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Thin Places

Peter and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. We did way back when, in the early dating years, when we were teenagers. But we soon decided it was simply an opportunity to support Hallmark, and we decided to celebrate the joys of our relationship throughout the year. We’re fortunate enough to have a weekly date night,…

I have a new post at her.meneutics: “The State of Sex.”  It begins: When it comes to attitudes about sex in America, I often find myself somewhere between cynical and hopeless. I read statistics about 95 percent of adults losing their virginity before marriage. I look at the magazine rack in the grocery store and…

It is a struggle for me to know how to describe our 5-year old daughter Penny, who has Down syndrome. On the one hand, I want to tell skeptical strangers that she’s smart, and I want to back up that loaded word with proof of her accomplishments. I want to describe how she asks, “Mom,…

I used to get emails from an organization–I think it was called “Save Darfur”–and those emails arrived about once a week. For a time, I read them and did nothing in response to their content. Then I started deleting them without opening them at all. Then I unsubscribed from their email list. Even with a…

 Over the past several weeks, we have been highlighting writings by adults with Down Syndrome and the book Writing Our Lives by those same adults, edited by Mary Ann Jansen. This week we have a collection of poems and an essay from the book.  To purchase your own copy of Writing Our Lives click here.…

Yesterday, I posted a question from a reader about whether my religious faith provides me with continuous inspiration. Here’s my response:   My favorite preacher, Tim Keller, has often said that there is a big difference between inspiration and transformation. Inspiration is momentary and fleeting–exactly what you describe in reading a line from a poem…

A friend of mine (and reader of this blog) recently wrote an email in which she asked,   “Does Christianity/Christian practice/ the Bible work for you as any sort of inspiration to keep your mind on higher things, let’s call them?   I’ve long wanted to keep my focus, as best as I can, off…

Over the course of the fall, I ran a series of posts called “Questions for Jesus.” Recently, I worked with the editors at beliefnet to turn those posts into a “gallery”–a slide show of sorts with various questions that people ask Jesus throughout the gospels and Jesus’ response to them. You can check it out…

It’s been my habit for years. Every night before I go to sleep, I pull an index card out of the top drawer of my bedside table. I jot down the “to do’s” floating around in my head. When I’m done, the card might include appointments for the next day. It might note errands or…

The other night, Penny and William and I were reading Corduroy, a children’s book about a bear in a department store. A little girl saves her money to buy the bear. And they all lived happily ever after. As we were reading, Penny asked, “Mom, what’s a piggy bank?” I said, “Oh, it’s a place…
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