As is our tradition at the end of the year, here is a list of the five most-read articles we wrote this year, as well as the five most-watched/heard podcasts from this year and the three most popular articles that were written before this year. The article analytics all came from Google Analytics.
Our blog received 214,177 unique pageviews from 38,373 unique people this year.
Nicole Hocott at the March for Life in the nation’s capital.
When I read this post from University of Michigan Students for Life club leader Nicole Hocott, I asked her if we could repost it because it so aligns with our ethos at ERI. As Nicole explains, “We all have certain topics that make our blood boil. I want to consider what our response should be when talking with people about them.” I can’t think of a more important year to have published this article!
We bring you the extended interview of Emily Albrecht (our newest team member!) from the recent ERI Pajama Gala. Emily explains how she got involved in the pro-life movement, and how her campus club used their training from the Equipped for Life Course to transform the culture at St. Olaf, from one where they hated pro-lifers to one where pro-lifers are respected.
There’s a post making the social media rounds in which a liberal pastor takes pro-life people to task, essentially calling the religious ones fake Christians. In so many words, he states that pro-lifers advocate for unborn humans out of convenience and hatred.
“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
Let’s be clear: this is a baseless attack on all pro-life Christians. Dave Barnhart’s argument is fundamentally that because we don’t abandon unborn children to support his pet political agenda, we’re fake Christians. He implies that pro-life people don’t love “people who breathe” and, because Christians must love other people in order to love Jesus, we’re just claiming to love Jesus and lying to ourselves and others. Unfortunately, many people seem to think this hot take is a profound take-down of the pro-life movement.
Normally at ERI, we promote relational dialogue and give people the benefit of the doubt even when it isn’t merited. In this case, a public figure has called into question the ethics and sincerity of an entire class of people. I’m not in a dialogue with him. My job is to refute his empty rhetoric, and I’m taking the gloves off to do it.
It’s here! The new Equal Rights Argument module is ready for you to watch!
There’s a cool thing that’s been going on behind the scenes at the ERI office this year. We decided that we wanted to find a better way to train students in the most persuasive pro-life argument, the Equal Rights Argument. It’s been a significant part of our training content since we launched, and while the argument itself doesn’t need to change, we want a more helpful way to teach the argument. We had lots of brainstorm sessions, including multiple great calls with our friends at Justice For All, who also recently revised their method of teaching this argument. We’re excited to announce that we have finally landed on a new four-step process that our Philosophy Team created for teaching the Equal Rights Argument.
Josh has taught this process virtually to three groups now (including one in Ireland!), as well as to a small focus group that he ran in Charlotte. We feel confident that the new process makes it significantly easier for students to master this argument now, so we just finished publishing this module for the Equipped for Life Course.
Editor’s Note 12/15/20:We’ve expanded the conclusion to clarify how we use thought experiments in conversation.
Editor’s Note 12/11/20: We’ve changed the original adjective about the worldview we discuss here from “weird” to “unorthodox”, which has a less negative connotation.
Here’s the bad news up front: sometimes you’re going to get stuck in a conversation about abortion because the other person has a strange worldview. This is what happens, for example, when talking to someone who defends act utilitarianism or moral relativism. Their worldview justifies abortion, and also a number of really problematic things, and the only way through is to help them see that the problems in their position are too much to merit defending.
In other words, your goal is to wake them up from a bad worldview by showing them why it makes ethics a nightmare.
By way of example, let’s examine a comment responding to one of our podcasts that was brought to our attention by a listener. There is a very odd philosophical position lurking behind scientific-sounding language, so I’m going to clarify the position and show why it’s problematic.
As is our tradition at the end of the year, here is a list of the five most-read articles we wrote this year, as well as the five most-watched/heard podcasts from this year and the three most popular articles that were written before this year. The article analytics all came from Google Analytics.
