2014
I'm starting to feel like an old lady. I shook my head at Miley Cyrus at the MTV Music Awards and at Beyonce's performance for the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show. I went out for a drink with friends on my 37th birthday, and we talked for an hour about how to protect ...
I'm in Grand Rapids at the Festival of Faith and Writing as I write, and my head is swimming with new books to read and new ideas to consider, and that's only after hearing four speakers/panels on the first day. But it strikes me that I ought to talk about books today ...
It's been six years since the beginning of the Great Recession. Six years of conversations about unemployment, underemployment, mortgage-backed securities, and millions of Americans who have seen their fortunes fall. Six years of bemoaning Wall Street. Six years of reports ...
Repent sounds like such a religious word, like street preachers shouting, like moralists wagging fingers. But I learned a long time ago that the literal translation of "repent" is to turn around. "Hey, buddy, you're headed in the wrong direction"—that ...
"If people in your community are going to Wal-Mart in their wheelchairs but not coming to your church, a lot of times the church community calls them shut-ins. They're not shut-ins; they're just shut out of the church" (Ned Stoller (cited in Making Churches ...
I first happened upon Micha Boyett's blog, then called The Mama Monk, a few years ago. A young mother trying to figure out how to reimagine her life as a Christian now that she had small children and housework rather than "official ministry" to do, a young mother ...
On Monday of this past week I hit "send" and submitted the final final final draft of my manuscript for my next book, Small Talk: Learning from my Children about What Matters Most. It's a book filled with thoughts and questions that my children have asked or ...
I think of myself as a rather laissez faire parent. I believe in germs and dirt. My kids, including my three-year old, go outside and play without my immediate supervision. When they fall down, I wait to make sure they are really truly hurt before I comfort them (like when ...
Last Friday, Pope Francis broke with tradition when he knelt down at a confessional in public view and gave his confession to an ordinary priest. Typically the Pope confesses in private, but after preaching a sermon in which he talked about our common sinfulness, he also ...
It had been more than a year since we last buried a child. And though we all knew it would eventually happen again, it felt like an especially hard blow. When the time came, Special Hope Network had existed in Lusaka, Zambia, for close to four years and we had been serving ...
Peter and I took Penny and William, our two older kids, to see Frozen in the theater in January. I was nearly as excited as the children. I had read the endless praise, including the writer who called it the best Disney movie since The Lion King (which I saw four times in ...
In case you haven't noticed, every week on Friday I offer a list of blogposts and articles you might enjoy over the weekend on the topics I try to cover on this blog--faith, family, disability, and culture.
Faith:
Andrea Palpant Dilley shares her personal faith experience ...
I had a roommate in college who went out (to a party, that is) four nights a week. If she returned to our room at all, it was usually long after I had gone to bed. Much as I enjoyed her company, I saw us as very different. I was organized and well-behaved. She was wild and ...
A few years back, I read a beautiful and heart-wrenching article in the Boston Globe about a family who had adopted a child from Uganda named Ruth. I reached out to the author, Meadow Rue Merrill, and an online friendship budded in time. Since then, I've had the privilege ...
I left our pediatrician's office feeling somewhat self-satisfied. The doctor had asked for a report on my three-year old daughter Marilee's use of iPads, iPhones, and television. She came in under the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for hours of screen ...
2015
