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Thin Places

Imagine a feast. Actually, no. That would be too much. Imagine going to your favorite restaurant. Starting with your favorite soup and proceeding to eat the perfect amount of your favorite entrée, leaving just enough room for dessert. Or imagine a visit to the Louvre and being the only person in the room with the…

There were three pediatricians in our wedding party. One bridesmaid. Two groomsmen. So we have a nice list of friends to call whenever we have a question. I’ve asked them to talk me through the signs of dehydration, the best way to treat wheezing, the various questions to ask back when one doctor suspected Penny…

Jane Steen is a freelance commercial writer working on her first novel. She blogs at http://keepgoingyoufool.blogspot.com We’re a reading family. Not quite as much as we used to be, now that the Internet and our gadgets have stolen away so much of our attention. Yet walk into our house and you’ll see books–lots of them. My…

Real Simple magazine is running an essay contest where entrants are invited to finish this sentence: “I never thought I’d…” Perhaps I’ll submit an entry about having a daughter with Down syndrome. We’ll see. But I’m pretty sure that what I’m about to write here wouldn’t win. While it’s true that I never thought I’d…

What if someone knew everything about you? Really, everything. All the good and all the bad. What if someone knew the mean words you thought but didn’t say this morning? Or the kind deed you were going to do but didn’t because you were tired, or embarrassed, or because you forgot? What if someone counted…

A few years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report about reading. I wasn’t surprised to find that literacy rates are higher among children whose parents read to them at home. What surprised me was that literacy raters are higher still among children who see their parents reading. In fact, watching their…

Yet another (see last week’s post) Books and Culture article that made me think, encouraged me, and was informative: “The Church on a Justice Mission.”  It describes the work of IJM (the International Justice Mission), the recent commitment among evangelical churches to social justice work, particularly around sex trafficking, and it offers sobering statistics about…

We don’t currently own a TV, so we do a fair amount of reading in our household. That’s true of Peter and me, but it’s also true of our children. So I thought this week’s “What I’m Reading” should include the picture books that I get to enjoy on a daily basis.  If I ask…

(Note: the photo is nearly two years old, but it’s a good picture of what life in our household feels like at its harder moments.) Marriage and especially children don’t bring immediate, subjective happiness. Sure, when William breaks out into song: “Thank you Father!” at the sight of apricots, it makes me happy. When Penny…

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer whose work focuses on faith, parenthood and disability. She is writing a book on the ethics and theology of reproductive technology, genetic screening and disability, and she blogs at Choices That Matter and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.     A few weeks ago, when we were leaving…
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