Above all else: protect the children

From the time we were expecting our first child, at least until the last one left for college, I saw myself as having ONE JOB ABOVE ALL OTHERS: protecting my children and keeping them safe. Nothing else really mattered. Our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and so we were frantic to protect the next child.

They are precious in His sight…

Even as a lover of words, my vocabulary fails me in expressing the frustration, grief, and RAGE I feel about the thousands of families that my nation’s government has torn asunder: children ripped—in some cases permanently—from the arms of their parents. The federal departments overseeing this human rights violation have not kept records and have

Because you taught me…

I’ve come to see my identity, my sense of self, as the sum total of all the encounters I’ve had across nearly six decades: each friend, family member,  student, colleague, and teacher has uniquely touched my life. Most encounters have benefited, taught, or improved me in some small or large way.  Others have wounded or

The things we brought from Indiana

In the summer of 1968, a big orange Allied moving truck picked up our belongings from our campus housing at Ball State, stopped in Fort Wayne for the household items we had in storage in our house there and made the trip across Ohio to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where we would grow up and my

What you have done to the least of these…

Eighteen years ago this fall, I accompanied a group of college students on a retreat over at a beautiful camp in Angola, NY. The setting was on the bluffs high above the Lake Erie shoreline.  We had a delightful time there except for one terrifying incident that is still burnished into my memory two decades

A walk to remember…

I love visiting the grand old city of New York: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the energy that permeates the place; it is a paradise for a people watcher such as I. In particular I enjoy watching people walking dogs and pushing strollers, I suppose because those are two of my all-time favorite activities.