Should we create children with three parents?

What about creating sperm from female stem cells to the end of creating a child with two biological mothers?

Is it ethical to incubate a growing baby in an artificial womb? Could a womb like that end the perceived need for abortion?

These questions might seem like science fiction, and indeed they were when Aldous Huxley, an agnostic, published his dystopian novel Brave New World nearly one hundred years ago. Huxley wove a fictitious world in which progeny were designed and grown in laboratories, children were raised by the state rather than in families, promiscuity was encouraged and monogamy considered grotesque, and the government endorsed self-medication with a “harmless” drug that kept its users in a placated state.

Yet these are the questions up for debate in today’s public square, as evidenced by a recent debate hosted by The Free Press: “Is Designing Babies Unethical—Or a Moral Imperative?”

All things considered, one has to wonder if Huxley wasn’t more a prophet than a novelist.

Technological Dystopia

The explosion of new technologies and applications is truly exciting, but with this exciting potential comes the responsibility to reflect on its meaning for the human community. We must refrain from rushing down an unexamined path. Medicine in general, and reproductive medicine in particular, are coming to be defined not as the restoration of human health, but as the optimization of human well-being. No longer are the goals of medicine strictly “medical.” Researchers pursue drugs for cognitive and physical enhancements that not only improve our functioning on the bell curve but seek to redefine the curve entirely.

As we continue to expand the umbrella of medicine, we are slowly but surely redefining what it means to be human. We have reached an era in which we cannot afford the naiveté of believing that science and medicine are value-neutral; they will always be tools subject to the values of those who wield them. We can no longer afford to leave the morality of new technologies and procedures to the discernment of those fascinated by their possibility or to those who may reap economic or therapeutic benefits from them. These procedures increasingly shape not only the individuals who employ them, but future generations of humanity.

The New(est) Eugenics

Along with a postmodern decline in reverence for God has come a lost sense of the sanctity and dignity of the human person. How can that which is merely matter be sacred? How can we speak of “violating” the purely mechanical? As C. S. Lewis so presciently grasped, the attempt to wield ultimate control over the material aspects of nature has given us the impression that we both can and ought to control all aspects of our own nature: “The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.” The more we use technologies that give us access to control over who we are and what kinds of children we bear, the more we will exercise that control. It seems we can’t help ourselves.

What’s left after we decide to employ these technologies is to decide how.

Read the rest at The Public Discourse

AMDG,
Samantha

I also felt a deep sense of peace in the Spirit-ordained timing of these tapings. In October, we taped on the 13th—the anniversary of the day the sun danced at Fatima. In May, the taping was also on the 13th, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Sr. Lucia, one of the Fatima visionaries, said that, “the final battle will be over marriage and the family.” I do not know whether we are in the end times—no one does. But I do believe that mothers are the heart of the home. Whether it plays out in dehumanizing biotechnologies or the quiet temptations of our hearts, the spiritual battle for our souls and for our children is real.

While I’m not someone who focuses a lot of time or attention on spiritual warfare, I think the adage is true: “The best defense is a good offense.” The battle is as simple as allowing God’s sanctifying grace to transform us from what we are into what we were made to be.

That’s what I set out to do in The Bellbind Letters: to create a literary examination of conscience that frees the reader to respond more fully to that sanctifying grace. That’s what we discussed in the first episode, which you can view here:

Watch the Episode

Below, you’ll find the written responses I prepared in advance. While much of it made it into the show, there are several tidbits you’ll find only here.

I will be sending out the link and expanded responses for Part 2 here on Substack later this summer.

AMDG,
Samantha

The Spiritual Battle of Motherhood

Discussing my book The Bellbind Letters

1. Why revisit The Screwtape Letters for our time? How is your book different?

The Screwtape Letters is timeless. There’s a reason why, nearly 100 years later, it still tops the spiritual classics charts at #1. My husband and I try to revisit it every year during Lent. It is such a brilliant examination of conscience in literary form.

While it remains timeless and has become, in some ways, even more relevant now than when Lewis originally penned it, the main character—the “patient”—is a man and a newly converted Christian. The particularity of this character lends itself to the exploration of temptations specific to this context.

The usefulness of Lewis’s literary device extends to the whole of the spiritual life. My husband and I sometimes use the phrase, “I think that’s Screwtape talking,” as a shorthand to lovingly challenge one another.

I wrote my first copycat Screwtape letter for our local Catholic Women’s Conference. They asked for a testimony, but what kept circling in my mind were all the reasons that get in our way. A “case of the ‘too’s,” we call it. So, that’s what I wrote. (It is still on their website in its original form, and an edited version appears in the book as Letter 4).

In any case, it unleashed something in me. I began keeping notes when I faced my own temptations, or when I heard something in women’s groups that others were struggling with. I wanted to unmask the intricacies of these clever lies, to trace the way in which these temptations deceive us. When we trace a lie to its source, it becomes that much easier to resist.

Where Lewis’s book deals primarily with cultural temptations with a hint of the relational, mine reverses that in a way that I think is appropriate for the feminine heart. The Bellbind Letters details the intimacy of relational temptations with a side of the cultural.

2. Why has this epistolary format been so impactful? Why revisit it now?

Lewis’s format is so enduring because fiction is a disarming mirror. Fiction teaches us empathy and ignites our imagination, allowing us to more fully and emotively embrace and embody truths beyond mere intellectual assent. It helps us travel the long distance from head to heart.

While the examination of conscience is an indispensable tool, it can sometimes be difficult to look at a list of sins or vices and translate that into what’s playing out in our lives. When we read a book like Screwtape or Bellbind, we are allowing the grace of the Holy Spirit to pour into this whole new dimension of our personhood. When that sanctifying grace baptizes our imagination, it penetrates in a new way, perhaps bypassing some of the defensive walls we’ve erected.

As for the timing, I believe there is more to be said specifically for a woman’s heart as well as on motherhood and the family—especially post Sexual Revolution.

3. Can you tell us about the symbolism behind the character names?

Bellbind is the name of a pernicious weed that I have battled in my garden season after season. It has these deceptively lovely white flowers that you see on the cover of the book. What it does is creep through your garden and wind its tendrils around your crops so that you can’t pull it out by its roots without harming them. It chokes out the good plants, stealing nutrients and reducing crop yields by up to 50%. It also lurks. (As an aside, my computer has crashed 3 times while typing this section. Hmm… Sts. Isadore, Claire, and Carlo, pray for us!) With most weeds, the goal is to remove the entire root, but when you break bellbind roots, it doesn’t get weaker. It multiplies. It grows more heads, like the mythical Hydra. It creeps and spreads its rhizome up to ten feet below the surface, and can be dormant for years before reappearing to decimate your garden once more. So wicked!

When I learned about the boomslang snake, I fell in love with the symbolism. Boomslang is an African tree snake that is so venomous, antivenom alone cannot save you. The only way to survive its bite is with a full blood transfusion. In order to survive this snake, someone has to sacrifice their blood for you.

4. C.S. Lewis described the process of taking on this demonic persona as spiritually draining and costly. Did you have a similar experience?

I’m not sure what it says about me, but no, I did not. I suspect part of the reason why must be because Lewis didn’t have the benefit of receiving The Screwtape Letters as a reader. I knew going into the drafting process how powerfully edifying these letters could be because I had benefitted so much spiritually from what Lewis has given us. Being able to see these temptations playing out makes them so much easier to resist, and seeing the force of opposition against good and holy things—against motherhood, the Rosary, Our Lady, Mass, Scripture—precisely because they are so good and holy throws such a stark spotlight on how powerful the graces are that come from these gifts that Christ has given. Seeing this was a powerful reminder to choose those things when it gets hard.

5. What do you hope readers gain from The Bellbind Letters?

I hope that the readers come to a deeper awareness of the spiritual movements in their lives, but also to see themselves and their own temptations with a greater sense of compassion. Often, we give so much grace to others but harbor such shame when it comes to our own human failings. The trouble with that is that it is a form of pride. we need to have patience with our own littleness and, like St. Therese, lift our arms to Jesus and ask him to pick us up when we fall. The most successful Christian isn’t one who never falls. We all fall. The most successful Christian is the one who never tires of resting in Jesus for the grace that we all need and that he dispenses so freely.

As of the Feast of Pope St. Paul VI (a fitting date), I can officially announce that my next two books will be coming to you from Ignatius Press!

I’ll share titles once they become official. For now, I can tell you that the next book to come out will be a motherhood devotional rooted in theology of the body, a way to pray through the deeply physical realities of this vocation. This is the project I hinted at in this note (This quotation made it into the proposal. I owe you, !):

The second, a Christian guide to biotech, rooted in the theological anthropology of the Church, will follow a year later. (As always, newsletter subscribers will be the first to know exact details once I receive them from the publisher.) Here’s a little teaser:

Both hinge on the quotation that is my most-liked note to date (click to read in full):

And this quotation from Pope Leo as quoted by :

Just a little taste to whet your literary appetite. Raise a glass with me.

Okay, that’s enough celebrating. Time to get to work.

I cannot overstate how excited I am to get to work on these projects, and I plan to keep you updated as they unfold. In the spirit of my last book, however, some thinning is in order.

Making space for these good fruits requires thinning out competing fruits; like my peach trees, my branches can only support so many at once. Brave New Us is already on summer hiatus and will remain so. In the last episode, I spoke about pivoting to a season of rootedness and invited you to join me in the garden via YouTube. I might still sneak in a garden tour or two, but with the advent of this book deal, that rootedness will take the form of words on the page instead.

This newsletter will also see some changes, shifts I am excited about making. First, the paywall will be removed. While my gratitude to those of you who support this work financially cannot be overstated, I have always felt uneasy about the idea of creating a barrier to these topics.

Paid subscriptions have been off as I’ve been mulling over how to proceed. Many of you have communicated that you subscribe to support the podcast and newsletter, and not necessarily for any of the current “benefits.” To that end, I will be switching back to a PBS model, ala The Pillar: this work is free for you to enjoy. If you believe it’s worth paying for, that option is available to you.

Subscribe now

If you were just here for the paid benefits, now is the time to downgrade your subscription to “free.” No hard feelings! I’m just glad you’re here.

I am so excited to bring you these books. While that means scaling back here a bit, I am also excited to show up here in a new way. Here’s what you can expect:

• Twice-monthly newsletters from me—one devotional, one bioethics update

• Links to any outside articles I write and/or new interviews

• Updates with speaking events announcements like when the next podcast season will drop and book progress check-ins

AMDG,
Samantha

Brave New Us

Still on hiatus but be on the lookout for a bonus episode on Magnifica Humanitas, coming soon!

Articles + Interviews

• This conversation with Vanessa at EWTN’s Catholic Connection was so lively. We covered a broad range of topics—very on brand for this post!

• I’ll be sending out a few posts on my visit to EWTN this summer, but for now, here are the links to the two episodes we taped on May 13, Feast of Our Lady of Fatima:

  • Episode 1, on the spiritual battles of motherhood

  • Episode 2, on the hidden connection between soil and soul

From the Author’s Desk

Devotional: 10,000 words drafted

Biotech: 8,000 words completed, approximately 47,000 more books to read for research

But wouldn’t the word be better if we could give gifts that actually nourish people?

Not just entertain them for a few minutes. Not just add to the pile of things already cluttering the house. But genuinely strengthen them in their vocation and interior life?

Motherhood today can feel strangely disorienting. We are surrounded by more conveniences than ever before, and yet so many women I know feel spiritually depleted, intellectually isolated, physically overwhelmed, and longing for something deeper than productivity hacks and self-care slogans.

