Fed up with my increasing impairment due to chronic pain, I went to see a naturopath last week. I left her office with plans and recommendations for a five-pronged approach to lessening my pain, and increasing my strength and function: 1. Weekly acupuncture 2. Regular yoga practice 3. An anti-inflammatory diet (such as this one). 4. Daily use of supplements (such as vitamins, fish oil, and herbs) 5. Some psychological counseling, to explore whether and how stress and anxiety might... Read more
Word came to me this morning that Gordon Cosby, who founded the D.C.-based Church of the Saviour in the 194os with his wife Mary, has died at age 95. The Church of the Saviour was the first Christian community I found that took both Jesus and social justice seriously, emphasizing both the “inward journey” (prayer, fostering a relationship with God, taking Jesus’s identity and ministry as Son of God seriously) and the “outward journey” (sacrificial ministry with the marginalized, particularly... Read more
From all the fraught conversations I witnessed or participated in after the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14, 2012, I keep recalling one line: I wish these guys [mentally unstable people with guns] would go back to shooting themselves in basements, instead of taking a bunch of other people with them. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary got our attention because there is something particularly heartbreaking about all those six- and seven-year-olds, and their teachers, being subjected to fatal violence... Read more
Graham Hill’s op ed about living well with less in last Sunday’s New York Times started like this: I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent... Read more
Last week’s New York Times featured a story about Joshua Miele, who at the age of four in 1973, answered the door of his Brooklyn home to a man he recognized as a neighbor. The man, for no reason other than his disordered thinking due to mental illness, threw acid into the boy’s face. A reporter who grew up in the same neighborhood at the time of the attack decided to track Miele down to see what had become of... Read more
In his vast and gripping book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, journalist Andrew Solomon discusses the two narratives that we use when we talk about life with disability in general, and/or with particular conditions, such as dwarfism, deafness, Down syndrome, autism, or my own genetic disorder, osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). The illness narrative says that these conditions are flaws to be fixed, and if they can’t be fixed, they are to be hidden or eliminated.... Read more
A friend recently sent me an article written by an Australian man who has the same bone disorder I do (osteogenesis imperfecta, or OI). Writing for the Christian journal First Things, Philip C. Burcham tells a compelling story of his family’s OI history. Seeking promising new treatments for his daughter, who inherited OI from him, the family visited a top Australian OI expert. Instead of focusing on how he might help Burcham’s daughter thrive with newer treatments, the doctor asked... Read more
Fundamentally, it is simply a sad story, one that took place just a few miles from where I live, in the hospital where I gave birth to two of my own babies. As CNN reports, Connecticut resident Crystal Kelley agreed to carry a baby for a couple who had three children and wanted a fourth. The couple’s three children had been conceived via IVF and there were pregnancy complications. The mother was unable to carry another child herself, but the... Read more
In the New York Times Sunday Review yesterday, Evgeny Morosov defines “solutionism” as “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” Observing that “Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity,” Morosov highlights proposed technological solutions to such universal problems as forgetfulness and inconsistency. Reading the editorial,... Read more
Good morning friends. I will be back with some original stuff of my very own next week. I’d like to end this week with one more link to a colleague’s post. I first got to know Adam McHugh (as much as one can get to know someone solely through Facebook, blogging, and emails) because of his book Introverts in the Church and his blog of the same name. But Adam is far more than a champion of introverts and the... Read more
Ellen Painter Dollar
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