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Thin Places

A few months into our life with a child with Down syndrome, I realized that we live in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right resources. We are within an hour of the best children’s hospital in the nation, a hospital that has a satellite office 15 minutes away.…

A short reflection the day after Mother’s Day: “The ethic of giftedness, under siege in sports, persists in the practice of parenting. But here, too, bioengineering and genetic enhancement threaten to dislodge it. To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our…

I have a new post at Patheos in anticipation of Mother’s Day. It begins: Yesterday I heard Betsy Stevenson, of the Wharton School of Business, talking about happiness and being a Mom. She said, on Marketplace, “There is an unhappy fact to ponder this Mother’s Day: Women with children are less happy than similar women…

I turned in my thesis last Friday night. Well, kind of. I finished my thesis last Friday night and submitted it by email only to discover on Monday that I had submitted a draft from twelve hours earlier. A draft complete with notes like “INSERT QUOTE HERE,” no title page, no footnotes. Thankfully, my gracious…

I have a new post on her.meneutics about the ethical and theological concerns raised by the Pill. It begins: The Pill turned 50 this year, and Time magazine commemorated the anniversary last week with Nancy Gibbs’s cover story, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill.” Gibbs thoroughly and thoughtfully provides a scientific and…

There’s a little girl in Penny’s class who always arrives with armfuls of stuff. A transformer. A wooden crawfish. A princess. A baby doll. Something different every day, thrust into the hands of her teachers. Penny has never been particularly impressed with stuff. She shares pretty easily. She rarely insists on a particular article of…

Penelope Ayers is now available on Kindle. Unfortunately, the Kindle edition is not in the same place as the paperback. Go figure (and if any of you are tech savvy and know how to fix this discrepancy, please comment!). And to read a new review, and get introduced to an interesting blog (Holy Vernacular!) click…

Peter was talking with a friend of ours. I don’t know the context, but she called something “retarded” as they talked. We bumped into her again the next day. She reached out and touched Peter’s arm. “I’m so sorry about what I said yesterday. I don’t know if you even noticed, but I was sleep…

I read a lot. Every night before bed. In the bathroom while I’m brushing my teeth or blow drying my hair. If I happen to catch a meal alone. In addition to an array of magazines, I usually have at least two books going. Currently, my bedside table includes: Anagrams by Lorrie Moore, an advance…

I’m sure that everyone knows the feeling. One day you hear yourself talking, and you think, “I sound just like my mother” (or father, or best friend, or whoever). I still find myself using the same incredulous tone modeled to me by my boss at my first job out of college. And I find myself,…
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