I think part of the reason is that contemporary culture has become profoundly uncomfortable with dependence, limits, rootedness, and the body itself—all the very things motherhood forces us to encounter daily.

To mother another human being is to live constantly in the reality of creatureliness. You cannot fully optimize it. You cannot entirely control it. Love keeps interrupting your plans. The vulnerable keep making claims on you. Your body matters. Time matters. Presence matters.

And despite what our culture often suggests, I do not think this makes motherhood smaller than other work. Instead, motherhood reveals something essential about what it means to be human.

That conviction sits underneath every book I’ve written, even the ones that look very different on the surface.

So if you are still looking for a meaningful Mother’s Day gift, I thought I’d share a few of them here. Each is a companion for a different season of motherhood and spiritual life.

The Bellbind Letters exists because I have always loved The Screwtape Letters and have long thought mothers needed something similar written particularly for them—and written from a distinctly Catholic imagination.

Lewis was brilliant at exposing spiritual warfare through satire. He understood that evil often works not through dramatic wickedness, but through distraction, distortion, confusion, vanity, comfort, and small compromises accumulated slowly over time.

But I increasingly found myself wanting a version that wrestled more directly with the particular spiritual pressures facing mothers and families now.

The contemporary world places extraordinary strain on attention, embodiment, family life, and even our understanding of what it means to be human. And mothers stand very near the center of that battle because mothers remain guardians of things our culture often undervalues: dependence, vulnerability, continuity, memory, incarnation, and home.

So The Bellbind Letters became my attempt to explore spiritual warfare in an age of biotechnology, digital immersion, disembodiment, and endless distraction—but through a deeply Catholic lens.

Not merely “Christian morality” in the abstract, but a deeply sacramental vision of reality. One where bodies matter, meals matter, birth matters, ritual matters, and grace enters the world through physical things. A world where the home is not spiritually insignificant, motherhood is not peripheral to civilization, and the battle for the family is not merely political, but profoundly spiritual.

(Author’s note: I was also particularly pleased with the prose and amazed by the alliteration I was able to include on this one.)

Purchase The Bellbind Letters

Grow Where You’re Planted is a practical gardening guide filled with spiritual reflections that were born in the garden with my hands in the dirt.

Contemporary life trains us to live as though we are disembodied minds floating above creation. We spend enormous amounts of time in artificial environments, mediated through screens, detached from seasons, weather, soil, limits, and dependence on God’s provision.

Gardening interrupts that illusion.

You cannot force growth. You cannot control the weather. You cannot rush a season God designed to unfold slowly.

Grow Where You’re Planted is ultimately a book about recovering wonder in ordinary life and learning to receive our limits not as punishments, but as invitations into communion with God, creation, and one another.

And perhaps that is one of the great callings of mothers in this cultural moment: not merely to consume the world as it is, but to cultivate places where life can still take root and flourish.

Purchase Grow Where You're Planted

We are living through a moment where nearly every limit of the human person is being reframed as a problem to overcome. Fertility becomes a burden. Aging becomes a defect. Dependence becomes humiliation. The body becomes raw material for self-creation rather than something received with meaning and purpose.

And mothers experience the pressure of those ideas very intensely because motherhood ties us so concretely to reality, biology, time and vulnerability.

We are sold the lie that “happily ever after” is synonymous with a life of pleasure and ease, when, in truth, it is just the opposite: true love demands sacrifice rather than self-optimization.

I wanted to write a book that helped women see that their discomfort with modern motherhood narratives was not irrational or reactionary. Much of what we call “progress” has come with enormous spiritual and cultural costs, particularly for family life.

But I also did not want to write a nostalgic manifesto pretending the past was perfect. My hope was to recover a richer and more humane vision of motherhood—one rooted in the Christian understanding of the person as embodied, relational, and created for communion. That vision—the vision the Church has articulated for 2,000 years—is exactly the vision presented in Reclaiming Motherhood, ancient wisdom applied to our temporal moment. (These are in short supply on Amazon, but if you don’t mind a shipping delay, you can order signed copies directly from me by replying to this email).

Purchase Reclaiming Motherhood

I wrote Mama Prays during a season when my spiritual life felt very small by the standards I once imagined mattered.

My prayer was interrupted constantly. I was tired all the time. I rarely finished a spiritual book. Silence was hard to come by, and even when the house was technically quiet, my mind often wasn’t.

I think many mothers quietly carry the fear that they are failing spiritually because their lives no longer resemble the conditions where contemplation seems easiest. But motherhood has increasingly convinced me that God is not waiting for us somewhere outside ordinary life. He is here, in the hiddenness of it.

In the laundry room. At the kitchen sink. In the rocking chair at 2 a.m.

The vocation of motherhood forces us into dependence in a way our culture deeply resists. It confronts us with our limits, our neediness, our inability to control outcomes. And yet Christianity begins precisely there—not in self-sufficiency, but in surrender.

So this devotional was never meant to be impressive. It was meant to accompany women trying to remain rooted in prayer while living very embodied, interrupted lives.

Purchase Mama Prays

PS If you loved any of these books, please please leave an Amazon review! They help authors (and readers) so, so much.

I’d love to ask for your prayers as I travel to Alabama next week to film at EWTN studios.

I think it is no coincidence that my first taping there was October 13, the day the sun danced, and I will be back to film the next two episodes on May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Sr. Lucia, Fatima visionary, revealed that the final battle will be over marriage and the family. Mothers are the heart of the home, and therefore central to that battle.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

I will send links to the episodes when they become available.

And speaking of links, here are my latest interviews if you’re interested:

• Messy But Marian: How to be Human in an Artificial World

• Catholic Homeschool Parents Podcast: God, Multiply Me

• Salt and Light Radio Review: not an interview, but a rave review of Grow Where You’re Planted that gives a fantastic look inside the book and does a great job highlighting the various features and extras—which are many, in case you’re on the fence ;)

And here are links to the last few episodes of Brave New Us for this season. I’ll be quietly working on some exciting new projects this summer, very behind-the-scenes work (which is actually my favorite way to work).

I can’t wait to share the news with you when the time comes. For now, please enjoy the fantastic interviews that wrapped this season:

• Made Good: Making Peace with the Body with a Catholic Nutritionist (this book also makes an amazing Mother’s Day gift!

• Your Uterus or Mine? How Transplantation is Changing the Face of Reproductive Medicine

• Touching Grass (a preview of my audiobook, which is narrated by yours truly)

Finally, this quote from the Vatican is my most loved Note here on Substack EVER. Definitely worth resharing here:

It may or may not be central to that project I’ll be working on this summer ;)

AMDG,

Samantha

We debate health-care policy, argue about insurance systems, and spend billions on supplements, medications, and biohacking trends; meanwhile, we ignore one of the most powerful and accessible tools for restoring human health: we’ve stopped growing our own food.

Less than a century ago, our food wasn’t in grocery stores. It was in homes, in larders, and in gardens. Today, many Americans don’t even know how to cook for themselves, let alone grow or preserve; we rely instead on premade, ultra-processed options or takeout.

Meanwhile, industrial agriculture is jeopardizing our ability to grow anything at all with its reliance on pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers that degrade our once-fertile land. Worldwide, synthetic fertilizers and other agricultural runoff have contributed to over 700 “dead zones” where once-thriving marine ecosystems can no longer support life. Our pollinators are disappearing. By some estimates, the United States has just decades of topsoil left if industrial agriculture goes left unchecked.

But beyond the environmental impact, this has led to a full-scale human health crisis.

The same system that has depleted our soil has also depleted our food. The same practices that maximize yield have stripped nutrients, increased our exposure to toxins, and contributed to the rise of chronic disease, metabolic dysfunction, neurodegeneration, and cancer. We cannot separate the health of our bodies from the health of the land. A tomato pulled warm from the vine contains more than nutrients—it restores a relationship modern life has nearly severed.

If we want to make America healthy again, we have to start at the root—literally.

Read the rest at Crisis

The more I grow in my own backyard, the more convinced I become that gardening is not a luxury—it is a practical way families can reclaim both health and independence.

Are you growing any of your own food this year—or hoping to start? I’d love to hear what you’re planting (or what’s holding you back) in the comments.

Leave a comment

AMDG,

Samantha

PS If you’d like help getting started, I wrote Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard to help families cultivate food, restore their health, and steward soil and soul alike.

Their vibrant colors remind us of the life and beauty that await as the warmth of the coming season eclipses the darkness of winter. The chickens know it, too, as we can tell by the many eggs we’re beginning to collect each day.

In the heat and light of the sun, we are all a little more active outdoors, taking note of the rapid changes as trees leaf out and the early bearing peaches and cherries start setting fruit. It’s also time for the many spring chores that will set the stage for the garden’s main show of abundance come the heat of summer. Irrigation needs fixing. Garden beds need amending. Paths beg to be re-mulched, lest our walking space and our growing space become indistinguishable.

In the midst of all this preparation, it is good to remember just what all this work is for. After all, we could simply make the drive to our local grocery store and have our pick of produce right away—no tending, no weeding, no pests munching away at the fruits of our labors.

Why do we put ourselves through all of this? What is the point of growing all our own food, or even any of it at all?

For our family, health has always been at the forefront of our motivations. Cultivating a non-toxic, organic growing space was important to me, even before I knew how depleted our soil was, before I felt my own vitality slipping away in the grasp of chronic disease.

The advice now is to down handfuls of supplements, buy this product because the earth is tired and can no longer give us the nutrients she was meant to. Never mind the intricate mysteries that make nutrients bioavailable in nature’s lovely packaging. And so we keep on with our monoculture farming of the minority of crops that can survive the thousand-mile journey from field to our plates. We douse them in synthetic fertilizer and pour on the poisons that purge the pests, never mind what it does to our pollinators. We may have banned DDT, but can we truly say we aren’t still headed for a silent spring?

While we hope for our system to change, we know that our health begins here in our home. It grows not only out of our soil, but out of the time we spend with our hands in the earth and our faces toward the sun.

Of course, we all know that there may come a day when we don’t see abundance in the grocery store and instead survey empty shelves. Shipping delays, a fragile supply chain, or some as-of-yet unknown disaster might be rare. But does that mean that we can take the availability of food—or perhaps more to the point, its affordability—for granted?

The things we call progress always come at a price—some sacrifice or another that we have now for something we believe will offer us a greater tomorrow. Growing and preserving our own food, despite any apparent utilitarian purpose, is a choice to preserve the wisdom of those who have come before—both their prudence and the practical skills that enabled life for them for generations.

When we preserve our food, we preserve lost skills. Not so very long ago, most American households grew some of their own food to put it up for the winter. At the dawn of Gerber, a hundred years ago, it was the canned food in stores that was the expensive luxury.

Our cheap modern conveniences may save us time and effort, but they come at the cost of health and vitality, robbing us of the ability and desire to exert any effort at all. Nowadays, it’s becoming rare to find a household that cooks for itself, let alone raises or grows their own food.

Rest and leisure are lovely gifts, but they’re only made meaningful when they punctuate ongoing creative projects that offer purpose to being alive. We weren’t made to lie low. Convenience tempts us to pursue a life of ease. But when we make ease and entertainment our sole end, what we pursue is, in fact, a life of nothingness.

The antidote to the toxins running through our bodies and souls is, at least in our home, making the most of what we’ve been given. Cultivating our small patch of earth may not yield every bit of what we need, but the very act of doing so is an answer to human needs more fundamental than merely what we consume.

