Celebrate + Worship + Recharge + Be Blessed
Guest Speakers, March 28, 2008
Immaculée Ilibagiza is a living example of faith put into action. Immaculee's life transformed dramatically in 1994 during the Rwanda genocide when she and seven other women huddled silently together in a cramped bathroom of a local pastor's house for 91 days!
Immaculee entered the bathroom a young university student with a loving family weighing 100 pounds. She emerged from the bathroom weighing 65 pounds only to find that her whole family (with the exception of one brother who had been studying out of the country) had been brutally murdered. But she survived to share the story and her miraculous transition into forgiveness and a profound relationship with God.
Left to Tell, Immaculee's first book, has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide, was on the New York Times Bestseller List for two weeks, been made into a documentary, and through her Left to Tell Charitable Fund has raised over $150,000 for the orphans of Rwanda. The importance of her story has been recognized and honored with numerous humanitarian awards.
Gretchen Harris, UCMVA's "Female Vocalist of the Year", is a Catholic singer/songwriter whose music expresses her love for God and Church. Songs from her six CDs can be heard on Catholic and Christian radio stations in the United States and many other countries, in addition to the worldwide radio outreach of EWTN.
The latest addition to the catalog is "SING to the LORD," a CD full of beautiful songs sung TO God... gorgeous settings of well-known and deeply loved tunes that touch the soul and lift the heart, including "Prayer of St. Francis," "You Are Near," "Shepherd Me, O God," and "Breathe."
Colleen Carroll Campbell, is an author, columnist, television host, and former White House speechwriter, frequently contributes to national publications and speaks to audiences across America.
She is the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola Press, 2002) which explores the appeal of traditional religion and morality to a growing number of young Americans.
Now a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, she is an op-ed columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a frequent commentator on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, a regular contributor to such national publications as The Weekly Standard, National Review Online, and First Things, and host of "Faith & Culture", a weekly television show that airs internationally on EWTN, the world's largest religious media network.
Amy Welborn is the author of fifteen books, including The Catholic Woman's Book of Days (Loyola Press), The Words We Pray (Loyola Press), De-Coding Mary Magdalene (Our Sunday Visitor), the Prove It series of apologetics for youth and most recently Mary and the Christian Life (Word Among Us Press).
She has written for the Catholic press for twenty years, in publications ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to Commonweal. She has a BA in history from the University of Tennessee and an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University. She is married and the mother of five children.