Praise Her in the Gates: Telling the Pro-Life Story, with Brian Kennedy

“The Gospel is not some vague palliative, it’s a man raised from the dead.” The Pro-Life Movement has, for several decades now, remembered the dead, principally those children lost to abortion, with a hope for a new culture of life raised from those tragedies. And yet the story of the Pro-Life Movement is primarily told by its enemies, who regularly reduce the movement to caricatures and sound-bites, leveling into a collection angry objections and hostile tactics. The story of the pro-life movement––both its past and its present unfolding into the future––has not really been told as a coherent and full narrative. And so my guest today and his collaborators have set out to chronicle America in the age of abortion and emphasize the response of the pro-life movement as an unparalleled model for social and political resistance. It is a work that seeks to reckon with our dead in obedience to the man raised from the dead.

Praise Her in the Gates – Dispatches for a Pro-Life Nation is a longform (multi-episode, multi-season) audio journal released on January 22, 2025. Its creator, the artist Brian Kennedy, joins me today to talk about the original work and what it offers to us, whether we count ourselves as members of the pro-life movement or not. It is a work arising from the Catholic imagination, with which things otherwise neglected or forgotten are perceived, revered, mourned, and praised.

Follow-up Resources:

• Lydwine Substack, home of Praise Her in the Gates (first episodes released January 25, 2025)
• “The Ghost Outside,” essay by Brian Kennedy
• “Vandals at the Golden Gate, Part One,” essay by Brian Kennedy
• “How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 1, with Tricia Bruce,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 2, with Tricia Bruce,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Mary O’Callaghan on Disability Selective Abortions,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.