And of course, what can never be overstated is the sheer wonder of doing it all. Our hands have a part in the magic of growing things. Our eyes feast on the exquisite loveliness imbued in the colors and textures of the garden. And our tongues taste the spicy zing of garlic scapes and the tang of golden raspberries, too delicate for grocery store shelves.

All this among the buzz of the bees and butterflies and hovering hummingbirds—tiny co-creators with us, doing their part to create and take their share, drinking deeply of the oasis of enchantment.

When we grow our own food, we grow so much more. As Wendell Berry reminds us, “Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders. We see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”

Here’s to the feast of wild wonders just budding up to bloom.

Looking to grow more of your own food this year?

I invite you to follow our journey and tour our garden on YouTube for lots of ideas about how to maximize your growing space and preserve the harvest—while keeping up with the many demands of busy family life.

And for my full system of growing food for our family in a backyard, get my BOOK: Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard. You’ll find step-by-step instructions for making the most of what God has given you, right where you are—no relocation to sprawling acreage required.

(And as an added bonus for fellow homeschool families, it includes a downloadable expansion to turn the hands-on experiences in the book into a full year elementary science curriculum!).

Around the Web

I’ve been doing lots of promotions with two books releasing back to back. Many of them are still in progress, but here are some of the interviews and articles out now that you might enjoy:

“Reclaiming Eden in a Backyard: On Growing Things Where You Are” at Catholic Exchange

CatholicMom Lenten Bookclub: The Bellbind Letters:

• Episode 1: Letters 1-6

• Episode 2: Letters 7-12

• Episode 3: Letters 13-18

• Episode 4: Letters 19-24

• Episode 5: Letters 24-30

My interview at Catholic ReCon on all things conversion, bioethics, and books. Basically the story of how I went from being an obstinate Lutheran teenager to a Catholic author and homeschool mom!

“Subtle Lies Quietly Sabotaging Your Marriage” on the Dr. J Show

“The Devil’s Plan for Your Motherhood” at Ave Maria in the Afternoon

“Change the Language, Change the Culture,” in which I do a dramatic reading from my Screwtape-inspired The Bellbind Letters

“Disembodiment—Or Something Else?” a podcast adaptation of my response to Helen Roy on our need to touch grass, and what screen-based life does to our bodies

So it comes as no surprise that when it comes to new technologies, he is a first adopter, and I border on Amish (unless that technology is a robot vacuum, in which case I say, “Beam me up!”).

Given this context, our attitudes towards AI are pretty predictable: while I have been glaring warily at the apocalyptic Beast come to devour all human creativity, my husband has busied himself building an AI chatbot. For Fun. (In his defense, he works in tech, and his job is literally to be the top guys managing his company’s AI rollout. Perhaps this was inevitable.)1

In their spare time, my husband and another faithful Catholic father have developed Chatechism, a 100% Magisterially Catholic, truth-telling answer machine.

Check out Chatechism

On the one hand, what they’ve developed is impressive. I am a little in awe, having witnessed the whole process of development. I’ve done my best to “break” it, to get it to spit out heretical answers, and to have it prove my distaste for AI in general well-founded.

All I can say is that—for a lifeless robot—it knows its stuff.

Do I think it’s awesome and incredibly cool?

Yes.

Is it better than its competitors Truthly and Magisterium AI (which I never would have set eyes on save for the fact that I am a biblically-based wife putting myself under the mission of my husband)?

100%.

If it were up to me, would I still choose a world without AI?

You bet.

The thing is, though: it isn’t up to me. And if God allows AI, God will redeem the existence of AI. Tenfold. A hundredfold. And I firmly believe that Chatechism (totally the best name of the three—by far—don’t you think?) is one of the concrete ways God is redeeming AI.

Here’s why I think Chatechism is such a gift for the Church today:

• Makes the faith accessible—for people exploring Catholicism, for those in revival, and for anyone curious about conversion.

• Gives users a reliable way to ask the questions they might not feel comfortable asking out loud.

• Each answer comes with a “Fide Score,” showing how closely it aligns with Church teaching—so users can trust it while still thinking critically.

• Sources are listed right there, which is amazing for study, research, or just satisfying curiosity.

• Always points back to human connection—to priests, spiritual directors, and the wider Body of Christ—because AI can’t replace the guidance and companionship of real people.

• Lets users explore the faith through different personas with unique answers: Thomas Aquinas for theology, a spiritual director for guidance, and a catechist for teaching clarity.

• Helps the Church share the faith in a way that’s approachable, thoughtful, and rooted in real relationships in the digital age.

Try Chatechism

As disciples of Christ, we are called to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. That means baptizing even—or perhaps especially—these globalized, digital spaces.

I’ll keep saying it: we were made for such a time as this, and this is the ground on which our fiat takes form. As much as I’d prefer to be an ostrich with my head buried firmly in the sand, I have to admit that my husband is making the right call on this one. If Christians don’t actively shape this technology from the outset, who will? What values will direct what it becomes—what we become?

That’s part of why I’m so excited about Chatechism. It’s absolutely a clever AI tool, but what makes it transformative is the harnessing of new technology to bring the faith into digital spaces thoughtfully, faithfully, and in a way that invites people to encounter the Church and the Body of Christ. By giving answers rooted in the Magisterium, pointing users toward human guidance, and helping people explore questions they might never ask out loud, it shows how technology can serve evangelization rather than replace it.

At the end of the day, I have faith in God’s promise that in all things—even AI—He works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28).

(Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful to be an eye and not a hand, if you know what I mean…)

AMDG,

Samantha

For gardeners, summer smells like warm earth and tastes of home-grown tomatoes bursting with tangy sweetness. It also means a sweaty, daily battle with vicious villains: squash bugs and weeds.

When I first planted my backyard garden, I chose the “no dig” method of layering cardboard and compost right over our weeds. I hauled in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow until our small patch of earth was no longer a snarled mess, but an unmistakable garden plot ready for planting. It was exhausting work, but each shovelful brimmed with the promise of homegrown vegetables, and that vision drove me on. I naively believed the no-dig promise that the cardboard and mulch would be enough to smother the weed seeds lurking below.

Confession and the Garden of the Soul

It was around this time that my daughter received her first Confession, which meant that I found myself coaxing and cajoling a fearful and anxious 8-year-old to our local parish for her second Confession, which held none of the excitement and glamour of the first to obscure the objectively nerve-wracking nature of bearing your weaknesses to a total stranger. I couldn’t really blame her for her reluctance; I am an adult convert, and 15 years later, I feel the same aversion when dragging myself to Confession.

Shame spills over into hot tears, and I berate myself for failing to avoid those same sins that land me in Confession week after week. When will I stop needing Confession? I ask myself in exasperation. It is at this moment that a tiny drop of wisdom finally bubbles over from my head, soaking into my heart.

The Weeding Is Never Done

I pushed open the gate to our back garden in July after about a month of neglect to find my once pristine vegetable beds entirely overrun by weeds. There was cheese weed with its deep taproots, nearly impossible to remove without the right tools. There were tall bright green grasses with shallow roots that nonetheless reappear every year, and – worst of all – nefarious bellbind with its deceptively lovely white blooms wound its way up my crops, choking the life out of them (Incidentally, this is the indefatigable weed that inspired the name of the demonic title character of my book, The Bellbind Letters, a creative take on C.S. Lewis’s spiritual classic for Catholic moms).

I spent the better part of a week on my hands and knees yanking every last one out by the roots. When I finally stepped back to survey my work, my triumph was short-lived: although my well-defined borders were once again visible, they were dotted with tiny specks of green from weeds that had either escaped my notice during the initial battle or had simply grown back in the time it had taken me to tackle the other beds.

Tempted as I was to hang my head in shame at my utter inability to dominate this space, a fleeting moment of grace whispered deep in my heart like the fluttering of a hummingbird’s wings: maybe what the Lord is trying to grow through this garden is my patience with myself.

Like our sin, weeds are impossible to eradicate entirely. Continuous weeding is the fate of every gardener, and if we want to make of our souls a delightful garden for our Lord, we find ourselves in need of constant cultivation. We will always need to be diligently weeding out vices. Frequent visits to the confessional will prevent the roots of more serious sins from penetrating too deeply and dissuade the deleterious effects of sin from choking out emerging seedlings of virtue.

What the Master Gardener Sees

Of course, tending the garden of our souls is not something we are meant to do on our own. We must consult the Master gardener, sower of good seeds. What is His vision for this space? What fragrant varieties would He like to see planted here?

As gardeners and disciples both, we cannot become overly distressed when we see the weeds creeping in. The Master gardener calls us to a life of joy and unceasing prayer. Of course, weeds cannot be permitted to flourish in the garden, but their appearance is not cause for despair. He expects to find weeds, and so should we. If we attend to them diligently, day by day, we will find that they can be managed. With His help, flowers will still blossom and trees bear good fruit.

If the Master still sees all the beauty in this garden, why shouldn’t we?

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This reflection originally appeared at the Blessed Is She blog.

If you enjoyed this reflection, I invite you to discover the seeds of contemplation hidden in every season through my new book, Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard.

This gorgeous hardcover with full-color interior tells the story of how growing our own food helped me heal from chronic illness, and how I learned to let go of my homestead dream and flourish right where God planted me.

A prayerful and practical guide to cultivating seasonal abunance and sustainable family life, this book provides so much value, including:

• step-by-step instructions for cultivating a garden from scratch

• a month-by month chore guide for cultivating the garden

• annual seed inventory

• seasonally-inspired garden-to-table recipes the whole family will love

• tips for raising little gardeners (plus a downloadable year-long, hands-on, lit-based elementary science curriculum expansion rooted in nature, the garden, and the seasons)

• “seeds for contemplation” reflections for growing in the garden of our souls

If you’ve ever felt God move in the garden or wondered if you could grow your own food in your own backyard, Grow Where You’re Planted is for you!

Order Now

Could we really make a third of an acre feed a family?

On the surface, it seemed impossible—but what we discovered changed everything about how I think about food, space, and stewardship.

On the one hand, a third acre can’t supply us with beef, dairy, or grains that we need to feed our family. The more I lean into this lifestyle, the more I learn to provide for our family with what we’ve been blessed with—the more I believe the goal isn’t really self-sufficiency. Not entirely. It’s interdependence with a like-minded community of those who believe that all of this—the growing, the preserving, the handmade life over the instantaneous one—is worth the effort.

I can’t raise my own cows, but I can purchase beef in bulk from someone who raises them like I would. I can make our family’s yogurt with raw organic A2 milk from a dairy just miles down the road. I can grow an abundance of berries and watch as my children bite in and let the juices run down their chins in hot summer sun.

“Can we call this a homestead?” I kept asking myself.

Our little piece of land in cookie cutter suburbia sure doesn’t look anything like what one pictures when you hear the word “homestead.” Some people say it isn’t right to call this a homestead, and I go back and forth on that myself.

At the end of the day, for me, it all comes down to mindset. When you make the commitment to become your own food source, to learn long lost skills, every tomato grown and berry pie baked becomes something intangibly satisfying.

Yes, it is as much work as it sounds. More, probably.

“Why do you do it?” people ask. “Is it worth it?”

God didn’t put us on this earth for a life of leisure. Sunday rest, yes, but rest from fully extending ourselves in imitation of our creator who actively labors in all of creation.

