In a case reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo story, the father and mother of comatose 16-year-old Javona Peters are fighting over whether she lives or dies. Peters’ father wants his daughter to remain on life support, but her mother is seeking full custody so she can sue the hospital for malpractice … and potentially determine her daughter’s fate.

According to Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, the fate of the girl should be determined by the one “who speaks with the most loving and intimate knowledge of the daughter.” What do you think?

Each week, Wilma Runia visits a 99-year-old woman who can no longer hold her own Bible. The woman has no children and she’s outlived two husbands.

From a worldly perspective, she, like many elderly people, has reason to be depressed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults 65 years and older have a higher risk of suicide than any other age group. Reasons for depression include the loss of loved ones and increased physical limitations. But Ms. Runia, a resource person on aging in the Christian Reformed Church, told WoW that elderly people also start reviewing their lives: “They start asking, ‘Why am I here? What’s my purpose now that I’m older?’ If you get in that state, it can go from bad to worse in a very short time.’”

Each week Runia makes home visits as part of a nine-person team that supports the elderly and dying: “They say, ‘It takes a village to raise a child. Well, it takes a village to care for an elderly person.”

Runia also speaks to clergy about how to better involve seniors in their congregations – in both intergenerational and senior activities. She recommends each church have a trained team committed to visiting the home-bound on a weekly basis, so the church can recognize suicidal thinking and remind individuals of their value in God’s eyes.

“I’m not looking at wrinkly old ladies but children of God. We have to look beyond the wrinkles and physical limitations,” Runia said.

Kyle Smith, a film critic for the New York Post, had an intriguing essay in Friday’s Opinion Journal that, for all its merit, left me wondering why so many of us reflexively assume that to oppose violence is to be anti-American. Smith wanders about, first reviewing what sounds like an absolutely dreadful new Jodie Foster film, and then taking a few jabs at liberals, before settling down to his thesis, which is that liberals like movies that question the use of violence. Such movies, Smith implies, are anti-American. To substantiate his point, Smith points to two recent films, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and “A History of Violence,” which he says capture the liberal ethos regarding violence, to wit, that it is bad and somehow caused by nefarious forces — in the former movie, a shady government, and in the latter, a violent American culture.

It’s a bad habit for conservatives to adopt this reflex of defending whatever liberals critique. Eric Breindel, a New York Post journalist from a more thoughtful era, once wrote that “some things are true even though Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy said they were.” The same can be said of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The fact that liberals approve of a storyline in which Jason Bourne, the haunted ex-assassin from the Bourne trilogy of movies, was trained by the U.S. government, shouldn’t lead conservatives to suggest that the only pro-American stance is to be in favor of CIA-trained assassins. If conservatism is about, in part, a rightful distrust of large, unaccountable government bureaucracies, then shouldn’t conservatives applaud films that pick on the CIA?

More disturbing, however, is the notion that to oppose violence is somehow anti-American. A conservative understands that in a fallen world, violence may sometimes be necessary. But a conservative, and especially a Christian, also mourns the destruction of life. Smith notes that left-wing Hollywood filmmakers must be disappointed “that audiences remain more interested in crisp revenge than messy guilt.” It seems to me that genuine conservatives, and Christians above all, ought to be disappointed as well. That doesn’t mean that every movie which attempts to portray the true ugliness of violence should be applauded (Smith mentions some real stinkers). But it does mean that we ought to admit that violence is an ugly, terrible thing, even if Oliver Stone says so.