Today marks the official release of friend Emily Wierenga’s book, Mom in the Mirror. Wierenga, a former anorexic, and Dena Cabrera, an expert on eating disorders, teamed up to write a book that tackles issues of post-pregnancy body image for [...]

The following guest post ran yesterday on author Amy Julia Becker’s blog, “Thin Places,” as an installation in her ongoing series, “Perfectly Human.”  The reflections materialized after an afternoon spent teaching my now three-and-a-half-year-old daughter how to jump off a one-foot step.  [...]

I’ve missed you here at this intersection between life and God!  Last week’s scramble to meet a self-imposed deadline for Grace Sticks meant a cyber fast of sorts, but I’m grateful to be back. By way of an update to catch us [...]

Yesterday’s post contained an untruth. Last night I went back and read a sentence that claimed a previous unfamiliarity with the reality that God can meet us everywhere, when in actuality I’ve always known intellectually that God can meet us anywhere and everywhere.  [...]

  My favorite poem from the recent series by Andrew Sullivan (The Dish), Poems from the Year, contains refrains from the Old Testament, especially Ecclesiastes.  Even today’s reading from Nehemiah 8, where “the joy of the Lord is my strength,” [...]

I love reading the obituaries in The Economist.  They’re often such clever and insightful portraits of human nature in its myriad of expressions. The most recent issue features legendary jazz musician Dave Brubeck, for whom jazz improv was in the [...]

My husband would be the first to tell you I have the directional sense of a squirrel. There is an advantage to this handicap: if my intuition tells me to travel in one direction, I can safely assume that I [...]

Once again, in the spirit of an Andrew Sullivan “mental health break,” today’s musical feature is Mumford & Sons’ cover song for their newly released album, Babel:  like many of the band’s songs, “I Will Wait” has, I suspect, deeply [...]

Yesterday morning, when tropical storm Isaac was gathering speed and looked ready to hit this year’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, conservative Christian talk show host Pat Robertson was, oddly, silent.  The coincidence of a second hurricane in four [...]

A shorter, storybook version of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe for younger children comprised last night’s bedtime reading ritual.  A five-year-old boy and three-year-old girl snuggled up next to their mother to hear with bated breath [...]