#childblessed

Dear Gentle Reader*,

This is a “shout out” to Edward Short for honoring all Mothers from our first mother Eve, through Mother Mary, to his own Mother, and to the Mother of his daughters, and to each and every Mother, including myself, until the end of time.

In full disclosure, I Love Life. Because I Love Life, I am a faithful committed reader of The Human Life Review. Edward Short has written on the HLR blog a Lenten outreach to millennials and Gen X-ers whose attitudes are “Nowhere better captured than on TikTok. Collated under the hashtag #childfree, which has over 242 million views, thousands of women wonder why anyone would choose to have children and forgo their freedom to party, go on guilt-free girls’ nights and maximise their income . . . .”

Oh, Edward Short! That name is so familiar…….. I think I have a book by Edward Sshort. Searching here and there…. Aha!! Here it is!!!! Culture and Abortion.  Hmmm. Our culture….Previously, I have read When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?: A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question ( Charlotte Hays). Back to Logic 101... Define my terms. This quest sent me to my 2500 page dictionary which I had forgotten I had in my library to look up “culture”. “Culture” is a look at civilization for a particular time period. Yes, Hays book is a timeline for the particular period that begins in 1936 and continues until the present. And “culture” is also that which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc. This is the definition that’s apt for Edward Short’s work Culture and Abortion.

The author in Culture and Abortion says he sought “to see if some aspects of culture –which is to say works of poetry, history, criticism, fiction and the encyclicals of popes could help make sense of this life-destroying notion, though another and perhaps important purpose was to argue that in order to end the evil of abortion we need a revival of culture, true culture, not the travesty of culture that Arnold recommends. (Culture and Anarchy).

A list of the Chapters gives you a peek into this master work:

·      Anne Ridler and the Poetry of Life

·      What English Literature Would Be Like If Pro-Abortion

·      “Reaping the Rich Inheritance of Love”: Motherhood in Georgian England

·      Penelope Fitzgerald’s Life Story

·      J.J. Scarisbrick and the Pro-Life Special Relationship

·      Identity, Relationship and Walker Percy

·      William Wilberforce and the Fight for Life

·      Rose Hawthorne and the Communion of Saints

·      Teenage Daughters and the Great Work

·      Charles Dickens and the Cry of Life

·      Dickens, Chesterton and the Pro-Life Genius of Little Dorrit

·      Abortion and the Historians

Each chapter is Excellent! Each chapter is unique! Each chapter is inspired and inspiring! My three “faves” are Anne Ridler,

For a Child Expected

Lovers, whose lifted hands are candles in winter,

Whose gentle ways like streams in the easy summer,

Lying together

For secret setting of a child, love what they do.

Thinking they make that candle immortal, streams forever flow,

And yet do better than they know.

So the first flutter of a baby felt in the womb,

Its little signal and promise of riches to come……

Walker Percy has sent me to reading Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome,

 and Teenage Daughters dovetails with Hays When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?

Overall, the “take away” message—“the sense” of the author I’m hearing in Abortion and Culture is that Abortion is the opposite of a Love Life Ethic, a Love Life Affirming, a Love Life Reverencing system of beliefs from conception and over the life span until birth into eternal life. Abortion is the opposite of the Eternal Creation Elation; it becomes a practical atheism. Thus then  “a revival of culture, true culture”, is the revival of Christendom.

Thank you, Edward Short, in your role as spiritual watchman to awaken us to the shadow play of good v. evil and our desperate need to focus our vision on that reality while there is still a demographic of Life. From #childfree to #childblessed.

*Gentle Reader—Edward Short’s generous salutation in his HLR blog post