A battle within the battle: fighting for life, in a spirit of love

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew about the value of unity and organization to nonviolent public witness. His book Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story is about the 1955-56 boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in an effort to break segregation. Ultimately, the boycott worked, though it took a year.

Impatience and violence would have undermined the effort. In his book, King outlined some aspects of nonviolence that were critical to the Montgomery effort.

  • Nonviolent resistance isn’t for cowards. It is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. King pointed out that the weekly mass meetings associated with the boycott always included prayer, and that ministers took the lead exhorting participants to Christian love and nonviolence.
  • Nonviolence does not seek to defeat or humiliate an opponent, but rather to win friendship and understanding.
  • Nonviolence is directed against the forces of evil rather than the persons doing evil.
  • Willingness to accept suffering without retaliation is crucial. King frequently repeated the theme that unearned suffering is redemptive.
  • Have faith in the future and in God’s Providence; “the universe is on the side of justice.”
  • Avoid not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. Motivation must be love, not hate.

All those things ring true where the right to life is concerned, except that the last item – avoiding internal “violence of spirit” – gives me pause. Abortion kills children. The abortion industry fights to prevent accountability for outcomes to women’s health. It wants my money. It has destroyed my confidence in the medical arts, as I see abortion apologists at the state house fight conscience protections for health care professionals who choose not to participate in abortion.

I can’t pretend to view the landscape calmly. There is real urgency to the call to build a culture of life. To do so with conviction and persuasiveness, without giving way to anger – the “violence of spirit” of which Dr. King wrote – is a challenge I’ll probably have to face every day of my life.

Healing, serving, thriving: Melissa Ohden on the Abortion Survivors Network

Excerpted from a post at Braided Trails.

By the time Melissa Ohden wrote her book You Carried Me, she had already spent several years sharing her story publicly. That didn’t come easily to her – “I’m most comfortable behind the scenes, to be perfectly honest” – but she knew that speaking out was the only way to come to terms with being an abortion survivor.

Along the way, she found that her experience wasn’t unique. She connected with other people who were born alive after attempts were made to abort them. She later founded the Abortion Survivors Network, where she now serves as CEO. By 2022, nearly 600 people had reached out to ASN. Four years later, that number has doubled.

The network includes not only abortion survivors, but their family members as well, including mothers who gave birth after abortion attempts failed. “We offer healing support,” she says. “We are the only organization that has an online community not just for survivors, but for women whose abortions didn’t go the way they planned. We have a community for adoptive families as well.”

For more information about the Abortion Survivors Network and the resources cited in this interview, go to abortionsurvivors.org, and look for ASN’s posts on social media. 

Melissa joined me on a video call recently to talk about ASN’s mission, the people it serves, and the publication of its newest resources.

Head to Braided Trails on Substack to read the complete interview.

A Pilgrimage of Discovery: Finding Flannery

Finding Flannery: A Travel Memoir Exploring the Mystique of Flannery O’Connor and the Legacy She Has Left Us All (En Route Books and Media LLC, 2025) by Christina Brajkovich, Karen Anne Mahoney, and Roxane B. Salonen

A book with three authors can be disjointed, but Finding Flannery flows smoothly from one chapter to the next. Within each chapter are sections with three first-person narratives, and I can’t help but salute the editor who wove voices together so deftly. Each writer – Christina Brajkovich, Karen Anne Mahoney, and Roxane B. Salonen – adds a different dimension to what is more than a travel memoir.

One needn’t be a fan of the often-difficult fiction of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) to appreciate this book. If anything, as the authors go to Georgia to discover O’Connor’s milieu, they illuminate her gifts and Catholic faith in a way to inspire discovery, or re-discovery, of her work.

While the three women may have begun their journey intending to explore what they call the O’Connor “mystique,” their account of traveling to Georgia is rich in itself. The American South was unfamiliar territory for three Catholic writers coming from the north. They eased into it as they drove, enjoying hospitality from a fellow writer before making brief pilgrimages to the renowned Abbey of Gethsemane (where Thomas Merton found his spiritual home as Fr. Louis) and the motherhouse of the Sisters of Loretto, both in Kentucky. 

Their ultimate destination was Andalusia, the farm where O’Connor lived in Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor wrote piercing fiction (“…the oddities of our world with a heavy side of grace”) and perceptive essays while maintaining a lively flow of letters with many correspondents. Eventually, she developed lupus, a disease which gradually limited her mobility and strength. Her disciplined habits, which included daily Mass, sustained her as she kept writing to the end of her life.

Finding Flannery is filled with curiosity and humble openness to the unfamiliar, with observations and reflections about O’Connor’s work and legacy conveyed with clarity and appreciation. The three authors don’t shy away from problematic aspects of O’Connor’s life and work. They  recognize Andalusia’s flawed human being, a woman who shared their faith in God despite differences in time, place, and experience.  

The book would have been incomplete without the travelers’ accounts of their own lives and faith journeys, offering insight into what drew them to Andalusia in the first place.

Every page of Finding Flannery is informed by humble faith, gratitude for good fellowship, and deep respect for the craft of writing. Authors Brajkovich, Mahoney, and Salonen have left me open to approaching O’Connor’s fiction once again, this time with a better understanding of the woman who wrote it and the place from which it came. 

This post is shared to the Open Book blog linkup, found monthly at Carolyn Astfalk’s My Scribbler’s Heart and at catholicmom.com.