Church, Yale or the Mennonites in Goshen, Indiana, the New York Times or yeshivas in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t hesitate. Over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.

Joel Miller has a good post at Patheos about the social and economic philosopher Wilhelm Röpke. He compares him another economist, Ayn Rand. Röpke, unlike Rand, grounded his critique of socialism and his defense of free markets in a thoroughly Christian understanding of man and his world.

My picture of man is fashioned by the spiritual heritage of classical and Christian tradition. I see in man the likeness of God; I am profoundly convinced that it is an appalling sin to reduce man to a means (even in the name of high-sounding phrases) and that each man’s soul is something unique, irreplaceable, priceless, in comparison with which all other things are as naught. I am attached to a humanism which is rooted in these convictions and which regards man as the child and image of God, but not as God himself, to be idolized as he is by the hubris of a false and atheist humanism. These, I believe, are the reasons why I so greatly distrust all forms of collectivism.

It is for the same reasons that I champion an economic order ruled by free prices and markets — and also because weighty arguments and compelling evidence show clearly that in our age of highly developed industrial economy, this is the only economic order compatible with human freedom, with a state and society which safeguard freedom, and with the rule of law. For these are the fundamental conditions without which a life possessing meaning and dignity is impossible for men of our religious and philosophical convictions and traditions.

Joel closes the post saying:

If Röpke is right, then the last thing that we need is more of Rand. We need “to take counsel with our own souls and . . . bethink ourselves of the firm, enduring, and proved truths of life.” We’ve tried economics without reference to God, and no one’s better for it.

Socialism is a dead end, one that represses human freedom. But I don’t need Rand to tell me that. Rand’s critique is unnecessary and ultimately unhelpful because it is undergirded by an atheistic, anti-Christian philosophy. Our choice isn’t between socialism and Rand. We would be far better served by giving more space to people like Wilhelm Röpke.

After Tiller is a forthcoming documentary that played at the Sundance Film Festival which chronicles the only four doctors in the United States who continue to perform third-trimester abortions. The website describes the film as

an intimate look into each of the four physicians’ private and professional struggles. Wrenching moments in the clinics, when they gently counsel distraught patients facing grievous losses, force us to step into the shoes of both practitioner and patient and confront the full complexity of each decision…After Tiller sensitively and artfully extricates the controversy from the ideological realm and humanizes those who have been demonized.

What is shocking about the above video is that the doctor assumes she (with the consent of the mother) can decide for another person if their life is worth living. If they determine the quality of life is not going to be good enough, then ending the life is for the greater good and acceptable even though a hard decision.

The film portrays the abortionists as protagonists who help women make difficult decisions. Even more disturbingly the film seems to acknowledge they are killing babies.

At least in this film, they have abandoned the argument that these babies are simply a “clump of cells” and gone straight for the utilitarian argument.

Justin Dyer in an article on Public Discourse says:

The film unquestionably depicts the termination of severely disabled or malformed children as the lesser evil. By the end, however, After Tiller also pushes its viewers to consider the morality of late-term abortion for reasons unrelated to the health or life quality of the child.

At one point, Dr. Robinson confronts a young Catholic woman who is wracked by guilt at the thought of committing what her Church considers a mortal sin. Her parents, the father of the baby, and the father’s parents all plead with her not to have an abortion. Robinson lays out the decision to her this way:

“You have three choices. You can have a kid that you say you can’t take good care of. You can have a kid and give it to somebody else, who you know or don’t know. Or you can have an abortion, which you think is the wrong thing to do. Those are your three choices. They all suck.”

In putting the options this way, Robinson does not shy away from the fact that abortion ends a life; this is precisely why, to use her phrase, abortion sucks. Throughout the film there is no pretending that a child’s life is not at stake or that what is at issue is merely a clump of cells. At one point, a patient expresses her hope that her baby will become an angel and go to heaven. Later Sella confesses, “I think of them as babies.”

I don’t know if you caught that. One of the doctors thinks they are babies, yet they continue.

After Tiller broaches the question of whether, and in what circumstances, it is morally permissible to end the life of human beings at any age, since the reasons and justifications for ending the life of a child are not dependent, in principle, on its being an unborn child. Pro-choice philosophers and academics have acknowledged this at least since the 1970s, but it has taken several decades for the logic to manifest itself in our culture.

Even if unwittingly, the extreme position staked out in academic philosophy journals is the very position to which viewers of After Tiller are being pushed. Once we accept the humanity of unborn children (as the doctors in the film do) and approve the deliberate killing of unborn children diagnosed with severe disabilities, the logical next question is, why not also allow the euthanasia of disabled infants? And if we are prepared to accept other justifications for abortion beyond fetal disabilities, then why not also accept these as justifications for infanticide?