Visiting the "Journey Home"

Only one day until my visit with The Journey Home airs on EWTN.  The episode was taped on April 2nd, and I have been nervous since:  The time flew by, so the end of the interview is rather abrupt; and there was much more I wanted to explain about the process.  Mostly though, I have worried at what people will take away from it.  

Those who know me today hear me present more on the "intellectual" side of the Faith - logical reasons to believe in God and the Scriptural and historical witness to Catholicism as the full expression of the Faith Jesus gave us.  The early years of my journey on the other hand were so "experiential," which of course is open to argumentation; and yet, that is the way God led me and I am eternally grateful that He was so merciful in reaching out to me in a way I could understand prior to the years of study that have followed.  In between the experiences I shared on TJH, there were of course months of reading Scripture and other books, and talking to the adults I had come to trust about the truths the experiences forced me to grapple with.  

In the end my prayer is that God will use that hour on EWTN to excite people at the thought of how much He loves them and challenge those on the fence to dive into study and prayer on the beliefs they struggle with.  I also pray that it can direct parents, teens, and college students to The God Who is Love: Explaining Christianity From Its Center.  There my experiences provide an introduction for each chapter, but the other 75% is the Scripture, logic, and history the experiences introduced me to and the cumulative effect that had in bringing me fully home.

A War on Women?

Like many Sundays, I started this morning watching NBC's Meet The Press with David Gregory.   Several times I heard he and his panel use the term, "the war on women" in reference to the supposed move to "restrict women's access to contraception" which was frustrating, because it is a political fiction.  There is no movement in Congress or the courts - state or federal - to make contraception any less available to women than it has been for the past 40 some years.  I also heard Hilary Rosen and Rachel Maddow equate "the war on women" with movements by lawmakers to restrict abortion.  The response that immediately jumped to my mind was, "In what sense could the attempts to save the lives of the 500,000 girls who are aborted every year be considered a war on women?  Isn't it the exact opposite?"