#401 March, RECongress, Darkest Hour, Wendell Berry - March 9, 2018
March for Our Lives, March 24 We’re pulling together a consistent-life contingent for the Washington DC march. There will also be local versions all over the country. For anyone needing more information about the DC group, or offering information about contingents in other local marches, please contact us at weekly@consistent-life.org.
RECongress For the Religious Education Congress (RECongress) of the Catholic Church, thousands of people will converge in Anaheim. California, March 15-18. We’ll have an exhibit there, and always find this annual event one of our most productive. We have both the peace people who will listen about being more pro-life and the pro-life people who will listen about being more pro-peace. If you’re there, be sure to come by to see us! Note that your contributions help support us in spreading the word at venues like this, plus a wide-ranging set of other conferences.
“In Every Part of the World” Fr. James Martin (who will be one of the major speakers at the RECongress) has written a piece on The Ecumenism of the Prolife Movement, in which he expresses that he’s pleased with how the pro-life movement has been an effective collaboration among many different Christian denominations. We’d like to point out that collaboration on the pro-life cause has also been effective with other religions and secular groups, but because Fr. Martin is writing for the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, he understandably emphasizes a Christian perspective. Fr. Martin goes on to highlight the expanded logic of the movement: “If I am pro-life it means that I support anything that helps a person live a full, healthy and satisfying life, in every part of the world.”
Latest CLN Blog Post Last week’s comments about the Oscars brought a couple of responses questioning whether certain movies belonged in the “glorifying-war” category. This week Rachel MacNair explains why she thinks Oscar-nominated The Darkest Hour goes beyond presenting war as justified, and that in fact the word “glorifying” applies, in a post entitled The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War? That movie did feature a more mature portrayal of events than the over-simplified war movies of yesteryear, but making the decision for war seem harder also makes it appear braver. The same pattern of a difference between positive support and hand-wringing acceptance applies to abortion defenders.
Quotation of the Week Wendell Berry, author and environmental activist The Consequences of Treating a Fetus as a Human Being, June 22, 1986
The first mistake may have been in calling it a "fetus.” In the tongue of our real experience we don't say "fetus.” We say "child” or "baby.” When we talk, like clinicians, about "aborting a fetus,” we are implicitly acknowledging that it is wrong to kill a child. “Let us destroy this fetus,” we are saying, "before we have imagined its human face and suffered its human claims.” And this is what we mean when we speak of our warheads destroying an "enemy city”: "Let us kill them abstractedly and far away, before we have seen them clearly enough even to hate them.” Suppose our government should begin to say to us, "Let us be ready to kill all the Russian men, women, and children.” It would be different. The greatest difference would be made by the thought of the children. Humanity has always understood that it is a horrible thing to make an enemy of a child.
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