The periodic gathering of links folks have kindly passed on to me:

At Dawn Eden’s, a post about a crisis up in Toronto: a pregnancy center has been helping a mom carrying twins, one of whom has been diagnosed with spina bifida.

The mother cannot face this challenge and has booked to have a selective abortion of the spina bifida boy on February 2. If she goes through with it, the child will be aborted at 31½ weeks by Caesarean.

Yes, you read correctly. 31½ weeks. Abortion is legal and unrestricted in Canada until birth.

Aid to Women feels that if they can offer this mom a promise that a family will adopt the handicapped boy, she will carry him to term. They put out a call, including a mass e-mail, and have received interest from two families so far.

I received the e-mail and phoned the center to ask if they wanted me to put the request with their phone number (they don’t have a Web site) on my blog. Center director Ann Wilson asked that I not publish their phone number, as they are overwhelmed with interest from the e-mail. However, she did request that I ask readers to pray for the mother. While the mother is Christian and opposes abortion, she is very distressed at the thought of giving birth to a severely handicapped child, and she is thinking that perhaps it would be better for both the boy and her if he were killed before birth.

Please pray for the mother and her unborn child.

There are also ways to help financially. Go to Dawn’s for details.

Please pray for blogger/novice Gashwin Gomes’ father who has taken a turn for the worse. Gashwin has returned to India once again and would appreciate your prayers.

Don’t forget the West Coast Walk for LIfe, coming up this weekend.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s conversion and ordination have been covered by his local paper – the Greenville News (and remember that Fr. Dwight is a Bob Jones U. grad…) 

Catholic Exchange has started a new page dedicated to "personal productivity" with lots of contributers.

Fr. Guy of Shouts in the Piazza has an account of an event he attended at the UN at which a new journal, Oasis, dedicated to the challenges of living out the Christian faith in Arabic countries, was introduced. Cardinal Scola was one of those present and speaking. 

The website for Oasis. (You may have heard of it before – a few weeks ago it was announced that the General Audience talks would be published in Arabic on the site.)

John Allen also reports.

Nasr, the Islamic scholar, argued that the “greatest stumbling block” in dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims is a “tendency to expect everyone on the globe to follow the trajectory of development in the West.”

For example, Nasr said, many Westerners talk about the need for an “Islamic Reformation.” But, he asked, is that really desirable?

“How many people did Oliver Cromwell hang?” he asked provocatively. Instead, Nasr suggested, Westerners should allow Islam to follow “its own internal dynamic.”

{Rabbi} Singer was full of praise for Scola, at one point wistfully suggesting that United Nations should have held its own conclave and elected the Italian cardinal as Secretary General.

“Maybe you could succeed at redirecting its budgetary priorities towards their original purposes,” he said. “The 192 countries here could learn from what you’ve done [in fostering dialogue]. They’re trying to do it here, mostly to little avail.”

Two blog changes (that I know of):

Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic has moved

So has Bill Cork.