When we create, we act in His image. When we grow our food, we take on the stewardship he has given us. I love caring for our soil, for the pollinators on our patch of Earth.

We are to grow where we’re planted and be good stewards of what God has given us, to be faithful in the small things. For those who can be trusted with what is little will be trustworthy with still more.

We do what we can. Every journey begins with a single step.

Our first year growing in this space, I got just shy of a year’s worth of potatoes and more squashes than we could eat. The following year I got six months of onions. The potatoes were small, and washing the dirt off to prepare them for supper was more labor than I was used to.

This year we added garlic to our storage crops, and I’m amazed by how crisp and flavorful it is straight out of the garden.

Progress is slow, but with every harvest we are gathering not just food, but reaping the benefits of all our hard work, painful lessons, and experiencing the freedom of producing a bounty with our own hands.

After you try to grow your own food, it becomes impossible to be ungrateful for the abundance we do have. I honestly look back to all those years that I just had no idea what it takes to sustain a family, and I’m amazed at how far we have really come.

In this time, we have big plans, lots of projects coming up to showcase how to be creative with the space you have.

If you enjoy this, I’d love if you would share it with someone. I think we all struggle with these limiting beliefs, and it just comes down to giving it a leap of faith, no matter how small a space we’re given.

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Everyone can grow where they’re planted, and we all benefit from greater knowledge of these skills, of really caring for ourselves and the needs of our family that used to be so common.

If you’re curious to see this process in action, our YouTube channel shows how we transform a small suburban backyard into a productive, thriving homestead. Watching it come to life has been one of the most inspiring parts of this journey, and I’d love to share that with you.

Of course, all of this isn’t just about our family. If it were, there would be no need to share what this looks like on YouTube or to write it all down in a book.

Ultimately, I hope families’ eyes might be opened to the wondrous possibilities in their own soil, yards, and back porches. That’s why I wrote Grow Where You’re Planted: so that we all can become better stewards of what we have, and to participate more fully in the miracle of creation. In this book, I break down step-by-step how families can turn whatever space they have—whether a small suburban yard or even a corner of their patio—into a space that spills over with seasonal abundance

Get My Copy

I’ve already heard from many of you who have purchased the book, and I am dying to see pictures of all of your gardens this year!

Wouldn’t that be amazing, to fill up our screens this summer with the fruits of our labor, to inspire others to get outside, to touch grass, and revel in the magic that happens when we plant seeds in the soil?

Here’s to becoming better stewards of what we have, and learning to grow wherever we are planted.

AMDG,

Samantha

I could barely bend low enough to tend our two raised beds with a trowel. We watched the garden grow large as I grew round, both of us spilling over to bring forth new life. The littles ones braved the unwieldy jungle to retrieve hidden tomatoes and monster zucchini. Our harvest that spring was so abundant and delightful that no one could have guessed its dark and melancholy origins.

Shortly before our son’s first birthday, I found myself taking a pregnancy test. At first, it appeared negative. I set it on the counter to attend to the regular rhythm of chaos that hummed throughout our 1200-square-foot house. Built in 1960, our fixer-upper kept our weekends occupied with home improvement projects, but we adored it for its spacious, tree-lined backyard that made it feel like our own private oasis—a rarity in Southern California suburbia where even small houses loom large on lots the size of a postage stamp.

And so, we embraced the pitter-patter of little feet on the laminate flooring that slanted across the uneven foundation, drywall cracking in the corners with the contraction and expansion of the California clay. Later that morning, chaos diffused, and I returned to check on the pregnancy test I’d abandoned on the counter. Before I’d even crossed the threshold, its bright pink line jumped out at me from across the bathroom, instantly producing waves of shock and joy in equal measure.

Delighted as we were to be expecting our third baby, I soon found myself unable to access that joy. As if someone had turned off the water to a faucet, my emotions ran dry. I no longer felt delight, anticipation, motivation, or even contented satisfaction. In their place came inexplicable, sourceless darkness and despair. It was all I could do to drag myself through the most basic motions of stay-at-home motherhood.

About a year had passed since I’d left my full-time teaching job to stay home with my kids a few months after completing my master’s degree in bioethics. I had just begun a writing stint for a publication of which I had all but begged to be a part. Dream after dream was coming true, but now it felt as though someone else had dreamed them. Confused and ashamed, I had to ask my editor for a leave-of-absence. I could no longer put words on the page. It stayed blank, just like my insides.

I now know that this was the first sign of my burgeoning battle with chronic disease. It would be years before I would put it together that my bouts with prenatal depression in this and the following pregnancy, my bone-deep exhaustion, hair loss, difficulty losing weight, and searing joint pain were all connected.

For many women with autoimmune disorders, their symptoms take a back seat during pregnancy. I don’t know if it is me or the Hashimoto’s, but my symptoms flare up worse than ever. There is something about growing new life that makes me feel like I am dying. All I knew at the time was that my life—a life that had once been full of joy and possibility—was suddenly bleak and gray. Nothing had changed, but everything was different. That’s when I found her.

She was this incredibly vibrant woman, not much older than me, with a few more kids and a velvety smooth voice. I stumbled across her YouTube channel, and immediately I was hooked. Every inch of her was as lovely as the flowers that sprawled across her cottage gardens. I was drawn in by the aesthetic appeal of her videos, but even more enchanted by the beauty of her words and enticed by the lifestyle she espoused. She spun tales about life on the homestead that quickly became my own grown-up fairy tales.

From the stunning flowers blooming on the borders of her stone steps to the ripe, juicy tomatoes she sliced on her well-worn wooden cutting board to the luscious grapes hanging heavy from the vines spilling over her courtyard arbor, I devoured every second. As I binged her videos, I absorbed her philosophy and let it take hold until it became my own. My soul soaked it all in, and, like a dried out old sponge, sprang back into life. By my second trimester, we were building raised garden beds and filling them with compost.

I give thanks for my initial ignorance; if I had known from the beginning what a vast undertaking it is to grow your own food, I am not sure I would have persisted. Years of schooling may have earned me two master’s degrees, but I knew next to nothing about how our food is grown or where it comes from. Blissfully ignorant, I plopped down with a couple of classic gardening books and calculated how much space we would need for our small but growing family.

I quickly learned that you cannot, in fact, grow all your own vegetables in two raised garden beds, and that even if you fill your yard with fruit trees, it will be years before you actually taste the fruits of those labors. As we prepared to relocate to Idaho’s Snake River Valley, my homestead dreams quickly took a back seat. We packed up boxes. Our fourth baby was born. I published my first book.

Six years later, we find ourselves a thousand miles away—literally and figuratively—from where we were in those early gardening days. We moved to a one-third-acre property in a typical suburban neighborhood that backs up to an irrigation canal that borders the remnants of rural Idaho. My writing desk on the second floor overlooks twenty acres of open field, home to prancing peacocks, millions of chirping crickets, and soaring birds of prey. Our neighbors raise their own cows, horses, and chickens. We may live in suburbia, but if you close your eyes, you’ll find yourself immersed in the sounds and scents of the country.

We dove into homeschooling and settled into our new parish community. We built relationships with some of the best neighbors around. We eagerly awaited fruit from the small orchard we’d planted the first year we moved in, and we munched on peas, lettuces, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini from the five raised beds we built that first year. The garden was buzzing, but the dream of growing enough food to feed our family was dormant, sealed away in one of our unpacked boxes. Then one day, I stumbled upon it hiding in the weeds behind our fence.

Our home borders one of the many canals in the valley’s intricate irrigation system. Our property line runs down its center. Our backyard fence stops quite short of that due to an easement next to the canal that allows for easy access when it needs to be serviced. The area between our fence and the canal was a weedy patch of puncture vine, bindweed, and tall grasses. The brush was almost too thick to walk through, but the occasional venturesome dog walker would find his way through.

That day, my heart sank as I discovered the remains of nocturnal teenage revelry in the form of piles of trash littered about our property. I thought back to my days studying Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, in which he describes how New York officials cut crime by eliminating signs of disorder, like cleaning up graffiti on the subways. As disappointed as I was, could I really blame those kids for treating our property like a dumpster? It looked utterly abandoned, certainly not as though it mattered to anyone.

As quickly as if I’d dropped a match into those dried up weeds at my feet, the spark of an idea engulfed my consciousness. “What if this space became a garden?” I asked myself. If this were a well-tended place of beauty, not only would our kids’ bare feet have fewer wounds from puncture-vine thorns and neighbors receive the signal that this land belongs to somebody, but we could also reclaim this soil—our soil—as a place of productivity and nourishment for our family. I had lost any illusion that we could grow everything we needed in those two small garden boxes long ago, but continued to pack away my thoughts of what ifs and somedays tenderly, sealing them in a box marked for a future property on sprawling acreage, a property with towering barns and open fields signaling the potential for self-sufficiency.

But as I surveyed the weedy patch of dirt and plucked trash out of the dust, those dreams burst out of the box where I had sealed them and settled in the soil before me. Words echoed unbidden through my mind. First, the words attributed to St. Teresa of Calcutta: “Grow where you are planted”; followed by those from the Gospel of Luke: “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (16:10). From that moment on, those escaped dreams took on the character of a call, a call that rooted itself in our soil, on our land. Those words opened my eyes both to the dignity of our land and to the faithfulness with which I was called to steward it. How could I truly say I dreamed of living off the land when I hadn’t yet been faithful to the land beneath my feet?

That day, I got to work. I laid down cardboard and hauled in yards of compost and mulch, employing the “no-dig” approach I’d seen in dozens of gardening videos. The land sloped down from our fence toward the canal. I evened it out by applying thicker layers toward the lower end. Later, I purchased compost and mulch in bulk and shoveled it into our wheelbarrow to apply it to the garden plot. It took me weeks in the whipping spring wind.

When at last I finished and surveyed twelve garden beds of dark earth neatly demarcated by wood chip paths, my husband cheerily observed that they looked like freshly dug graves. In a way, they were. My lofty, starry-eyed homestead dream was dead and buried; my new mission to grow where we are planted was born.

Slowly, I discovered that we could do so much more on our little piece of land than I had realized. Every inch of our property took on a new air of possibility. We devoted a section of our yard to chickens and used their spent bedding for compost and to fertilize the raspberries. That first year, we grew enough onions, potatoes, and squash to last us through the winter.

The next year, we added a year’s supply of garlic, dried herbs, and herbal teas. I canned jam from our blackberries, and we canned a hundred pounds of peaches from a local orchard. The kids spent their summer stuffing their faces with strawberries, and we welcomed bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds as they hovered above jewel-toned zinnias towering over the children. We have become stewards of abundance—not just of food, but of beauty and joy, simplicity and wonder. Even with all this fruitfulness, we have yet to maximize the harvest potential we have on our one-third-acre suburban property.

With abundance comes work. Gardens need tending, weeding, and a vigilant sentry to keep squash bugs at bay. Simply receiving the bounty requires diligence in cultivating, harvesting, and preserving. Everything from the unpredictability of the weather to unexpected pests guarantee that the gardener bathes daily in the sometimes gentle and sometimes torrential waters of humility. With every seed sown and fruit harvested, I was encountering the Holy Spirit in the gentle breeze of the garden. In the creeping weeds, I saw our need to pull sin out by its roots. Drought spoke to me of meaning in spiritual dryness.

