Registration!

Greetings!  The conference is quickly approaching and we have secured funding and the work is certainly getting out.  All we need is your participation!  To that end, we have placed the registration form on the site.  Just hit the tab at the top of the site, print it out and send to the address on the form.  Or you can email it to kofccultureoflife@gmail.com

An Ecumenical Conference

People who attended or have looked into the previous culture of life conference might notice one or two differences.  One is that the first speaker is a Protestant and another is that the venue is at a Christian Reformed Church.  This is in contrast to the previous conference which featured all Catholic speakers at a Catholic venue.

The truth is that we always wanted to be ecumenical and yet not compromise our Catholic teaching.  There are numerous areas where this is not easy.  However, the major culture issues that have plagued our nation for several decades now provide an area where Catholics and Protestants of many kinds can find common ground against the militant secularism that surrounds us and with the push for homosexual marriage and the HHS contraception mandate threatens some of our most cherished liberties.  As such it is important for all Christians to offer a response to these challenges.  And it is our firm belief that that response should not only be negative in the sense of stating our opposition and some reasons for that opposition.  Rather our response should also be positive, reminding our culture of the beauty of Christian marriage and family life lived in its fulness as Christ intended and the positive effect it has on the wider society.

With all of this mind, we invite all Christians and non-Christians who wish to understand the Christian teaching on marriage and family for fully to come North St. Christian Reformed Church in Zeeland this November 2.  There we will get beyond the slogans and sound-bites and into the real roots of Christian teaching on marriage and family, the cornerstones of civilization.

What is the Purpose of this Conference?

As things finally are falling into place for the next Culture of Life Conference, I thought it might be a good idea to think about just why we've spent so much time and effort trying to get this together.

Seeing a conference on Marriage and Family in the present climate, one may well be forgiven for thinking that the primary purpose is political, attempt to energize the faithful to go out an influence elections.  Or perhaps it is an attempt to circle the wagons, a last attempt to hang onto outmoded teachings before the force of law and external societal pressures force an inevitable retreat.
As anyone reading this post might well imagine though, this is far from the whole picture.  Certainly, we hope that there is a political consequence of this conference and certainly there is a great need to protect Christian teaching on matters of marriage and family due to the nature of the culture right now.  But this is only part of it.
This conference is actually the second in a series of conferences meant to look at the most controversial topics of our day from a perspective rooted less in the present controversies and more in the roots of doctrine as taught by the Catholic Church and some of the more conservative and orthodox Protestant denominations.  The goal is to reach beyond the sound bites and get to heart of the matter.  What do we really believe as Christians and why?  Where does this teaching come from?  How has it developed over the centuries?  What has been the effect on society?  These are the questions we hope to touch upon, if not fully answer with this conference.  At the end of it we hope that you come away better informed about how great the teachings of our faith are and how when lived out fully they help to build a just a peaceful society, how they truly are the foundations of a Culture of Life.

The DVD's...

have arrived!  It took a little doing and a couple of extra programs but we now have several copies of the DVD for the Culture of Life Conference available!  We will be working on getting some sort of graphic on the DVD itself as well but we'll see how that goes.  More to come soon!

Status update

We're in the process of taking those YouTube videos of the Culture of Life Conference and converting them into audio and video files that can be turned into DVD's and other things.
There is also a KofC meeting this week in which we'll no doubt be discussing the mandate and what to do about it.

Culture of Life Conference Video 4

Culture of Life Conference Video 3

Thanks

Thanks go out to Mark Shea for linking to our conference videos.  And of course welcome to new visitors.  Updates will be few and far between for a little while yet but stay-tuned, we've been working behind the scenes on some potential new projects.

Culture of Life, Part 2

And part two.  More to come soon.

Culture of Life video again

Here's the video, no pesky link!

Video!

At last, we have the first part of the conference up on YouTube!