I’m honored to be speaking for The Catholic Churches of Visalia again. TCCOV is hosting public events on current hot topics, and they’ve asked me to speak on how Christians should think about the Planned Parenthood videos released by the Center of Medical Progress.
I will also speak about what we’ve learned this year about the kind of question you should ask in dialogues, and the kind of question you should not ask to keep the conversation productive.
| Date: | November 10, 2015 |
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| Time: | 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. |
| Event: | How Should Christians Think About the Planned Parenthood Videos? |
| Sponsor: |
The Catholic Churches of Visalia 559-734-9522 |
| Venue: | The Serra Center |
| Location: | 506 Garden St. Visalia, CA 93291 |
| Public: | Public |
Want me to speak to your group? Click here to check my availability!
I’m frequently asked how I became pro-life, or when it was that I decided to fight abortion. This is the story of how I learned what abortion is, standing in front of an abortion facility in downtown Sacramento at 11-years-old.
I’ll be speaking at a Fresno FCA event in November, and I’ve been given permission to share the information in case you would like to come. I’ll be talking about the biblical case for the pro-life position, my favorite secular argument against abortion, and how to respond to the rape question with appropriate sensitivity. There will be time for Q&A afterwards.
For the precise location, click here to access the interactive Fresno State map, and then click on the “Duncan Athletic” checkbox in the “Select a Building” menu.
| Date: | November 2, 2015 |
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| Time: | 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. |
| Event: | Fresno County Fellowship of Christian Athletes |
| Topic: | The Most Undervalued Argument in the Pro-Life Movement |
| Sponsor: |
Fresno County Fellowship of Christian Athletes Lorne Bell: (805) 795-9116 |
| Venue: | Fresno State University - Duncan Athletic Building |
| Location: | Fresno, CA |
| Public: | Public |
Want me to speak to your group? Click here to check my availability!
A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of pro-life advocates being open to letting their conversation change topics. I gave the examples of religion and same-sex marriage and described how it might be more important for a given person to talk about one of those issues than to talk about abortion. Good dialogue requires the ability to listen well to the other person, as opposed to stubbornly sticking to your flowchart. [Tweet that!]
There’s another common reason that I change topics from abortion to something else: I discover that there is something more seriously wrong with their view than that they are pro-choice about abortion. Sometimes you can’t realistically make progress on abortion unless you deal with something else first.
Probably the most obvious example of a time to stop talking about abortion is if the person you’re talking to is not only pro-choice, they’re a moral relativist. If a person doesn’t think any action is morally wrong, even an obvious case like rape or child abuse, convincing them of the wrongness of killing a fetus is pretty hopeless. People tend to relate much better to victims of child abuse and survivors of rape much better than they relate to human fetuses. In order to consider defending fetuses they don’t emotionally connect to, they need to at least be able to see something like rape as evil.