The Indomitable Barbara Nicolosi Harrington Writes:

Dear Friend of the Culture of Life:

Here's a heads-up about an event I am coordinating through my new company Catharsis: The Story Lab and Azusa Pacific University.  

The event is called, "Communicating the Culture of Life: Media and Messaging Training for Medical Professionals."  It will be happening in October the two days before the Catholic Medical Association Conference which is happening this year in Southern California.  We are limiting the media training event to twenty people so there can be the opportunity for camera interviewing practice, and individual/ministry message crafting on all the vital life issues confronting us today.

The website and registration link is here.

If you know any pro-life doctors, nurses, hospital administrators or crisis pregnancy folks, please do forward on to them.  It will be practical and sublime, entertaining and highly informative, and provide the opportunity to meet 19 other wonderful pro-life medical professionals.

Thanks for anything you can do to help spread the word!  God bless -

Barbara

P.S.  (If you can't attend but would like to support the event, we could use the help so we can provide some scholarships to med students and student nurses.  Tax deductible checks can be sent to Azusa Pacific University at the address below with "Culture of Life Training" in the subject line.  Thanks!)

Barbara gets (and communicates with great force) that people primarily receive reality through art, story, song, and image in our culture rather than through syllogisms. A speech from a sympathetic character in a TV program, accompanied by swelling music, will often do more to move hearts and minds (for good or ill) than a thousand philosophy lectures.

This is not to say that Catholics should undertake learning about art and storytelling in order to create good propaganda.  Good art is not propaganda.  It is good art.  It tells the truth of things and trusts that the truth of things does not need our manipulative help in order to be seen.  Indeed, one of the marks of bad art, as Barbara insists, is that it tends to require ad campaigns that consist of "You should go see this because it's a Catholic or Christian film and we have to support it."  Nobody needs to be told to go see a good movie or a listen to a good piece of music.  You want to do it because it's good.  A work of art that requires we "support" it in the same spirit we have to eat our spinach is a bad work of art.

The good news is folks like Barbara are out there, helping to training up Christians to be good artists, not mere propagandists, in the service of the true, good, and beautiful.  If you can go to this conference or support somebody who wants to, you'll be doing a work of mercy for them and for the world.