Dear Friends of The Howard Center: Christmas and New Year Greetings!
May the peace and love of “the baby born in Bethlehem” be in your heart this season and throughout the year. I am pleased to share that excitement is building for The World Congress of Families IV, scheduled for Warsaw, Poland, in five months time!
I can also report on some of our confirmed speakers: Phillip Longman, author of the controversial book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity; Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus; sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands; bioethicist Nigel Cameron; economist Maria Sophia Aguirre; and pioneering legal scholars on marriage Bruce Hafen and Lynn Wardle. We also anticipate acceptances from Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, President of The Pontifical Council on the Family, and Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Both are already three-times veterans of past WCF meetings. Please consider joining us in Warsaw May 11-13! It will be a grand, history making event. Online registration is available at:
www.worldcongress.org.
I can report other good news from The Howard Center. My new book, Conjugal America: On the Public Purposes of Marriage, is winning much attention. As World Net Daily reports: “…Conjugal America seizes the current controversy over marriage as an opportunity to revitalize a necessary institution that has recently been abused and neglected – and reinstate it as the primary source of commitment and care in the modern world.”
A book length version of The Natural Family: A Manifesto – which I co-authored with Paul Mero – appears in early 2007. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition reports, “this family Manifesto is nothing short of a blueprint for western survival.”
Other Center books in the pipeline include John Howard’s Christianity: Lifeblood of America’s Free Society, 1620-1945 and Earhart Fellow Stephen Baskerville’s Taken Into Custody: The Politics of Fatherhood, Marriage and Family.
We’ve also awarded a Kohler Fellowship to Dr. Randy Wood of Lee University, who will write a new History of the Family in Western Civilization for use at colleges and universities.
Meanwhile, we have published in recent months ten new monographs in our Family in America series (including Capturing Other People’s Children: The New Bio-politics of Fertility and The Real Danger of Same-Sex Marriage) together with six new issues of Religion and Society Reports (including Behind the Homosexual Tsunami in Brazil).
In all this, we strive to be the leading source of fresh ideas and new strategies for affirmation and defense of the natural family, both nationally and globally. And we are making a difference. As family scholar Don Browning reports in his book Marriage and Modernization, “the small but influential Howard Center … is at the center of an emerging conservative religious and political world strategy on families.”
Our opponents single us out, as well. As The Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. reports: “Groups [opposed to our agenda] continue to claim that marriage benefits individuals, children and society…. Arguably the most prominent international meeting of opposition forces is the World Congress of Families.”
As the calendar year closes, we are in need of your special help. Mounting a global Congress puts extra stress on our budget. Please help us with a year-end gift, either for General Support or to help convene The World Congress of Families. Checks can be mailed to: The Howard Center, 934 North Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103. You can also donate instantly online with credit card or Paypal by clicking here:
www.profam.org/THC/thc_donation.htm or visiting us at
www.worldcongress.org. For gifts of $250 or more, I will be pleased to send you a personalized and signed copy of Conjugal America. In anticipation, I thank you. Godspeed!
Allan Carlson
President
P.S. We are in need of your special help today! Donations and gifts postmarked before January 1st are tax deductible for 2006.