I am hardly the first gardener to be enchanted by God’s presence in growing things. Scripture is filled with agricultural metaphors, as are Jesus’ parables. As I write to you, it is Holy Week, and I am reminded that some of the most significant moments of Jesus’ life—and the Father’s plan for our salvation—took place in gardens: the agony in the garden of Good Friday, and the Resurrection of Easter Sunday. If we look further back, we recall that God’s gift of original holiness was set in a garden. It was there that we fell by Adam’s “happy fault,” catapulting us into the greatest story of love and redemption that will ever be. We may not all be called to off-grid homesteading or large-scale market farming, but we are all made for the Garden.

This journey to increase our self-sufficiency has given our family a vision not born of fear or scarcity but rooted in the call to joyful stewardship. What began as a response to chronic illness grew into a celebration of abundance—a way of life that nurtures the body and soul alike. Rather than retreating into rugged individualism, this lifestyle is an invitation into deeper interconnectedness: with creation, with each other, and most of all with Christ. It is a Christ-rooted, family-centered, seasonally oriented approach to living—one that honors both the limits and the gifts of our days.

I hope and pray that this book nourishes both you and your garden, helping you to deepen your roots and bear good fruit, and always, to grow where you are planted!

This reflection is adapted from my new book, Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard, releasing March 17, 2026!

Grow Where You’re Planted Cover Reveal

A prayerful and practical guide to cultivating seasonal abunance and sustainable family life, this book provides so much value, including:

• step-by-step instructions for cultivating a garden from scratch

• a month-by month chore guide for cultivating the garden

• annual seed inventory

• seasonally-inspired garden-to-table recipes the whole family will love

• tips for raising little gardeners (plus a downloadable year-long, hands-on, lit-based elementary science curriculum expansion rooted in nature, the garden, and the seasons)

• “seeds for contemplation” reflections for growing in the garden of our souls

If you’ve ever felt God move in the garden or wondered if you could grow your own food in your own backyard, Grow Where You’re Planted is for you!

Preorder

Gorgeous and Giftable

The team worked so hard to make the interior beautiful, and it shows. The layouts are gorgeous and the design is delightful.

A hard cover with full-color interior, the book makes a perfect gift for the gardener in your life. Each season includes both devotional reflections and practical how-tos.

I can’t resist sharing some screenshots from the most recent proof they sent me:

The best part is that you don’t have to wait for the book to arrive to get started. When you preorder, you can preview the downloadable files instantly.

Preorder

Instant Downloads, Incredible Value

No need to wait: when you preorder, you receive INSTANT access to the following downloads:

• a list of my favorite nontoxic products

• a month-by month chore guide for cultivating the garden

• annual seed inventory

• seasonally-inspired garden-to-table recipes

• PDF Elementary Science Curriculum with hands-on garden activities, beautiful nature book suggestions for cozy reading, and even a schedule of “TV school” for rainy days of popcorn and snuggling on the couch!

Preorder and get my INSTANT downloads!

Praise for Grow Where You’re Planted

Here are some of the incredibly kind things people are saying:

Both deeply insightful and wildly practical, this book is gold. Connecting the realities of gardening with the spiritual life isn’t a new take, but not once did I feel I was reading fluffy, heard-that-before ideas. Stephenson is also mindful not to overwhelm as she inspires (and wow does she inspire).

As someone who longs to resist the siren call of the internet and fully be where I am, Grow Where You’re Planted was thoroughly resonant. I recommend it with my whole heart.

— , One Tired Mother

The Christian tradition is replete with stories, imagery, and parables from earthy realities. In Grow Where You’re Planted, we are given a two-fold view of both physical and spiritual truths as they are gently placed in parallel. Becoming acquainted with the practical work of the ground, we plumb the human heart.

Hands in the dirt become tools for contemplation. Here is a clear-eyed look at how, like what grows from the soil, we can be transformed—both given and giving life.

— , Life Considered

Grow Where You’re Planted is a wonderfully practical guide, both for the physical realm of the garden and the spiritual life of the soul. This book is a beautiful reminder that any person can experience an abundant harvest in their own lives. Stephenson’s well-earned wisdom in matters pertaining to the garden and to the soul is truly a treasure trove for readers to discover.

— , Missionary of Beauty

In Grow Where You’re Planted, Samantha Stephenson has created a vibrant, engaging vision of what it means to intertwine faith, family life, and gardening. She offers meditations on tending both the growth of the Catholic faith and the growth of a family garden. Readers will enjoy her clear and thoughtful directions and meditations.

— , The Home Front

A book which reveals the garden as a place our divine design is meant to interact with, and where our innate limits are revealed and our innate gifts are of great use. Intelligently ordered by season, philosophical faith-centered considerations for the soul are paired with actionable and practical knowledge for the gardener.

Samantha’s focus on the self discipline she cultivated through the management of her autoimmune disease and how that same sort of discipline can help one access the wholeness which is meant for us via cultivation of our own food is such a honest and hopeful message.

A true call to become literally and figuratively grounded, with our hands buried in the earth and hearts open to whatever may come from our toil, Grow Where You Are Planted is a gardening book for everyone, much like as Stephenson aptly states, “we are all made for the garden.”

— Hancock, mother, nurse, and writer at the Women’s Work Substack

In Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaiming Eden in Your Own Backyard, Stephenson highlights the unique bond between mankind and the garden. She reminds us that nourishment from the soil feeds both body and soul through pages filled with practical tips and thoughtful meditations.

— , author Theology of Home IV: Arranging the Seasons

Samantha Stephenson offers a practical and personal guide for cultivating the garden in one’s own backyard—an apt metaphor and prescription for the crisis of the modern family. Her timeless vision of fruitfulness has that rare quality of informing and inspiring without pretense.

Give this book to the people you love.

— , Helen Roy Writes

Bursting with rich spiritual and practical wisdom, Grow Where You’re Planted is an inviting and encouraging read for both gardeners and spiritual seekers alike. Grounded in Scripture and time-tested personal experience, the profound insights and detailed tips found in these pages are worthy of revisiting season after season.

— , Wonder & Awe

It is altogether too easy to forget that we were created for a garden, but it was in a garden that God fashioned man from the very soil. And yet, it seems that we wander farther and farther from that primordial idyll for which we were made. There are those who propose radical returns to the land, but in this age in which many of us find ourselves caught between the pull to return to the garden and the reality of life in the city or in the suburbs, what we need is a guide on how to gently return to fertile ground, both spiritually and physically.

Samantha N. Stephenson’s Grow Where You’re Planted is that guide. Replete with the age-old wisdom and practical knowledge of nature that many of us have lost, Samantha correlates the natural rhythms of the land with the movements of the heart and spirit. I can give no higher praise of her book than this: it has made me yearn to spend my days outside, praying as I work in my garden.

—

If you know someone who would delight in this book, would you share this post and help get this book into the hands of readers who love it?

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I, for one, am very grateful to be celebrating the launch of my new book (and that this celebratory day falls just before the somber season of Lent begins).

What better way to celebrate than by sharing with you a sneak peek at a never-before-published bonus letter written especially for Lent—designed to help you enter the season with clarity and courage. (You can download the full letter at my website!)

Download the rest of the letter

Get Your Copy of The Bellbind Letters Today!

Lent is the perfect season to name the lies we’ve absorbed about motherhood—and practice replacing them with truth. This book serves as an examination of conscience, a way to unveil the lies we tell even to ourselves.

If you haven’t your hands on a copy yet, you can still snag it with enough time to use it as your Lenten book study (there’s only 30 letters, so you have wiggle room even if you just read one letter a day!).

The back of the book features a study guide which is great for groups or individual study. There are also two special bonuses:

• a downloadable companion journal

• a bonus letter so you can dive in right away

  Order The Bellbind Letters

  ---

When you receive your copy in the mail, I’d love to see it! Send me a pic or tag me in a post.

And be sure to join us at CatholicMom.com for our Lenten book study, beginning February 25!

AMDG,

Samantha

Subscribe now

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Introduction

Now that the physical copies are fianlly in my hands, I am bursting with excitement to share this book with readers!

While C.S. Lewis said he felt deeply troubled when taking on the demonic persona to compose The Screwtape Letters, I felt the opposite. As I wrote, it felt more like receiving than composing. The process served as a true examination of conscience. The Holy Spirit showed me my weaknesses, and the grace I could receive to overcome them—if only I would ask.

Ultimately, it brought such peace to pull back the curtain on the Enemy’s lies, and fortified my convictions to live otherwise—as the Lord uniquely calls us as women. It is that gift that I am so excited to get into the hands of mothers everywhere this Lent.

Order my copy!

If you order today, you will receive your copy next week—just in time to be your Lenten reading (plus a bonus letter available immediately).

And be sure to join us at CatholicMom.com for our Lenten book club, beginning February 25—check out the page for a limited time discount of 30% off!

30% off discount details

For now, please enjoy the excerpt below. I can’t wait for you to read the whole thing!

AMDG,

Samantha

My Dear Bellbind,

In our last communication, we spoke of ways to create friction between the spouses so as to prevent the mutual exchange of self. I may have been premature in my advice to you. Mind you, I am not suggesting that we abandon the tack of fomenting division and loneliness altogether. The anguish and despair that method yields alone make it worth pursuing.

However, I would be remiss if I failed to call on the great ally we have in contemporary culture: the movement of so-called feminism. Naturally, you and I jitter at the great jest we have made in convincing them to give it such a name. What a lark, to coerce them into bestowing such an utterly contrary name upon a movement that seeks to undermine all that is feminine, to demean their unique qualities and to steal away their most momentous of capacities: that of becoming a mother. Our Father is, of course, a veritable genius in the art of propaganda, and this may be the height of his achievements in the arena yet. Though that last point is debatable as we have achieved so many victories in this present age.

How I shiver with delight when I think of the ways we have managed to invert some of the Enemy’s most basic truths! Take Our Father’s prized base camp, “Planned” Parenthood: in point of fact, the organization relies on what is unplanned, its goal (and ours) being to eliminate parenthood altogether. In these chapels of death, devotees of our abortion cult chant that blessed hymn to bodily autonomy: “My body, my choice,” blissfully blind to the way we’ve engineered this propaganda to destroy bodies and erase choices by the millions.

Yes, I titter with mirth as they echo our slogan “my body, my choice,” while championing the denial of bodily sovereignty for those most despicable little seeds of flesh, whose choices are blessedly stamped out.

I relish the destruction of the flesh in gender “affirmation” and death with “dignity,” alike, through which we in fact deny the goodness of the body and violate the sanctity of life.

To accomplish any of these ends would laudable it itself, but I veritably giggle with glee at the inversions Our Father has constructed to befuddle the issues!

“Compassionate” care—ha! This movement is nothing more than a refusal to suffer with the dying; “aid” in dying has become the slogan for those who are all too happy to kill.

These fleshlings are such simpletons, really. All you have to do is invoke a term that elicits the proper emotion, and they are eating out of our hands. Just think of the many numbers we have seduced into destroying their babies, their marriage, their bodies and even ending their own earthly existences— all by spoon feeding them the message that their happiness somehow depends on their ability to become agents of their own annihilation. It is a delicious cycle; we feed them the lies, and in turn, we have a plentiful bounty of souls to consume through all eternity.

It is among the easiest of our tactics to employ in this current culture, so ripe for harvesting are so many dull and deadened souls. I suggest you mobilize the weapons we have developed in the culture to entice your patient to view her femininity with disdain and abandon those traits in which she has been uniquely gifted. You need merely to teach your patient to despise her femininity and imitate the poorest of the masculine traits. No longer need we whisper that they will become like gods; they are content with the promise that they might become like men. Our delicious propaganda has elicited such rightful distaste for all that women are. We have finally convinced them of the truth: that power is greater than love.

