I've written before about the two stories circulating in our culture about Down syndrome. There's the prenatal testing story, which suggests that fewer and fewer children with Down syndrome are being and will be born as women choose to terminate their pregnancies once they discover ...

I have a review of Kent Dunnington's new book, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond Models of Disease and Choice in this month's Christianity Today magazine: "The Antidote to Alcohol and Drug Addiction." It begins:

A friend of mine, let's call him Bob, was a faithful ...

I'm working on an article for Parents.com which will offering advice about raising a child with Down syndrome. I have my list of bullet-points that I would offer, but I'm curious what you all would say. If you are the parent of a child with Down syndrome (or a child with special ...

I had the chance to hear Tim Keller speak last weekend on "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society." It was a great talk, in which he referenced theologian Lesslie Newbigen's book by the same name. At the end of his talk, someone asked whether Christians must be fanatics. He replied ...

Penny woke up every morning the first week of kindergarten and looked at me eagerly, "I get to go to kindergarten again?" Her tone held a mixture of incredulity and delight.

We've settled into a morning routine–pack lunch and a snack, make breakfast, get dressed. She and William ...

"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" is one of my very favorite hymns. We sang it during Penny's baptism, and I'd happily insert it into every other monumental worship service, from weddings to funerals. It's honest and hopeful and beautiful. I sang it again recently, and I was ...

I thought you might be interested in a few reviews of A Good and Perfect Gift that came in over the course of the past few days:

First, from the Oregonian, a review by Amy Wang. She writes:

"A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny," Amy Julia ...

I grieved after Penny was born. I wish it weren't true, but I can't deny it. I know, I know. It was a normal response, and I needed to go through it in order for things to change. Actually, one of the most challenging aspects of writing A Good and Perfect Gift was revisiting ...

Here's a list of the blog posts I meant to write this week (the picture, by the way, is fun enough that I had hoped to come up with some creative something to say about it. I never got that far, so you just get the picture instead):

"What's wrong with my daughter? I'm no long ...

I have a new post on her.meneutics about the near-destruction of our family's summer cottages during Hurricane Irene. It begins:

For New York City, Hurricane Irene was largely a non-event, an unnecessary nuisance with unprecedented action. For me and my extended family, Hurricane ...

I didn't really want kids for a long time. That's a story for another day, but I might as well admit it. I thought they would slow me down. I worried that I wouldn't be able to achieve my own goals. I thought I might not know what I was doing as a parent. And I was ...

I have written before about the concept of a "wrongful" birth–the legal term used when a mother sues doctors after her child has been born with a disability that wasn't discovered in utero. The idea is that the mother would have aborted, given the proper medical information. ...

As a writer and former English major, I know that language matters. The way we talk about our world informs the way we experience our world. Language shapes reality. And so we are teaching our kids, for example, not to say "I hate that" (they learned hate from Cinderella, of ...

I have a new post on Bloom–Parenting Kids with Disabilities, "Friends in Need, Friends Indeed."

It begins:

I have 300 new friends. Well, not really. But last week, a woman who knows I write about having a child with Down syndrome sent me a Facebook message and a friend request. ...

I received a very kind comment over the weekend. In response to my recent post, "Penny's First Day of Kindergarten," she wrote,

Wow, did she really tell you all about the funny man up on the stage? What did she say? Do people understand her when she speaks and does she really ...