Praying and Running

I have been praying the Rosary for several years now and I notice from time to time that things get just a little too routine. When this happens I feel like I miss the point of the prayer. On my run this morning I finished the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary and realized I hadn't been paying much attention to it. In fact, I finished it and it seemed as though I hadn't actually prayed. This is Lent and it is no time for zombie prayer! What to do? Pray it again and try harder to stay focused? Move on and try to get into some contemplative prayer? Just count it as a Rosary prayed and try again tomorrow? Then I thought of a new strategy. I would spend time summarizing, paraphrasing,  and analyzing each mystery before praying the prayers and then try to keep the fruit of that exercise in mind as I prayed the mystery. I have no doubt that this technique is not unique to me. If the truth were known, I probably read or heard about it somewhere but I can't really say when or where.

Are we really watching this fight? The fight between an inalienable right granted to us by our Creator and the new "right to health insurance" granted to us by our government. Worse still, it is only being called a "right to health insurance". That is not even what this fight is about. Instead, there is a certain political faction that is trying to trick us into thinking that birth control is health care. Not only that but, they are trying to make us believe that health care is incomplete without artificial birth control and abortion inducing drugs. What this fight actually comes down to is a fight between the inalienable right of free expression of religion and the right to methods and drugs that have existed for only about 50 or 60 years. It is a fight between a right that is truly ours as part of our very nature and a  "right" to demand that someone else pay for our lifestyle choices. Because anyway you cut it birth control is a lifestyle choice.

I read Humanae Vitae this weekend. If you are unfamiliar with this document it is a papal encyclical written by Pope Paul VI in 1968. The document addresses the problem of artificial birth control in the context of modern society and applies the Church's Traditional teaching on the matter. When it comes to current events involving birth control and the teachings of the Catholic Church you don't have to look far to find people saying things like "it's none of their business", "why doesn't the Church move in to the 21st century", "what does an old celibate guy know about sex anyway", "the Church just wants to tell women what they can do with their bodies" etc, etc ad nauseum. Sadly, it is not only people who are outside of the Church saying this but Catholics themselves often express like sentiments. I think the most common objections to the Churches teaching are answered in Section 17 "Consequences of Artificial Methods&q