Lure her away from fruitfulness, dangling the carrot of control. Begin with a program of systematic disrespect towards the husband, which, if carefully managed, may undermine the marriage altogether. This tactic works best in tangent with a spouse who is already predisposed to anxiety over the finances, who looks to his spouse not as a helpmate but as a substitute self who can lift his burdens by carrying them herself. He can be made to view this woman he has vowed to protect and provide for as lazy rather than, as the Enemy dictates, the proper recipient of his gifts, the one for whom he is to lay down his life. Coordinate this attack with Inimicus so that the husband seeks to instrumentalize and extract from your patient, with razor focus on her utility to him, and to resent her if she does not pull her own weight.

If she cannot be swayed into idealization of the masculine traits, into a total rebranding of her heart’s desires, then you must push her to the opposite extreme. Teach her to live as a caricature of the feminine, one defined primarily by lipstick and lace. Once she begins to view her femininity as a performative act rather than a constitutive aspect of her person, she will act against her own flourishing in the very effort to attain it.

She can be made to cage herself in the trivial trappings of “feminine” and as she occupies herself with fulfilling this standard, she will retain none of the docility and flexibility to answer the Enemy’s call in the moment—so focused should she be on fabricating her feminine facade. As she further weaves herself into this design, lead her to harbor disdain for those who fail to live up to her imagined ideals of womanhood. With each day that passes within these trappings, she will be less likely to recognize herself without them. And that is right where we want her—a reduction of herself shackled to illusions, unable to answer the Enemy as He uniquely calls her to do so.

This line of temptation is most effective if her spouse is inclined to domination. In time, Inimicus will work on him to demean womanhood, to belittle his wife by the very lifting of her up on a pedestal as a porcelain caricature. Men of this sort can easily be taught to deny all that is uniquely strong about their counterparts and, if you happen upon a generous stroke of luck, he may even turn out to be of the sort who tell themselves they prize their women, even as they pummel them to the floor.

If the one tendency makes her think her husband a fool and regard him with disdain, the other makes her idolize him and think him her king. Whether she regards him with zero reverence or total sovereignty is immaterial; in neither case can one share in communion with the other, and so our Enemy’s aims are entirely thwarted, be the husband a buffoon or tyrant.

Even if her husband cannot be made to entertain such extremes, so long as you cripple her vitality by crafting an ever-smaller circle of acceptability, she will remain docile—to its limits. Do try to usher her into our program of sexual liberty and control, as it is most suitable to our aims; we generally prefer to discourage the habit of docility on the grounds that any practice of a virtue puts our patient solidly in the Enemy’s camp, and there is no telling what He might make of even the smallest of their efforts.

With love and venom,

Boomslang

PS If you know someone who would love this book—or have a friend you’d like to do a Lenten study with—would you share this email and help get the book into the hands of the readers who’d delight in it?

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Fair enough. I can’t blame him for wondering how someone who runs a podcast and Substack newsletter—all on the world wide web—might position herself as an authority on digital monasticism.

To him, the phrase conjured images of cloistered monks and nuns tucked away in their cells, ensconced in lives of silent prayer and withdrawal from the world. I, on the other hand, saw my own increasing efforts to pare down the technology in our lives as an analogous withdrawal from the world.

When I began crafting a digital rule of life, I was inspired by a book by Holly Pierlot that I’d read early on in my motherhood called A Mother’s Rule of Life. In it, the author draws on the centuries-old wisdom of monastic traditions to create a spiritual backbone on which to hang all the many competing priorities of motherhood.

The word “rule” is derived from the Latin regula, meaning trellis. Just as a trellis supports a vine as it grows and bears fruit, so too does a rule offer a framework to support its adherents in bearing good spiritual fruit. Pierlot’s book helps mothers to transition from Marthas to Marys, striking a balance between ora et labora, prayer and work, that integrates all of life into a single song in praise of Jesus Christ. By creating boundaries and learning to properly prioritize according to Heaven’s hierarchy, the various aspects of a mother’s life come together in harmonious resonance.

The effectiveness of Peirlot’s book is rooted in her adaptation of the rule of life first developed by Christian monastic communities in the fourth century to the circumstances of modern motherhood. The rule of life many of us are familiar with today was first articulated by St. Benedict of Nursia circa 500 AD, whose Rule became a template for most Christian religious orders as we know them today. Still, the exact specifications vary according to the unique call and charisms of each community. St. Francis of Assisi founded a community of itinerant preachers. The Benedictine vow of stability would have been quite at odds with their purpose! Instead, the Franciscans charisms of evangelization and poverty call for mobility and flexibility to fulfill their unique mission.

Adapting the rule of life concept for the unique needs and gifts of each family is what I envisioned when I described the concept to my husband: spiritual commitments to digital boundaries according to the discernment of God’s unique call for them. For some, a more liberal range of technology might be required. For others, a total withdrawal from digital spaces may prove most fruitful. Most will fall somewhere between extremes on this spectrum, and the exact applications will evolve and change with the ebb and flow of family life.

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Which is fitting, really, since it was Lent that inspired me to write it.

My husband and I reread C.S. Lewis’s spiritual classic The Screwtape Letters every Lent. That is, when Screwtape doesn’t get the best of us. For those who are unfamiliar, The Screwtape Letters is comprised of the fictional correspondence between Screwtape, a senior demon, and Wormwood, the junior demon he is assigned to advise.

It is at once brilliantly witty and chillingly insightful. Everything is backwards because it is written from a deeply diabolical perspective. God becomes “the Enemy,” Satan is “Our Father Below,” and the newly converted Christian being tempted is “the patient” (who, of course, they are not conspiring to heal but to corrupt entirely).

The more I read of Lewis (and all great fiction, really) the more I am struck by how it unveils us. Lewis’s fiction somehow makes his nonfiction all the more real. I can read about evil in his essays, but I see it incarnate in Perelandra. He describes the nature of temptation in Mere Christianity, but when I read The Screwtape Letters, I feel it in my bones.

Is there a work of fiction that does this for you—somehow makes what is real even more tangible, as though it were holding a mirror to your soul?

I penned my first letter several years ago when I was invited to write a testimony about our local Catholic Women’s Conference. What kept swimming in my head were all the reasons not to attend—all the little lies that we allow to creep in and separate us from the wonderful. The idea grew from there, blossomed into the book, and is finally ripe for harvest.

I wasn’t the only one to have this idea. There are now a couple of other versions for women on the market. The Holy Spirit seems to be up to something. I can say this is the only version to have a nihil obstat, the only one that features Mary, Catholic motherhood, and the truth about the Mass, Reconciliation, and the Eucharist.

The back of the book features a study guide which is great for groups or individual study. There are also two special bonuses for preordering:

• a downloadable companion journal

• a bonus letter so you can dive in right away

Get my bonuses

If you preorder today, the book will arrive just in time to be your Lenten book study this year—and please join us at the CatholicMom.com book club! (Preorders cost you nothing extra, but they do worlds of good for authors.)

There are so many beautiful ways to spend your Lent. I do hope you will choose to spend it with me and Bellbind this year.

Preorder

Naming the Tempters

And now, it’s time for the big reveal!

If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ve been hearing about Bellbind for months. If you’re new here, Bellbind is named for a vicious weed that I battle in my garden (that deceptively pretty flower on the cover is the face of my nemesis). It weaves its way around crops, stealing nutrients and reducing output by up to 50%. If you pull it, it multiplies. Even if you eradicate it from the soil surface, its roots live up to 20 feet below. The battle is daily, and even that sometimes won’t be enough.

What (almost) no one has heard yet is the name of Bellbind’s advisor (yes, in this version, the title is named for the tempter gnawing away at his patient’s soul).

Drumroll, please…

Today, I am proud to introduce you to the diabolical advisor who whispers those devilish lies in The Bellbind Letters: Boomslang.

Boomslang’s name comes from an African tree snake whose venom is so deadly to humans that an antidote isn’t enough; its victims need a blood transfusion in order to survive. We considered all sorts of names for this tempter, from plays on Latin words for nefarious traits to parasites to spiders. But once I learned about the blood transfusions, I couldn’t resist the symbolism.

After all, in the end, it really is the blood that saves us.

There was a fair bit of controvery over the fact that the word boomslang appears as a potion ingredient in the Harry Potter series. In the end, we ruled that J.K. Rowling does not have a monopoly on the words used in the books, which is good news for the future of English literature.

As for those of you who submitted names for consideration, thank you! Some of them do appear as characters scattered throughout the book. I hope you’ll enjoy hunting for them.

Praise for The Bellbind Letters

To close, here are some of the incredibly kind things people are saying about the book:

Stephenson’s contemporary take on Screwtape is utterly captivating, revealing astonishing depths of spiritual insight. She manages to weave together the old-as-time, perennial human temptations with the struggles particular to our secular, digital age. This is a must read for those seeking to sharpen their consciences and deepen their spiritual lives through the sacraments, Sacred Scripture, and the daily habits that help us grow in virtue.

— , Managing editor, Public Discourse

The Bellbind Letters is a powerful and creative work that speaks right into the heart of Catholic motherhood. With wit and insight, Samantha Stephenson unmasks the subtle temptations we face in our everyday lives and reveals the deeper truth of God’s mercy that meets us there. Every mother who longs to grow in faith—and laugh a little at the devil’s ridiculous schemes along the way—will find both challenge and comfort in these pages.

— , author, speaker, and host of the Girlfriends podcast

The heart of a mother is one of the masterpieces of God’s creation: humble, self-sacrificing, unconditionally loving in the face of any obstacle. Naturally, then, a mother’s heart is a special target of our enemy. Satan wants to carry on with his evil plans for mothers undetected, but The Bellbind Letters floods light on these spiritual attacks. This book made me reflect on many habits and attitudes that have indeed affected my walk with God as a modern Christian woman, wife and mother, and now I know exactly which graces to pray for and diversions to ignore. Not today, Satan!

— , author of Holier Matrimony: Married Saints, Catholic Vows, and Sacramental Grace

With wit and wisdom Samantha Stephenson walks us through the landscape of motherhood where we find ourselves seduced by worldly ideas and offerings. So many AHA! moments in this delightful read, recognizing my own temptations (so deviously subtle) presenting themselves untiringly during my own mothering years. As we seek holiness in our vocation, Samantha illuminates where we can be lured, particularly to the extremes that undermine our path of the golden mean of virtue. Satan is real, active and shadowed, enchanting or discouraging us in our weak moments and we must be aware.

Samantha awakens our perception with a cool and compelling hand.

—Bonnie Landry, host of the Make Joy Normal podcast

Women have been attacked by Satan forever. Women are a never ending target of our culture that cripples them with lies, fears, guilt, and being overburdened. This book does a great job of revealing, exposing, and countering those lies to help women find peace, purpose, growth in holiness, and truth that leads to joyful freedom.

—Bryan Mercier, Catholic Speaker, Author, Apologist, President of Catholic Truth

If you know someone who would love this book—or have a friend you’d like to do a Lenten study with—would you share this email and help get the book into the hands of the readers who’d delight in it?

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PS The book officially publishes Feb. 16—just in time to be your Lenten reading—but is available instantly on Kindle if you just can’t wait!

At Choosing Human, I write essays, host a podcast, and curate monthly link roundups that gather the ideas and stories helping us choose what is truly human—and to meet the future with clarity and hope.

I’d love for you to join me!

