Month: January 2015

On
Cathy Lins, Catholic Herald Correspondent

Respect Life Retreat held at Durward’s Glen

The Servants of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Vigil for Life held their seventh annual Respect Life Retreat at Durward’s Glen Retreat and Conference Center in Baraboo on December 19 to 20.

The weekend provided an opportunity for participants to encounter Christ in the silence of their heart through prayer, the sacraments, Adoration, and Catholic Advent mediations.

“I was just excited to be at Durward’s Glen again for another Advent retreat,” Will Goodman, director for the Servants of Our Lady of Guadalupe, said as he shared some of his observations from the weekend.

Read More
On
Mary C. Uhler, Catholic Herald Staff

What about mourning lives lost by abortion?

News media reported that world leaders — including Muslim and Jewish statesmen — linked arms on January 11 to lead more than a million French citizens through Paris in an unprecedented march to pay tribute to victims of Islamist militant attacks.

Commentators said the last time crowds of this size filled the streets of the capital was at the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany in 1944.

While we mourn the tragic deaths  in Paris — including the journalists and police who were killed there — I also find it ironic that over one billion unborn children have been killed in the world since 1980 and over 57 million unborn children have died in the United States by abortion since 1973.

Do we have a tremendous outcry about these lives lost? Do we mourn the deaths of these unborn babies?

Read More
On
Vicky Franchino, For the Catholic Herald

Retreats help heal pain of abortion

Jessica* was a sophomore in college. Naïve about sex, she thought she was in love.

But when Jessica became pregnant, her boyfriend coerced her into having an abortion. Jessica went along with a “choice” that seemed largely out of her control.

Shelly’s* pregnancy was unplanned and unwelcome. After her abortion, her immediate reaction was relief — she just wanted to move on.

Read More
On
Kevin Wondrash

A ‘smart people’ problem?

Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of contemporary atheism, proposed in 2003 that those who espouse a naturalist, atheist worldview should call themselves “the brights,” thereby distinguishing themselves rather clearly from the dim benighted masses who hold on to supernaturalist convictions.

In the wake of Dennett’s suggestion, many atheists have brought forward what they take to be evidence that the smartest people in society do subscribe to anti-theist views. By “smartest” they usually mean practitioners of the physical sciences, and they point to surveys that indicate only small percentages of scientists subscribe to religious belief.

Read More