In early 2010, Amy Julia Becker was a wife and mother of two, an MDiv student at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the author of an unpublished book about raising a child with Down syndrome. The book had been rejected by 48 publishers. "I put the project away, focused on finishing my last semester at Princeton, and started writing about other things," says Becker. Those other things included Avatar, sex scandals, and the Easter Bunny, a few of the topics she explored in her first Her.meneutics posts. Within a few months of writing for CT's then-fairly new women's site, Becker was approached by two editors wanting to publish the book, which would become A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny.

If Her.meneutics had any role to play, though, it was simply to highlight a gift previously unnoticed: specifically, Becker's gift for applying deep Christian thinking to ethically thorny issues of the day, in a style both clear and graceful. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, Parents magazine, and The Atlantic, and her story of raising Penny was featured in Time magazine in 2011. We're delighted to feature Becker's writing on a brand-new CT blog, Thin Places. In the following interview, Becker talks to Katelyn Beaty about her hopes for the new site.