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Top Articles Worth Reading

To carve away features our culture deems “objectionable” is a rejection of our own transcendence, and also of the people who created us….

The beauty-industrial complex tells us we can paper over our flaws and somehow separate ourselves from the world of mortals, the quotidian processes of aging and death. It tells us we can face others without ever showing them who we really are…

Since real love is not a commodity, the corporate interests ruling our culture undermine and reject it. We have lived for decades under a technocratic paradigm that promised to liberate us from the shackles of our imperfect bodies, including homely features, signs of aging, and even natural fertility. As Wendell Berry has observed, this bid for freedom has not only alienated us from our bodies, but removed any possibility of finding meaning in them…

The beauty-industrial complex is fueled by our desperation for love, which is the very thing it can never give us.

— , “Bodily Integrity: Why We Shouldn’t Chip Away at Ourselves”

As seen with the recent trends in plastic surgery, the unstated goal is to erase any evidence of lived experience or organic imperfection from our bodies, so that they’ll appear as if fresh off the factory floor….

We begin to think of our bodies and the body of the earth …as inanimate, mechanical entities designed to serve us and our ego-driven ends…

Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and even menopause are clear, experiential evidence that we are at the mercy of an intelligence that is much greater than us, one which connects us to the whole of the cosmos around us and endows us with our immutable worth. It’s through paying witness to this intelligence and the wisdom it has to offer us that we can experience the true meaning of our bodies, which rests in their ability to receive life and even more miraculously, to give of it.

— , “How to Actually Love Your Body”

The more we poke, pinch, prod—the more we inject—the more we’re giving into society’s view of woman as Object To Be Admired. We’re rejecting the natural beauty and gift that comes from aging and instead trying to cling to time, something that’s going to slip through our fingers regardless. We’re tap-dancing for a culture that crucified a perfect man.

What about now? Am I beautiful now? Do I look right now?…

When you normalize looking like a 30-year-old at the age of 70, that isn’t just about you. It might feel “empowering” to spend thousands of dollars on injections, but who is it really giving power to? I’d argue the answer to that question is the larger systems in place (fashion magazines, the multi-billion dollar beauty industry, filtered-influencer culture) that insist if women don’t look exactly how they want them to, they’re trash. We’re giving into a lie, and paying it money to keep it going. Feeling beautiful does not come from conforming to a beauty standard.

Some questions I’d suggest praying over:

1. Why do I want this cosmetic procedure? Really, truly, in my heart and soul, not to be broadcasted on the internet?

2. What do I think “beauty” means? How would I define that?

3. How will this procedure help my life? How will it hinder it?

4. How much money am I putting into attempts to craft myself into something worth looking at?

— , “Dirt on Her Face, Filler in Ours”

Reject and Inject: Why Cosmetic Procedures Aren’t Just Skin Deep

In case you missed it, last week’s essay on cosmetics procedures is also available in audio format on the Brave New Us Podcast.

Listen to the Episode

Books + Long Reads

• Made Good: Overcoming the Lies that Keep Women at War with their Bodies by Florencia Moynihan is one that I have not yet read (it releases tomorrow!), but am excited for.

• Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey should be required reading for all Christians. It breaks down the culture’s mind/body dualism that keeps us from effectively discussing issues like abortion, hook up culture, and transgender ideology. We discussed on the podcast a while back and it has only become more relevant.

• Feast, Faith, Flourish: Holistic Wellness in the Light of Eternity by Ember Collective has been my go-to gift for friends since it came out. It is beautiful, wise, and lovely.

Podcasts + Media

• Healthy Catholic Moms

  If you are trying to get in shape, I highly recommend the Healthy Catholic Moms Podcast with Brittany Pearson. I have personally used her pre- and post-partum workout plans, and continue to use the Chasing Greatness group for my workouts. I love that Brittany plans everything and works every muscle group to promote longevity by building lean muscle efficiently (in about 20 minutes a day).

  
  Her wisdom on nutrition is priceless. Because of her coaching years ago, I finally understood macros, and learned that I didn’t need to fear fat—that it was actually the fuel my body needed. I felt full for the first time in years and didn’t need to chase empty calories because my blood sugar was finally regulated.

• Last Week Tonight on MedSpas
  I don’t love John Oliver, but I have found several episodes to be worth watching. I linked this episode on MedSpas in last week’s essay, but thought it worthy of including here as well.

• This Is Why Americans Can’t Have Babies Anymore by Alex Clark
  I loved this speech, but it killed me that the applause was so weak. I only wish Alex could hear how I made up for her lackluster audience in my living room.

Culture Corner

What’s one piece of content that made you think differently this week? Reply with a link—I’ll feature a favorite pick next time.

Wake Up Dead Man was, hands down, my favorite movie of 2025. I’m not sure I have ever seen a more positive portrayal of a priest in a secular film. It’s no Hallmark film, and it has its issues, but I loved it, and cried at more than one point as I watched.

Apparently, the writer/director grew up Evangelical and based the villain on fundamentalist preachers, but chose to set the movie in the Catholic Church because our aesthetics are unbeatable.

If you watch it, pay attention to the symbolic use of light and shadow, and notice which confession is complete, and why.

For the Kids

Links and books for forming faithful, rooted kids

• For discussing body image with kids, I love these clips from Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. Each is only a minute. All are worth your time.

  • The power of images on our view of ourselves

  • The crazy ways photoshop presents unrealistic portrayals of women

  • This “reverse selfie” clip is an updated version.

• The Butterfly Circus is a short (20-min) film depicting a limbless man who becomes part of a circus that refuses to exploit those who are different in side shows, instead celebrating the beauty that comes from brokenness. This is a must-watch that never gets old, and a great way to discuss how God uses our perceived flaws to bless the world.

Around the Web

• “Mary Is the Antidote” at Crisis

• “Are Christians Called to Be More Judgmental” at Crisis

• “The Case Against Assisted Suicide” with Stephanie Gray Connors at Brave New Us

• Why Women Are Getting Sicker, Younger” at Brave New Us

• “My Favorite Reads for Catholic Wives, Mothers, and Homemakers” at CatholicMom.com

What’s the best piece of content YOU have read or listened to this week?

I’d love to know! Please drop a link in the comments.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading.

AMDG,
Samantha

PS My new book, The Bellbind Letters: Inside the Devil’s Plan for Your Motherhood, comes out Feb. 16—just in time to be your Lenten reading—but is now available on Kindle!

Listen to the Essay

I’ll never forget Katie’s cute button nose.

I met Katie1 while chaperoning a high school retreat. At age 17, Katie was a classic Snow White beauty with long dark hair, ivory skin, and rosy cheeks. As the retreat reached its crescendo on the third night, the teens’ masks began to fall away. Secrets dripped out, revealing their unfiltered hearts.

Katie’s rosy cheeks were wet with tears as she described an abusive boyfriend whose derisive mocking of her appearance had her deeply convinced of her own ugliness. Despite having escaped that toxic relationship years earlier, Katie remained haunted by this memory; each time she looked in the mirror, she saw the wounds he’d inflicted on the inside looking back her.

“My nose is perfect now,” she confessed, “But it isn’t mine.”

At age 14, before Katie had even finished puberty, her parents had funded the nose job she’d insisted she needed to be happy.

Though I wasn’t yet a mother at the time, my heart ached for Katie. Now that I am a mother, molten fury erupts in true mama bear fashion when I recall Katie cupping her hand over her “perfect nose,” as her tear-stained face reflected the broken heart inside her chest.

How could her parents allow her to get such a procedure, and at such a young age—much less fund it? Why didn’t they respond by telling her how beautiful she was, just as she was? Instead, they chose to subject her to serious medical risks, all the while confirming her deep fears that she was ugly, unworthy, and unlovable.

It’s easy to conjure this righteous anger on Katie’s behalf, but if we’re honest, don’t we all have a bit of Katie’s parents lurking inside us?

Maybe this isn’t what we’d say or do to our girls, but what about the girl we see in the mirror?

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Reject and Inject: How the Beauty Industry Problematizes the Body

The beauty and cosmetic surgery industry is now a multi-billion dollar industry, with the United States leading the charge. Projections anticipate huge growth in this sector, from $61 billion to $83 billion in less than 10 years. Americans are lining up by the millions to get their tummies tucked, breasts augmented, noses tweaked, faces filled, and wrinkles flattened.

These procedures are not without serious risks. Aside from the standard risks of surgery, cosmetic procedures risk additional complications like breast implant illness and autoimmune disease. Even the cosmetics we use on a daily basis are known endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. These everyday cosmetic products expose users to thousands of synthetic chemicals, many of which are associated with reproductive disorders, diabetes, immune dysfunction, and cancers—chemicals that end up coursing through our bloodstreams.

Those are just the known risks for legitimate procedures. The loosely-regulated MedSpa industry is notorious for selling fraudulent and harmful treatments sourced from dubious sellers on sites like Ali Baba.

Despite the risks, the beauty industry is booming. What is fueling this growth? Does all this alteration actually make us more confident? Of course not. Women report skyrocketing rates of insecurity; it appears that the existence of cosmetic “solutions” serves not to quell women’s anxieties, but to exacerbate them.

This is not a conspiracy; it’s just good business. The industry telling us what we “need” profits most not by solving problems, but by creating them. The driving force behind the beauty industry is not to care for our bodies, but to problematize them. The more problematic our bodies become, the more solutions they can sell. For the beauty industry, the central question is not “how many steps does a skincare routine need,” but rather, “how many steps can we convince the customer to buy?”

This is the legacy we are passing on to our girls.

Today’s generation is not just facing unrealistic images distorted by photoshop anymore; social media filters show them in real time just how much “prettier” they could be—if only they fixed themselves. So-called “Sephora kids” spend hours browsing the makeup aisle and demonstrating multi-step skincare regimens valued in the $100s online. These regimens purport to fix problems girls this age don’t yet have. Meanwhile, these products are actively damaging their delicate skin barriers.

These Sephora girls grow into the 18-year-olds shelling out up to $1000 per session of “baby Botox”—preventative neurotoxin injections that allegedly keep wrinkles at bay (at the cost of muscle atrophy, flu-like aches, headache, nausea, and even bladder control problems). These risks they endure, despite evidence that the so-called “preventative” procedures seem to inadvertently lead to premature aging.

In a culture that normalizes medical means for nonmedical problems, where do we draw the line? Where is the boundary we ought not cross in pursuit of “beauty” (if you can even call it that)?

Just how much risk and pain and financial cost is ethically justifiable?

When it comes to medical procedures, we can distinguish between therapy (procedures intended to restore function and that aim at healing) and enhancement (manipulation of the body that doesn’t serve the ends of health). For example, a woman who undergoes a double mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis may receive breast implants to restore her figure. A burn victim may have plastic surgery to correct and restore appearance (think Jay Leno). These are medically similar but ethically distinct procedures from a cosmetic breast implantation or a face lift that freezes an actor’s face to iron out the wrinkles typical of old age.

Thanks to Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body, we know that the body speaks a language; what we do with our body communicates deep truths about reality. What are we saying when we cut and paste the flesh?

When we cut open healthy bodies and rearrange ourselves, we say something about the gift of the body. When we reject what we’ve been given simply because it isn’t to our satisfaction, we miss the mark. We fail to properly receive the gift of our self, our body, with gratitude.

God, our Father, declares us beautiful and worthy. Meanwhile, we open our wallets and shell out the money to reconstruct His handiwork.

“No, thank you,” we say, as we attempt exchange His gift for one of our own making.

