A Pastor’s Reflections was created in 2015 by Reverend W. Ross Blackburn, Rector of Christ the King, an Anglican Church in Boone, North Carolina, and longtime contributor to the Human Life Review. Now the feature, renamed Pastoral Reflections, will carry contributions from a variety of clerics and religious who, along with Rev. Blackburn, will meditate on abortion and other grave moral transgressions that not only hurt individuals but deform the culture and threaten religious liberty.

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Catechesis of Despair

  It is just another bleary January Monday morning. In my best internal Eeyore voice, I find myself saying “well, here we are again, my least favorite month of the year.” I could add any number of thoughts to that, all of them dreary: How...
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Celebrating Babies in Public Spaces

  By the time you read this, my local airline will have abandoned its “open seating” policy of letting people sit wherever they want as they board the plane. The money crunchers have decreed that there are greater profits in being an...
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The Charity of Speaking Truth against Relativism

  Pope Leo XIV addressed the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See on January 9th. He spoke forcefully about the need to defend the truth against manipulations which make language not a means of honestly engaging with our fellow man,...
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Holding Christmas Every Day

  Early in December of 2025, our youngest son and his wife welcomed their newborn son into their arms. Her pregnancy had been difficult. “How difficult?,” you ask. While carrying the baby, she passed kidney stones on multipl...
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Film Life

  Over the past few years, I have occasionally written in this space about films in which we see the persistence of pro-life concerns. These are worth noting, for the film industry, like most of our high culture, subsists within a largely...
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The Cost of Independence: A Christmas Meditation

    [This text has been slightly adapted from Rev. Blackburn’s Pastoral Reflections meditation published Dec. 22, 2017.]   And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger (Luke 2:12)....
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