My friend Jessica Bigby has offered a Perfectly Human post before: "Walking Toward Freedom." In it, she talks about what it meant–both physically and spiritually–to start learning to walk without her canes. Recently, I learned from Jess that after years of assuming that skiing ...

Recently Peter and I took a walk together. We were talking about some trouble Penny's had in school lately. Peter said, "Do you want to pray?" And so we did. It was easy, refreshing, and totally unusual for us.

After nearly two decades as a practicing Christian, I still have ...

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

-Benjamin Franklin

There's been a fair amount of reporting on the celebrations that followed immediately after news of Osama Bin Laden's death, with people swarming Times Square and flocking to the White House to cheer and dance and start a party.

But members of various religious communities have ...

Years ago I read Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire. It was written in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez affair, and Professor Eire (he teaches at Yale) wrote his memoir of growing up in Cuba before Castro took over. Last fall I heard Prof. Eire ...

A long time ago I realized that when people first look at Penny, they don't see her. They see Down syndrome. I do the same thing. When I see someone in a wheelchair, I struggle to pay attention to the individual in front of me. The disability makes it hard for me to see the ...

"An 'innocent' Jesus does not overpower sin. A righteous Jesus does. The world needs less innocence and more righteousness."

–Greg Carey, Sinners

In this week's New York Times Magazine, Benoit Denizet-Louis profiles a place called St. Anthony's House, where alcoholics can go and ...