Welcome to Church Life Today, a production of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. I'm your host, Leonard DeLorenzo.Do you want to know when human life begins? And how to explain that to other people? That's what I'm going to ask our guest today, Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah Medical School. In 2015, Dr. Condic was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life, a distinguished group of physicians, scientists, and theologians from the international community whose mission it is to study questions and issues regarding the promotion and defense of human life from an interdisciplinary perspective.Three years later, in 2018, Dr. Condic received a Presidential appointment to the National Board of Science, the oversight body for the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on the development and regeneration of the nervous system, spinal cord repair and regeneration, and embryonic development, while she cultivates a strong commitment to public education and science literacy. In June 2019, she delivered the St. Albert Award Lecture at the annual convention of the Society of Catholic Scientists.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

Roy Petifils is a licensed counselor at Pax Renewal Center in Lafayette Louisiana. Roy studied ministry and spirituality at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and holds a masters in mental health counseling from the University of Louisiana. Roy has worked with youth and young adults for more than 20 years as minster, as teacher, school administrator, school counselor, and now as a counselor in private practice. Roy speaks all over the country and he hosts a popular podcast called Today's Teenager. His most recent book "Helping Teens with Stress, Anxiety, and Depression" is available from Ave Maria Press and today he joins us on Church Life Today.Helping Teens With Stress, Anxiety, and Depression - https://www.avemariapress.com/search/?q=roy+petitfils------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

In 1912, a priest named Fr. John Francis Noll worked up a plan to evangelize on a broad scale and respond to some of the pressing issues of his day facing the Church. His plan came into print as the Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly, which has been in print ever since. In 1915, as circulation and revenue grew from this and soon-to-be other publications, Fr. Noll innovated again, this time founding the Our Sunday Visitor Institute, the sole mission of which was to distribute the profits from Our Sunday Visitor’s publications to religious, educational, and charitable projects of the growing Church in the United States.More than 100 years later, this legacy of the man who would later become Archbishop Noll has funded more than $75 million through grants to support and enrich the life of the church in the United States. Today, the current President of the Our Sunday Visitor Institute, Jason Shanks, joins me to talk about the new strategic vision for the institute a century after its founding.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

Do you know how to talk about “gender” today? Does the Church? We might find ourselves caught up in language because we don’t know what to think about this stuff or how to think about it. What about feminism, women’s empowerment, or the question of identity? Pastoral responses, education, formation all seem to be hindered by our lack of competency and confidence. That’s why the work and witness of Abigail Favale is so important, so liberating in its own right. She’s written about her conversion to Catholicism in a new book, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion. Her articles have been going viral online lately because she talks in substantive, clear, and compelling ways about sex, gender, contraception, feminism, abortion, and the importance of the body. She’s a scholar who communicates clearly and accessible, and what she’s communicating about is precisely what many of us feel incompetent or unconfident to talk about ourselves. She’s helping us, immensely. Dr. Favale is the director of the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University, and she’s also a Life and Dignity Writing Fellow with our own Notre Dame Office of Human Dignity and Life Initiatives. RESOURCESSex and Symbol Article- https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/sex-and-symbol/Into the Deep Book- https://www.amazon.com/dp/1532605013/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_PdT0CbPD8ZDQJ ------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

As Leonard DeLorenzo has mentioned before on this show, the McGrath Institute for Church Life is hosting its annual Lent-to-Easter lecture series this year on C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. We’ve welcomed two of this year’s lecturers to our show in previous weeks, and now we host a third.Dr. Rebekah Lamb is a lecturer in theology and the arts at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. She is one of the four principal faculty members in the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts. Her lecture in the Chronicles of Narnia series was on the book, “The Silver Chair.” ------RESOURCESMcGrath Narnia Resources - mcgrath.nd.edu/narniaDavid Fagerberg Interview - https://soundcloud.com/user-178289668/2019-february-16Michael Ward Interview - https://soundcloud.com/user-178289668/2019-april-6------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

