691 - Peace & Life: Euthanasia Conference / Arab Peaceful Protest - December 1, 2023
Euthanasia Conference Recording Now Up
A national conference was hosted on October 21, 2023 by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Advocates for Better Care, and the Scholl Institute of Bioethics.
The full online recording just went up. For those wanting individual speakers, you can click the time stamp:
0:00:00 Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director, EPC
0:46:21 Edward Rivet, Advocates for Better Care Michigan
1:07:06 Genevieve Marnon, Advocates for Better Care
1:46:18 Meghan Schrader, EPC-USA
2:31:43 Wesley Smith, legal consultant to the Patients Rights Council
3:29:53 Josephine Glaser, family physician
4:11:37 Betty Odello, retired nursing professor and President of the Scholl Institute
Arabs and Peaceful Protest
Amr Hamzawy (pictured), director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - Middle East Program has
noticed a crucial development: Pay Attention to the Arab Public Response to the Israel-Hamas War.
He points out: “Protests have swept across the region . . . in support of the Palestinians in Gaza and their basic human rights in the face of an ongoing Israeli military assault and horrifying living conditions. The peaceful nature of this wave of Arab mass mobilization reflects a growing trend to renounce violence as a means of pursuing political objectives and a desire for stability following the turbulent years following the 2011 Arab Spring . . .
Together, the mainstream Arab public space put forward pro-peace and pro-life values without any attempt to justify Hamas actions”
FCNL No Longer Neutral
The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobbying organization, has never followed the consistent life ethic, but they were neutral on abortion and a fountain of good information on legislation involving our other issues. Accordingly, we used to occasionally link to their pages on specific bills.
The post-Dobbs backlash has now added them to the list of organizations who sabotage peace goals by being inconsistent about opposing all killing. Making an exception about using violence as a problem-solver to favor feticide is anti-pacifist. This point was made to them at their decision-making meeting by our own Rachel MacNair, to no avail. She at least did have fruitful conversations with many individuals.
Our Latest Blog Post
A movie was recently released about Bayard Rustin. He was a civil rights activist, and his main claim to fame is being the main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech. Observing the occasion, John Whitehead offers commentary: A Complex Man’s Complex Legacy: What the Movie Rustin Leaves Out.
Quotation of the Week
Blase J. Cupich
America: The Jesuit Review, October 12, 2023
Forty years ago this December, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin delivered a landmark address at Fordham University . . .
He had been asked to discuss the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace,” which six months earlier had made national headlines for its opposition to the moral logic of nuclear deterrence and war. Nuclear war was on the mind of millions in 1983. Long since dormant in the American psyche, this fear came roaring back to life with the current war in Ukraine – reminding us that the Cold War may have ended, but ours is still a nuclear world.
That pastoral letter, the cardinal noted, linked the issues of nuclear war with abortion, but without really making the case. Concerned about how abortion and other social justice issues had divided the church, Cardinal Bernardin designed his Fordham address to make that case, within a framework he famously called the “Consistent Ethic of Life.”