And yet, this desire doesn’t arise from vanity alone. It comes from the same tender place as Katie’s tears—a longing to be loved, to be chosen, to be enough.

Wanting relief from that ache doesn’t make us shallow; it makes us human.

Okay. Fine. But what if I still kinda want the Botox?

One might argue that injections, as risky as they may be, are not rejecting God’s gift, but an attempt to preserve it, akin to washing a car, waxing wood floors, or darning a sock.

That view ultimately betrays a limited view of beauty, a worldly one rather than a heavenly vision. When we attempt to equate beauty with youth, we miss the gift of aging and allow a lesser end to eclipse our ultimate good. As writes:

Motherhood only “ruins the body” if you accept all of the priors of a regime premised on total sexual objectification. If we instead choose to conform our minds to the divine imagination, and to regard our bodies as the form of our souls, then motherhood actually does the exact opposite. Motherhood and every scar it leaves behind represents the generative expansiveness of love itself—and our proximity to the Creator as women.

We need not be mothers to see the “generative expansiveness of love” that is made possible by our bodies. As Servant of God Chiara Corbella Petrillo (our youngest’s namesake) expresses it:

The goal of our life is to love and to be loved, always ready to learn how to love the others as only God can teach you. Love consumes you, but it is beautiful to die consumed, exactly like a candle that goes out only when it has reached its goal.

We are all melting candles, giving light to the world by the slow dripping of our love.

We could remain solid and stiff—but what good is smooth wax that never shares its light with the world?

The smooth skin of our youth is good, and is only natural to want to hold on to what is good. The problem arises when we grip so tightly to lesser good that we have no room for the greater goods God is preparing us to receive.

When we try to freeze our faces, we place disproportionate importance on appearance, lending our limited energy to a project that is less worthwhile—and ultimately more futile—than cultivating the virtues of self-donating love.

When we see ourselves with Heaven’s eyes, our laugh lines become marks of joy, and wrinkles are wisdom etched on our faces. Aging is also a gift of humility—should we choose to accept it. As we watch our beauty fade, we become more free to memento mori, to practice remembrance of our finitude, and to occupy our hearts and minds with higher things. We might not know exactly how much time we have left, but we know for sure that it doesn’t increase as our birthday candles do.

As our beauty fades, we become like a flower. Having bloomed brightly and offered its sweet scent, it droops, dropping petals one by one until finally, its true gift is revealed: the seeds of the next generation. A single lily produces thousands of seeds.

This can be us, if we live rightly. We could dye our petals back, inject them with hydrating serums, or paste them back onto the stems. Or we can embrace our God-given limits, like the flower that blooms wide and produces abundant life—through its very diminishment.

So too does our love only come to full fruition when we offer ourselves generatively to others. The quintessential example of this is St. Teresa of Calcutta. I certainly can’t think of anyone else whose countenance was at once more wrinkly or more beautiful.

Of course it is natural to want to preserve the beauty God has given us (and perhaps it is comforting to know that this desire will be realized in the perfection of the resurrected body). Problems arise when we cling to our earthly beauty so tightly that we are willing to sacrifice inordinate sums, subject ourselves to serious risks, and reject the gift of the way we’ve been formed. When we grasp at a beauty we are sure to lose, we forget to strive for the beauty that lasts forever.

So when that twinge starts to unsettle us, let us quell those rising criticisms and, instead, treat ourselves the way Katie’s parents should have treated her.

After all, we are—each of us—God’s little girls.

If you’d like to continue these reflections, you can subscribe below. And if someone you love is wrestling with these questions, sharing this essay may be the gift they need.

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I told God “I can’t.”

You can guess how well that went. This is a story I’ve never shared publicly—plus the early cover reveals and book news I can only share privately for now.

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Before the year closes, I want to say thank you.

If you’ve read this newsletter in 2025—avidly or occassionally—thank you for giving it your attention. As Simone Weil observed, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Amidst the many, much flashier things competing for your attention this year, you have been generous with me, and I am grateful.

This space is a place to explore embodied Catholic bioethics, grounded in prayer, family life, and the ordinary limits of being human. Every essay grows out of reading, research, and long hours of thinking carefully about embodiment, technology, motherhood, and hope. That kind of work takes time—and it also takes resources.

In 2026, I want to keep building this together.

If this newsletter has helped you think, pray, or see these questions more clearly, I’m inviting the first 100 readers to become paid subscribers at a discounted rate of $4/month ($1/week).

Paid subscribers make this work possible and help shape the character and future of the newsletter. They also receive:

• access to a subscriber-only chat for conversation and questions

• a monthly letter from me, written more like correspondence than commentary

• sneak peeks and early drafts of essays and book projects as they take shape

Free readers are—and will remain—very welcome here. But the readers who choose to support the work are the ones who make its depth, steadiness, and future possible.

Thank you for reading, thinking, and praying alongside me this year.

Here’s to building something worth tending in 2026.

AMDG,

Samantha

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P.S. A few readers have already joined—be among the first 100 to help shape this space from the start.

Books I Read in 2025

Below are the books I read this year, loosely categorized but otherwise in no particular order. I love seeing what other people are reading in similar posts, so I hope you find something here you enjoy.

This year’s most repeated authors were C.S. Lewis (5), Wendell Berry (2+lots of essays), Ginny Yurich (2), and Katherine Center (whose novels I shamelessly binged, making her the winner by a landslide at 10).

If the list below looks long to you, let me just say that beyond reading, writing, and gardening, I really have no other hobbies. You be amazed what you can accomplish when you apply singular focus to the exlusion of all else (for better or for worse!).

For more on how I “do it all,” you can read this year’s most popular post.

Research

• Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control by Paul Ramsey. Top research book of 2025.*

• Theology of the Body by Pope St. John Paul II, translated by Michael Waldstein. Too much to say. More later.

• Bioethics and Character of Human Life by Gil Meilander. Loved. 10/10.

• The Case Against Perfection by Michael Sandel. A nice start to refuting the eugenic urge, but we are going to need to do so much better.

• Begotten or Made by Oliver O’Donovan. Don’t miss the introduction by , which is amazing, whatever he tells you. Maybe I can convince him to write a forward for one of my books some day!

• These Beautiful Bones by . Excellent application and continuation of Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body in everyday experiences.

• IVF Is Not the Way by Stacy Trasancos. Great philosophical and pastoral explanation of the Church’s teachings on IVF.

• Everyday Miracles: Curing Autoimmune Disease with Stem Cells by Dr. Richard Burt. Incredible. Interviewed Dr. Burt on Brave New Us.

• Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Dr. Catherine Pakaluk. Fascinating and deeply moving. Interviewed Dr. Pakaluk on Brave New Us.

• The Transhumanist Temptation by Grayson Quay. So good. Wish I’d written it. Interviewed Quay on Brave New Us.

• Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker. Fascinating. Best book cover ever. Will cite extensively in upcoming project on embodied motherhood.

Homeschooling/Parenting

• Homeschooling: You’re Doing It Right Just by Doing It by Ginny Yurich. Better for unschoolers I think.

• Until the Streetlights Come On by Ginny Yurich. I preferred this one, hands down, and highly recommend for all parents—homeschooling and otherwise.

• Habits for a Sacred Home by Jennifer Pepito. Different than I expected. Much more of a defence against modern life than I’d anticipated.

• Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie. Required reading for homeschool moms. I reread almost every year.

Spiritual

• Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Fr. Jacques Phillipe. Should be required reading for all Christians. Top spiritual reading of 2025.*

• The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Ormartian. Helpful, practical, and powerful.

• Letters to Malcom Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis. The positive counterpart to The Screwtape Letters (which is practically free rught now on Amazon). Some fascinating insights into prayer that I had never heard elsewhere.

• God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis. If Lewis had a Substack…

• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. Challenging and practical.

Tech + Culture

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Good practical tips.

• The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch. Good reminders.

• The Tech Exit by Clare Morell. Tough, but necessary.

• The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. Still true. If I am ever able to write half as well as Wendell Berry, I will die happy.

Fiction

• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Read because it is one of Bishop Baron’s top 5 books of all time. Hated it 2/3 of the way. Have been converted and transformed. Top novel of 2025*

• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Am slowly making my way through Austen.

• Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Deeply moved, and still struck by Hanna’s observation that her adult children, because they have city jobs, have to pay for everything they need rather than provide for themselves, are “starting out so behind.”

• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. First in the space trilogy, but not required to read the others.

• Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. Second in the space trilogy, and my favorite. Continue to be amazed by the way Lewis’s fiction makes his nonfiction seem more real.

• That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. Final book in the space trilogy. Can be read on its own. Lewis said it was the fictional version of The Abolition of Man, and this is a dytopia whose warnings should be taken seriously.

• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells. Excellent short novel for those interested in science, technology, medicine, and/or bioethics.

• Next by Michael Crichton. His final novel. Terrifying because it is impossible to tell whether the headlines included are fact or fiction.

• The Ghost and Mrs Muir by R.A. Dick. A rare occassion when the movie is better. Definitely watch the movie!

• Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center. This was my gateway drug to my month-long binge of Center’s novels. Avoid the movie at all costs.

• The Bright Side of Disaster by Katherine Center. She captures early motherhood so well.

• Hello Stranger by Katherine Center. What if a portrait artist suddenly became face blind?

• What You Wish For by Katherine Center. Picks up with the adorable Duncan from Happiness for Beginners.

• Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center. A novel about a female firefighter could have been obnoxiously feminista (as Dr. Laura would say), but instead it was just awesome.

• How to Walk Away by Katherine Center. How could a novel about recovering from a plane crash be so not depressing? Center is the queen of gratitude.

• The Lost Husband by Katherine Center. Again, avoid the film.

• The Love Haters by Katherine Center. This was the only one that way just okay. Plot was far too over the top and convenient.

• The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center. As a writer, this one was especially fun.

• The Bodyguard by Katherine Center. Also great.

• The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkein. My moto for this newsletter:

  “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
  “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.

  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Thank you for your support!

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I’m writing today with an invitation that is also a moment of vulnerability. I am so excited to be launching two books in 2026, but this is by no means something I can do alone. It really does take a village—in parenting and publishing both, it seems.

That’s where you come in.

In Lent 2026, my Screwtape-inpired book for moms The Bellbind Letters will be released (February 16), followed just a few weeks later by Grow Where You’re Planted (March 17). Both have the potential to deeply impact readers, and I am so excited to share them. We are gathering a small launch team to help them find their way into the the hands of the readers who need them most.

Being on the launch team is simple yet hugely impactful. It means:

• Pre-ordering the book(s) via the links above (no charge until the book ships!)

• Sharing them with a few friends who might love them

• Leaving an honest review once they’re out

• Helping create early momentum so bookstores, libraries, and algorithms take notice

There’s no pressure to do everything—just to show up thoughtfully and faithfully.

In return, you receive:

• early PDF access to the texts

• a free hard copy in the mail when the book launches

• a complimentary subscription to Choosing Human during launch months to celebrate and share ideas and enthusiasm in the subscriber-only chat

• my undying gratitude and intercessory prayers

If you complete the launch checklist, I’ll be sending a little “thank-you” in the mail as a small sign of my gratitude.

If you’d like to apply to be part of the launch team for:

• The Bellbind Letters

• Grow Where You’re Planted

• or both!

you can do so here:

Apply for Launch Team

The team will be in touch in the new year with next steps.

Thank you for being the kind of reader who makes writing possible.

Merry almost Christmas!
Samantha