Michael Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in an the Age of Genetic Engineering is thoughtful, well-written, and, despite Sandel’s academic credentials, accessible to any reader. It is also very short (128 very small pages), and thus it is a great place to start if you are interested in learning some of the basic ethical issues at stake in debates about athletic enhancement (steroids, etc.), designer children, eugenics, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. Sandel is a teacher at Harvard,... Read more

“Don’t grab!” We hear those words a lot. It might be Peter or me admonishing one of our children. Or, just as likely, Penny reprimanding her brother. Despite the frequency of the command, grabbing is a part of the daily routine. Penny grabs a toy from William. William grabs my phone. Penny grabs the water on my bedside table. William grabs Penny’s bear. Invariably, there are tears, or pouts, or spills. So we start from the beginning again: “Instead of... Read more

I have a new post at her.meneutics about the spiritual significance of Williams Syndrome. It is called “The Anti-Racist, Anti-Fear Gene.” Incidentally, the title is somewhat misleading as Williams Syndrome involves the absence of certain genes, but that’s somewhat beside the point. The post begins: Over the past month, NPR has addressed various aspects of Williams syndrome, a rare chromosomal condition in which a series of genes on one chromosome has been deleted.Williams syndrome (also Williams–Beuren syndrome, or WBS) is... Read more

I have a new post at BLOOM: Parenting Children with Disabilities. I’m printing it here in full, although I also encourage you to click over to BLOOM when you’re done reading and scroll through the content there. Anyway, here’s the post, which should make sense of the photo, taken when Penny was in the Emergency Room at thirteen-months old: “Penny’s tough.” He said it because he wanted to support us. Peter and I were on vacation with close friends, and... Read more

A few months into our life with a child with Down syndrome, I realized that we live in exactly the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right resources. We are within an hour of the best children’s hospital in the nation, a hospital that has a satellite office 15 minutes away. People move to our state because of the quality of services and education for kids with special needs. We live, literally, one mile from the... Read more

A short reflection the day after Mother’s Day: “The ethic of giftedness, under siege in sports, persists in the practice of parenting. But here, too, bioengineering and genetic enhancement threaten to dislodge it. To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our ambition. Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have. We choose our friends... Read more

I have a new post at Patheos in anticipation of Mother’s Day. It begins: Yesterday I heard Betsy Stevenson, of the Wharton School of Business, talking about happiness and being a Mom. She said, on Marketplace, “There is an unhappy fact to ponder this Mother’s Day: Women with children are less happy than similar women without. The same is true for men. When people hear this fact they immediately suspect that happiness gains from children must exist somewhere. Aren’t people... Read more

I turned in my thesis last Friday night. Well, kind of. I finished my thesis last Friday night and submitted it by email only to discover on Monday that I had submitted a draft from twelve hours earlier. A draft complete with notes like “INSERT QUOTE HERE,” no title page, no footnotes. Thankfully, my gracious professor didn’t seem to care as I sent the final version. It’s done. It’s in. And I will graduate from Seminary seven years after I... Read more

I have a new post on her.meneutics about the ethical and theological concerns raised by the Pill. It begins: The Pill turned 50 this year, and Time magazine commemorated the anniversary last week with Nancy Gibbs’s cover story, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill.” Gibbs thoroughly and thoughtfully provides a scientific and sociological history of birth control, while addressing some of the ethical questions raised by the little tablet, swallowed by more than 100 million women worldwide... Read more

There’s a little girl in Penny’s class who always arrives with armfuls of stuff. A transformer. A wooden crawfish. A princess. A baby doll. Something different every day, thrust into the hands of her teachers. Penny has never been particularly impressed with stuff. She shares pretty easily. She rarely insists on a particular article of clothing. If “Mr. Bear” is not available at bedtime, she protests, but she gets over it without tears. So I was somewhat surprised last week... Read more