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endow

Endow

The gift of life at any cost {Endow Voices}

August 3, 2017

I met a girlfriend for drinks last month and we got to talking about infertility during a lull in the conversation. Knowing what I do for a living, she raised her glass ever so slightly and asked me, “can you explain what the Church teaches about surrogacy? Because friends of ours are struggling and it’s so sad and if I weren’t already pregnant myself I’d volunteer to carry a baby for them, they’ve been trying so long.”

I took a big sip myself and smiled at her; “that’s beautiful. Of course you want to help your friends.”

And then I did my best to explain why that kind of help cannot be – and will never be – okay.

Infertility is a brutally heavy cross, and it’s easy enough to explain the “rules” when you’re not sitting in the bathroom, gutted over another negative pregnancy test, another cycle of “no.” But also easy – and becoming all the more so as science and technology speed along – to lose sight of the fact that the entire industry which has sprung up around the problem of childlessness deals not in products, but in people.

…….

(Head over to Endow Voices to read the rest) 

Abortion, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization

Joining a chorus of voices

March 22, 2017

From an Endow press release this morning:

Today, we are announcing Endow Voices, an online platform connecting faith, culture and our everyday lives.

The goal is to engage our members with experts in various fields to answer questions from the philosophical to the practical to the mundane on how to be a Catholic woman in today’s crazy world. So far we have been amazingly blessed with the following women signed up as regular contributors, with more to come:

  • Alice Von Hildebrand: Philosophy and Womanhood

  • Marilyn Coors: Science, Medicine, Bioethics and Faith

  • Helen Alvare: Finding Truth in the Age of Relativism

  • Linda Grimm: Defending Dignity and our Legal System

  • Kathleen Domingo: Life Issues and the Public Square

  • Jenny Uebbing: Catholic Culture and the New Feminism

  • Michelle Chandler: Mom, Wife and the Interior Life

  • Jenna Guizar: Leadership and Ministry

Not exactly a shabby lineup, eh? Archbishop Jose Gomez of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has also agreed to contribute to this exciting new venture of Endow’s, which I’ve no doubt will do big things for the Church.

If you’re not already familiar with Endow, you need to be! They offer life-changing small group study experiences and have some of the best and deepest content out there, with studies covering everything from the encyclicals of St. John Paul II to Edith Stein and Thomas Aquinas. I have had the privilege to work behind the scenes with them on various projects over the years, and it is wonderful to see how God has called them to expand their physical community into the virtual sphere, the precise opposite trajectory of so many other ministries. It is truly an honor to be contributing to the mission of Endow in some small way, and I hope you’ll read along, and even better, join – or start! – an Endow group in your neighborhood or at your parish.

An excerpt from my contribution this month, Catholic Feminism:

“…I bother with the linguistic parsing because words mean something, and the proper use of language is critical to the building up – or tearing down – of culture. When I speak of Catholic feminism, what I mean is a total embrace of what it means to be a woman: self giving, creative, strong, and capable of profound sacrifice and leadership.

I think that modern feminism has become too conflated with Planned Parenthood’s agenda of sexual free for all and an angry, even violent rejection of motherhood and fertility. Feminism that calls a woman to reject and mutilate her body is only suppression and degradation by another name.”

Click here to read the rest.