Recorded live at the Rocky Mountain Catholic Home Educators Conference (June 20, 2026)

Our homes are not just places where we live—they are places where souls are formed.

In this keynote from the 2026 Rocky Mountain Catholic Home Educators Conference, Samantha Stephenson invites parents to see their vocation with fresh eyes. In a culture saturated with anxiety, distraction, algorithms, and competing voices, mothers and fathers are called to become guardians of their homes—carefully discerning what enters their family's imagination, habits, and hearts.

Drawing from Scripture, Catholic tradition, and practical wisdom for everyday family life, Samantha explores how we can cultivate homes rooted in truth, beauty, goodness, and peace. Rather than reacting to every cultural trend or technological advance, Christian families are called to become intentional communities that form children capable of recognizing the voice of the Good Shepherd.

Whether you're homeschooling, raising young children, or simply longing for a more peaceful home, this talk offers encouragement and practical tools for reclaiming your family's attention, imagination, and mission.

In this episode:

Why parents are the primary formators of their children's hearts and minds

How modern media and technology compete for our attention

Learning to recognize the difference between God's voice and the voices of fear, consumerism, and distraction

Building a home centered on truth, beauty, and goodness

Creating habits that foster peace instead of anxiety

Practical ways to cultivate silence, prayer, and wonder in family life

Why the culture of your home matters more than the culture around you

If this episode encouraged you, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with another parent who could use a little encouragement.

Connect with Samantha

🌿 Newsletter: Choosing Human

🎙️ Podcast: Brave New Us

📚 Books:

Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad

The Bellbind Letters

Grow Where You're Planted

Thank you for listening.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we search for information, write, create, learn, and even pray. But what happens when AI enters the life of the Church?

In this episode of Brave New Us, Samantha Stephenson sits down with Tim, creator of Chatechism, one of the most ambitious Catholic AI projects to date. Together they explore not only what AI can do for Catholics, but also where it should—and shouldn't—go.

Rather than offering easy answers, this conversation wrestles honestly with some of the biggest questions facing the Church in the age of artificial intelligence: Can an AI ever be trusted with spiritual guidance? What responsibilities do Catholic developers have toward truth, ecology, and the common good? Should AI help write homilies or daily reflections? And what might faithful innovation actually look like?

Whether you're excited about AI, deeply skeptical, or somewhere in between, this episode offers a thoughtful Catholic framework for engaging one of the defining technologies of our time.

In this episode:

Why Catholics shouldn't simply fear artificial intelligence—or embrace it uncritically.

How large language models actually work, and why hallucinations remain one of their biggest limitations.

Why Chatechism was created and the vision behind building a distinctly Catholic AI.

What makes a trustworthy Catholic AI different from a generic chatbot trained on religious content.

The ethical responsibilities of Catholic AI developers, including concerns about bias, reliability, environmental costs, and cooperation with morally problematic technology companies.

How one Catholic family is navigating AI with children of every age—from toddlers to adults.

The risks AI poses to education, creativity, and authentic human formation.

Whether AI-generated spiritual reflections and homilies enrich the Church—or risk displacing the unique work of the Holy Spirit through human authors, pastors, and communities.

Why Catholics need to help shape the future of artificial intelligence instead of watching from the sidelines.

Tim's answer to the Brave New Us closing question: Who best embodies what it means to be truly human?

Resources Mentioned

Chatechism

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For more, check out Samantha’s article “Can AI Be Redeemed?”

Connect with Samantha

If you enjoy thoughtful conversations about biotechnology, artificial intelligence, faith, and what it means to remain deeply human in an age of rapid technological change, subscribe to Brave New Us wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also find Samantha's writing at Choosing Human, where she explores bioethics, motherhood, technology, and Christian anthropology.

What if the answer isn’t escaping modern life, but learning to inhabit it differently?

In this season finale, Samantha reflects on her own attraction to the homestead ideal — and why she ultimately reconsidered what it means to live sustainably, faithfully, and attentively in the place God has already given her.

This episode marks the beginning of a summer pause for Brave New Us and an invitation to continue the conversation through gardening, stewardship, and cultivation on YouTube.

In this episode:

The appeal and limits of the homestead dream

Stewardship versus escape

Gardening as an embodied spiritual practice

An invitation to grow where you’re planted

Summer Update:
Brave New Us will return after a seasonal break. In the meantime, join Samantha on YouTube for garden stories, practical growing, and reflections on embodiment, limits, and care for creation.

Buy the book:

Grow Where You’re Planted: Reclaming Eden in Your Own Backyard

YouTube

Medical breakthroughs often arrive faster than our moral vocabulary can keep up.

Samantha speaks with Andrew Kubick of the National Catholic Bioethics Center about uterine transplantation — from its therapeutic promise for women experiencing infertility to the profound ethical questions raised as reproductive technology expands toward increasingly experimental possibilities.

When medicine gains the power not only to heal but to redesign reproduction, how should we think about human dignity, motherhood, and the meaning of the body itself?

In this episode:

The science and ethics of uterine transplants

Therapeutic medicine vs. technological expansion

Bioethics and Catholic moral reasoning

The cultural implications of redefining reproduction

Buy the book:

Transplanting the Womb

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What if health begins not with control, but with trust?

Samantha speaks with a Catholic nutritionist about holistic health, women’s metabolism, and the growing desire to step out of cycles of restriction and anxiety surrounding food and wellness.

Together they explore how Christian anthropology offers a different starting point for health: the body as created good, meaningful, and worthy of care rather than suspicion.

