4 Convos That Defined the Week: A Teacher's Battle, Spiritual Warfare and a Mom's Grief

Part of what we hope to do here at The Cultural Compass is to bring you insightful interviews and testimonies from ordinary people who have been put in extraordinary situations. First-time reader? We’d love your feedback on our story selection! Already a subscriber? Thanks for being here – and please consider sharing!

Teacher Wins Big Victory

A Virginia teacher is celebrating victory after fighting back over the claim she was “asked to lie to parents about their own children.”

Deb Figliola, a middle school teacher, told CBN News she felt compelled to take a stand after the Harrisonburg City Public School Board reportedly created a new policy she believes upended parents’ rights.

“A little over three years ago, we were given a training that told us as a staff — and this training was given to all staff and all personnel within the school district — that we would have to ask students for what they wanted to be called and what pronoun they preferred,” she said. “And then we had to always refer to them that way.”

Beyond that, Figliola said teachers were told not to tell parents about the use of these pronouns. She said she took issue with the policy and the district, where she has been teaching for more than a decade.

“When I heard that training, I basically went back to my office, my classroom, and wrote … down some thoughts,” she said. “I still have the paper and I just wrote, ‘I can’t lie. I’m not going to lie to kids and I’m not going to lie to parents.'”

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Pastor Tackles Spiritual Warfare

Pastor Jonathan Pokluda is on a mission to help people “identify spiritual warfare” and “defeat the enemy.”

“Being raised Catholic, I would see statues of angels and demons, and I was taught in religion class about the spiritual war that was happening around me,” he said. “And I knew the story in Genesis 3, the fall, you know the tempting of Satan in the Garden of Eden.”

Pokluda continued, “But, if this war was happening around us, I knew very little about it. And I didn’t know what could happen.”

Listen to the rest of the interview here and read the story here.

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A Mother’s Grief

More than a month after Cathy Tenedorio’s son, Matthew, was killed during the New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans, she’s relying on her faith to get through rapid waves of emotion.

On Sunday, Tenedorio and her husband, Louis, were invited to the 2025 Super Bowl along with first responders and other victims’ family members to honor the lives of those lost.

She told CBN News that the scene was “very moving” to be part of.

“They honored the 14 victims,” Tenedorio said. “It was just beautiful.”

She said the entire experience was deeply “comforting” and made her and her husband “feel special,” as she recognized there are many other parents who face similar pain but who don’t get a lot of attention or help publicly in navigating such dynamics.

Read the rest of the story here.

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A Detransitioner’s Journey

I shared this particular story earlier this week, but it’s worth repeating again because the transgender lobby is kicking their efforts to allow minors to receive life-altering sex change operations and debilitating puberty-blocking medication to the next level.

Oli London once lived as a woman but has detransitioned from his gender-confused life and now vocally speaks out to help others facing gender dysphoria, recently told CBN News about the “very dark headspace” many people facing gender confusion often experience.