At various times it has been said that a particular piece of music is the “song of our generation.” For the Boomers, it may well have been “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, or for Gen X, perhaps something like “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. It is, admittedly, hard to pick just one. But it is a fruitful exercise to look at the artistic output of an age, particularly its music, as a way of understanding its people, the associated dreams and hurts, and the zeitgeist itself.

There is some real false equivalence going on online right now surrounding the supposed moral incoherence of a religious exemption for the COVID vaccine due to the involvement of aborted cell lines and (in the case of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines) human desecration and vivisection in the development of these vaccines. The truth is, there is a crucial difference between origin and later misuse that rends the arguments against religious exemption invalid.

That was a mouthful, so let’s break it down.