In this episode:

Holistic health and the limits of modern wellness culture

Women’s health, metabolism, and stress

Faith and nutrition

Learning to cooperate with the body instead of fighting it

Buy the Book:

Made Good

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Modern culture is often described as disembodied — detached from physical reality and increasingly virtual. But is that diagnosis accurate?

In this episode, Samantha responds to arguments about “disembodiment,” proposing instead that modern life has produced a cluster of bodily effects: heightened anxiety about health, constant self-monitoring, and confusion about what the body means or how it should be understood.

Rather than abandoning the body, we may be struggling to interpret it.

In this episode:

A response to Helen Roy’s argument on disembodiment

Why modern people are hyper-focused on their bodies rather than detached from them

Technology, medicine, and the loss of bodily intelligibility

How diagnosing the problem shapes the path toward healing

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Infertility is often treated as a medical problem waiting for a solution. But for many women, the deeper questions begin after diagnosis.

Samantha speaks with Leigh Snead, author of Infertile but Fruitful, about the emotional, spiritual, and relational realities of infertility — and the challenge of understanding the meaning of spiritual motherhood when life unfolds differently than expected.

Together they explore how faith reframes suffering, vocation, and hope without reducing them to easy answers.

In this episode:

The lived experience of infertility beyond clinical language

Marriage, identity, and waiting

Christian understandings of fruitfulness

Finding meaning when life diverges from long-held expectations

Buy the book:

Infertile But Fruitful

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Language does more than describe reality. Over time, it teaches us how to see it.

In this episode of Brave New Us, Samantha shares a reading and reflection connected to her spiritual fiction project, The Bellbind Letters, exploring how cultural change often begins not with laws or technologies, but with shifts in vocabulary — especially around the body, femininity, and identity.

What happens when familiar words slowly take on new meanings? And how does language shape the way a society understands what it means to be human?

This episode opens a larger season-long conversation about embodiment, fertility, health, and the search for a more grounded way of living in a technological age.

In this episode:

How language quietly reshapes culture

Why debates about the body are often linguistic before they are political

Fiction as a tool for cultural and moral imagination

Setting the stage for conversations on infertility, health, and embodied life

Buy the book:

The Bellbind Letters

Subscribe to the newsletter!

In a culture that normalizes medical means for non-medical problems, where do we draw the line in the pursuit of beauty?

In This Episode
We explore the ethics of cosmetic procedures—from “baby Botox” and fillers to plastic surgery—and what they communicate about our bodies, our worth, and our deepest desires. Through the story of “Katie” and reflections from Theology of the Body, we ask:

Does altering a healthy body help us love ourselves…or teach us to reject the gift we’ve been given?

Is cosmetic “enhancement” actually making women more confident, or more insecure?

How do we distinguish healing therapies from enhancements driven by cultural pressure?

What does aging reveal about love, humility, and what lasts forever?

Mentioned & Linked in This Episode

Essay: Reject and Inject: The Ethics of Cosmetic Procedures

Concepts from Theology of the Body (St. John Paul II)

Reflections inspired by the life of Servant of God Chiara Corbella Petrillo

Cultural trends: “Sephora kids,” filters, and beauty consumerism

Resources from Samantha

Brave New Us podcast back catalog

Essays on biotechnology, beauty culture, and being human at choosinghuman.org

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For essays, link roundups, and book updates.

Grow Where You’re Planted — preorder bonuses include a downloadable list of favorite non-toxic products

Join the Conversation
Have thoughts on this episode or beauty culture? Join the discussion at choosinghuman.org.

If this episode resonated with you, consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts—it helps others find the show.

Is assisted suicide compassionate—or is it a cultural failure to respond humanely to suffering?

In this episode of Brave New Us, host Samantha Stephenson speaks with author and bioethics speaker Stephanie Gray Connors about physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and end-of-life ethics in the age of medical and technological power. Drawing on her book On Assisted Suicide (Word on Fire’s Dignity series), Stephanie examines how language like “death with dignity” and “medical aid in dying” reshapes our moral imagination—and why dignity is not something we lose when we suffer.

From Canada’s rapidly expanding MAiD program to suicide pods in Europe and growing pressure on doctors and patients alike, this conversation explores what happens when a culture begins to treat death as a solution. We discuss suffering, autonomy, coercion, meaning, and the profound human need for relationship at the end of life.

If you’re wrestling with questions about assisted suicide, euthanasia, medical ethics, or how to speak compassionately about death and dignity, this episode offers clarity without abstraction—and hope without denial.

In this episode, we explore:

Assisted suicide vs. natural death: what’s the ethical difference?

Why “death with dignity” is a misleading phrase

Canada’s MAiD program and rising assisted-death rates

How normalization creates pressure on the elderly, disabled, and poor

The illusion of control at the end of life

Viktor Frankl, meaning, and despair in the face of suffering

What compassionate, life-affirming end-of-life care really looks like

About the guest

Stephanie Gray Connors is an author and international speaker on bioethics, abortion, assisted suicide, and human dignity. She is the author of On Assisted Suicide in the Word on Fire Dignity Series and has debated and presented on life issues across North America. Originally from Canada and now living in the United States, she brings firsthand insight into the ethical and cultural consequences of legalized assisted suicide.

Mentioned in this episode

On Assisted Suicide — Stephanie Gray Connors

Suicide Pods

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada

The Atlantic on assisted suicide and physician pressure

Mother euthanizes 12-year-old daughter

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Nick Vujicic and The Butterfly Circus

Mattie Stepanick

Loveunleasheslife.com

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