Leonard DeLorenzo is joined today by Dr. John Cavadini, Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life and professor of theology at Notre Dame. He's here to talk with us about the tradition of Marian Processions and May Crownings, because he and the McGrath Institute are hosting one that you're invited to next Saturday, May 4th at 10:30 a.m. beginning at Notre Dame's Grotto. ------RESOURCESNotre Dame’s May Crowning information – www.mcgrath.nd.edu/maycrowning. ------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

Our guest today is Obianuju Ekeocha: founder and president of Culture of Life Africa, an initiative dedicated to the promotion and defense of the African values of the sanctity of life, beauty of marriage, blessings of motherhood and the dignity of family life. Ekeocha is the author of “Target Africa: Ideological Neo-colonialism of the Twenty-first Century.” She has spoken before the United Nations & the Canadian Parliament. She’s also appeared on the BBC’s “Focus on Africa.” A practicing biomedical scientist, Ekeocha holds a Masters degree in biomedical science from the University of East London and a Bachelors degree in microbiology from the University of Nigeria. In March 2019 she delivered the annual human dignity lecture for the Office of Life and Human Dignity in our own McGrath Institute for Church Life. The title “The Primacy of Reproductive Health and Rights and the Rise of Ideological Neo-colonialism.” You can find the video of that lecture at mcgrath.nd.edu/life.------RESOURCES2019 Human Dignity Lecture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0fuTT-bQqs&feature=youtu.be------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

As I mentioned several weeks ago on this show, each year, the McGrath Institute for Church Life hosts a lecture series that runs through Lent and Easter, which invites people everywhere to join in a communal reading of a spiritual work for the liturgical seasons. For this year’s series, we are focusing on C. S. Lewis’s beloved children’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m so pleased to welcome today one of our lecturers to this series, Rev. Dr. Michael Ward, who is as of last year a Catholic priest and who comes to us from the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow in Blackfriars Hall and Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion. Fr. Ward is the author or editor of several books, including “Heresies and How to Avoid Them”, “The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis”, and “The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens”, which was made into a one-hour documentary by the BBC. But it was of another of his books that Walter Hooper, the esteemed literary adviser to the estate of C.S. Lewis, lauded as unsurpassed in showing a comprehensive knowledge of and depth of insight regarding C.S. Lewis’s works. That book is the masterful, persuasive, and illuminating “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis”. He joins us today to talk about C.S. Lewis, Narnia, theology and the arts, and more.------RESOURCESDavid Fagerberg Episode on Chronicles of Narnia - https://soundcloud.com/user-178289668/2019-february-16Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801047498/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_6JnMCbJYYFE66The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521711142/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_X9nMCbT6QG3S5The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1414339658/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_2-nMCb6R6434EPlanet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis - https://www.amazon.com/dp/019973870X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_s.nMCbR9GPCT6------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioChurch 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.

In late February, Pope Francis called the heads of the national conference of bishops from around the world to the Vatican to address the sexual abuse and leadership crisis wracking the church and the faithful. From this side of news reports, it is something hard to know what really happened and what comes next. So we invited someone who was there to join us today to help us learn more. Kim Daniels is the associate director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, at Georgetown University. She is also a Member of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, to which she was appointed in 2016 by Pope Francis. She joins us today to talk about the meeting in February, about reform in the church and what we can look for in terms of next steps.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.

We welcome Sarah Shutrop, Director of Campus Ministry at Immaculate Heart Academy in Bergen County, New Jersey. Sarah is a graduate of Rutgers University, where she studies English and Political Science, and she holds a masters degree in Theology from The University of Notre Dame. While there she focused on moral and systematic theology, she is here with us today to talk about what she is seeing in the young people she works within the High School setting, and to reflect on her mission as a Catholic campus minister at a rather prestigious Catholic High School.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDSubscribe to the Podcast:iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloudChurch 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.