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Rod Dreher

Imagine our surprise to see a big NYT feature on the amazing Freda Rosenfeld, the Brooklyn woman who taught our Matthew how to nurse. Excerpt: About 74 percent of American mothers tried breast-feeding their newborns in 2006, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That was up from 58…

Or rather, what God did through her. From the comboxes this morning: Dear Ruthie and Mr Mike, I was your nurse for only 12 hours. I had six other patients that night, but you were the only one who smiled through tears after having received the worst news. I googled your name in hopes to…

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for making my niece Claire his Face of the Day today, and for linking to all my posts about my sister and her cancer. I wrote to Andrew from the airport yesterday and told him what was happening to my sister, and what an example she’s been to me, and asked…

“Well,” said my sister to me this morning, “I was diagnosed on Tuesday, and the next day was Ash Wednesday. I guess this is my Lent.” The people of the Church used to think of Lent as a journey of dying to self, and dying into sanctification. But as the Orthodox Father Alexander Schmemann observes,…

That’s a photo of my sister Ruthie Leming and her daughter Claire in the hospital this morning, shortly after we brought the girls in to see their mother. I think the look on Claire’s face upon being reunited with her Mama after a long night speaks more eloquently than I can about the love in…

Andy Crouch, contemplating the possibility of lung cancer at age 42 after troubling medical test results, thinks of three things: First, I love the world. E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web: “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” Yes. The…

Back home in the country from a long day at the hospital. The word from the oncologist was pretty grim. Ruthie is in Stage Four. They rushed Ruthie into radiation therapy at once after he read her latest MRI results. We have to hope and pray they can knock out the cancer in her brain…

I am finding it hard to maintain my prayers right now. I know in my head that just because my sister has not experienced a miraculous recovery and jumped out of bed to second-line out of the hospital, that does not mean my prayers have been in vain. I’ve got enough sense to know that’s…

How do you know you’re at a hospital in south Louisiana? At the coffee shop, during Carnival season they sell king cake by the slice. I got a kick out of that today, and was pleased and comforted to see so many people walking around this Ash Wednesday with a smudge on their foreheads. No…

On the way out the door to the airport yesterday, I pulled a few books off my shelf that I thought might be useful reading in the days to come. One I grabbed was a thin but rich book by the Orthodox Christian philosopher Jean-Claude Larchet, called “The Theology of Illness.” I read it last…
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