According to the Mayans, the world was supposed to end on Friday. It didn’t. But it sure feels like a bit like the end of the world as we know it, doesn’t it? The afternoon of December 14, some friends and I remarked that it felt an awful lot like 9/11. We had that same 9/11 sense of absorbing mind-boggling tragedy and realizing that nothing would ever be quite the same. Indeed, daily routines in the week that followed the... Read more
As the one-year anniversary of my book publication approaches in January, I’m devoting Fridays from now until the end of the year to revisiting the book’s major themes. Each Friday, I’ll post an excerpt from No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Suffering in an Age of Advanced Reproduction. This week’s excerpt focuses on the nature of suffering. I thought this passage might be particularly relevant given that our nation is grappling with the terrible suffering wrought by... Read more
There are so many valuable words coming from my writing friends and colleagues in the Sandy Hook shooting’s aftermath that I could sit at the computer, posting links to my Facebook page all day long. Here are three I’d like to share with you: Fellow Patheos blogger and my good friend Amy Julia Becker, like me, has a first grader, the same age as the precious children murdered last Friday. In this piece for The Atlantic, she contemplates the human... Read more
It blooms every Christmas and every Easter. I don’t do anything to make that happen. I water it when I remember to. I keep it in an east-facing window where it gets some sun but not too much. Other than that, I put absolutely no effort into this little plant. And still, every Christmas, every Easter…blooms. Perfectly timed little gifts. Grace unbidden, inexplicable. Read more
As I sat on the sunny bench in my front yard on Friday afternoon, where I had planned to tie up a few loose writing ends and was quickly waylaid by the awful news coming out of the small town not far west of here, I thought about whether and how to respond. I didn’t want anyone to perceive a blog post about this tragic event as a manipulative bid to get page views. I certainly wasn’t thinking about how... Read more
As I huddled beneath my flannel sheets Friday night, two of my children safely in their beds, my oldest daughter out with my husband driving several of her friends home, I surprised myself by whispering, “There but for the grace of God go I,” that old cliché that comes in response to tragedy. Friday’s Newtown, Conn., school shooting, which resulted in 20 children’s murders, took place in my small state, in a town whose bare winter trees and sturdy New... Read more
I came home from a lovely lunch with my mom to headlines that 27 people are dead in an elementary school not far from where I live. At least 18 are children. One account said that the gunman opened fire in a kindergarten classroom. I’m going to repost what I wrote after another (of the many) mass shootings we’ve had in our nation this year. Comments are closed on this post. When I have a crystal-clear picture of the kindergarten... Read more
As the one-year anniversary of my book publication approaches in January, I’m devoting Fridays from now until the end of the year to revisiting the book’s major themes. Each Friday, I’ll post an excerpt from No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Suffering in an Age of Advanced Reproduction. This week’s excerpt focuses on the rapidly growing practice of “fertility tourism,” particularly in India. In June 2010, channel HBO2 aired a documentary titled Google Baby, about the growing... Read more
My Advent posts this year have centered on a single theme—that honoring Advent does not require us to retreat from busy Christmas preparation, that our thing- and task-focused preparations might even be particularly appropriate for a God who came to us as an actual needy baby born in a stinky stable. Because I am fully immersed in my own holiday preparations, as well as working to meet a few non-negotiable work deadlines, original blog posts are likely to be few... Read more
For many female Christian writers, particularly those like me who write about theology in non-academic terms and in the context of our lives as mothers, neighbors, church members, and writers, novelist and spiritual memoirist Anne Lamott embodies our highest aspirations. I remember reading her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, and being completely surprised and enchanted by the gems of practical theology sprinkled throughout her account of the usual indignities and frustrations of bearing and nurturing... Read more
Ellen Painter Dollar
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