SFLA National Conference West Coast
| Date: | January 22, 2017 |
|---|---|
| Event: | SFLA National Conference West Coast |
| Sponsor: | Students for Life of America |
| Venue: | St. Mary’s Event Center |
| Location: | 1111 Gough St. San Francisco, CA |
| Public: | Public |
| Registration: | Click here to register. |
Want us to speak to your group? Click here to check our availability!
Just two months after starting Equal Rights Institute, Josh and Timothy Brahm gave their first seminar together on pro-life dialogue. In order for that to be possible, they had to very quickly take their growing body of original content and combine it with the most helpful tools they had learned from other pro-life leaders. From August 2014 to August 2016 only about four hundred individuals have had the opportunity to experience ERI’s full seminar in pro-life dialogue.
Until now.
The Equipped for Life Course makes it possible for any individual or group to experience ERI’s pro-life dialogue training.
Learn what the ERI staff have learned about how to make the most of an opportunity to help someone change their mind about abortion.
Moving ERI’s training online has wonderful benefits other than making it possible to train thousands of pro-life advocates a year. Students will have the opportunity to revisit the training when their memories are failing them. They can watch or listen to the lessons over and over instead of having to attend a seven-hour seminar and only hear the content one time.
They can also continue to learn with and interact with the ERI staff directly through the exclusive podcast and forum.
Here’s what two people who attended ERI’s live seminar had to say:
“I love apologetics, and I have never heard such great methods and arguments as I did today. I especially appreciate your emphasis on being compassionate. I realized that I need to be more compassionate, listen, and treat people as human when I talk to them.” ~Meleah
“I think that this is the best, most productive, and most effective pro-life training I have been able to find. This seminar has changed me in that I have a marked increase in my confidence in these arguments. I really think I will be able to dialogue more effectively and more lovingly.” ~Sean
Here’s a picture of what the top of the Modules page looks like when you log in.
Visit EquippedCourse.com to see a list of the modules and bonuses included in the course, read testimonials and an FAQ, and get instant access to the course!
We’ve been really busy finishing the Equipped For Life course lately. Several of our supporters requested that we shoot a quick video to show them where we’re working now and what a typical day is like for us. Here are some of the things we did yesterday. Enjoy!
It’s been almost a year since I started this blog and by far my most popular post is my explanation of the basic Equal Rights Argument that I and my colleagues at Justice For All have been using in conversations with pro-choice people. It became so effective that I called it the “most undervalued argument in the pro-life movement.”
We’re arguing that if adult humans deserve equal treatment, that must be because they all have something in common, and it must be a property that they all have equally. We try to figure out what that property is that seems to be grounding equal treatment, and then ask whether the unborn also has that property equally. If they do, then the unborn deserve equal treatment.
What is the property that human adults have equally? Originally, we were saying that it seems like we all have “humanness” in common. If someone asks why “humanness” matters, I would say something like, “I believe there’s this guy who walked out of his own tomb 2,000 years ago. He believed in the Torah, which says that God made humans in His own image, that He did something special with humans that He didn’t do with other animals, giving me a reason to believe that ‘humanness’ might morally matter.”
But as I’ve used this argument lately, I’ve noticed there’s a pragmatic problem: it’s not terribly convincing to pro-choice atheists who immediately brush off the argument as inherently religious. That’s a practical problem, but I think there’s an even greater problem philosophically: the “humanness” argument can’t account for the right to life of fictional aliens.
Remember that scene in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones is hilariously interrogating Frank?
As most of you know by now, we’re moving the ERI headquarters from Fresno to Charlotte, North Carolina in a few weeks! I’m speaking in Virginia this week and getting back just in time to help pack the truck and we’ll caravan to Charlotte for five days!
One of the most frequent questions I get these days is: “Why did you pick Charlotte?” Once I knew that it was time to move, I asked my wife Hannah to start researching good airport cities with good cost of living. After ruling out a few options for various reasons, Charlotte became the obvious choice.
It’s ideally located on the east coast, within driving distance of Operations Coordinator Jacob Nels, who lives north of Atlanta, and also a cheap flight away from D.C. where we speak often. The Charlotte airport has direct flights to lots of the places we go.
There are lots of wonderful Christian organizations in the Charlotte area, but no pro-life organizations that are similar to us. We have lots of outreach to do on the college campuses in NC!
We’re going to be so much more efficient by being in Charlotte, and we can’t wait to get there and set up our new office! But as you can imagine, moving is a fairly expensive process. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help us. All told the move will cost us around $7,412 in transportation costs, including the moving truck.
If you’d like to help, click the button below, and then click on the “Donate Now” button on the webpage it opens. In the third step of the process, you’ll be asked where you’d like to designate your gift. The last option on the dropdown menu is “The ERI Move.” Select that and set up your gift.
Thanks so much! We have huge things coming up, and I’m ready to get this move behind us so we can get back to spending all of our time training pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively.