Fall is coming, and a hush falls over the neighborhood playground as children trickle back to school. My oldest is old enough for kindergarten. These days I read a lot about education, shoring up my reasons for keeping her out of full-time school this year.

One author worth reading is Carol Black. Black is a writer, filmmaker, parent, and education activist. Her essays are thought-provoking and exhausting — exhausting because they challenge me to make drastic changes to the ways I think and act.

In August, The Washington Post ran one of her articles, “What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning.” In it, she notes,

“[W]e speak of our familiar school experience almost as though it were an integral part of nature itself, a natural and essential part of human childhood, rather than the vast and extremely recent experiment in social engineering that it actually is.”

Continue reading Saving the WEIRD Child →

I am a mother of young children and wife of a pastor, and I’ve been thinking about spiritual community lately. While I value the truths unique to the New Church, I think it’s important to support the good spiritual practices my neighbors and I share. Belonging to a specific denomination can feel lonely, especially in an increasingly secular country and generation. Humans are hard-wired to find “us-them” distinctions, but I think mental re-wiring is good for me sometimes so that I can look on friends of other religions as fellow members of a “Church-capital-C.”

In this vein, I have two anecdotes to offer.
Continue reading Our Greater Spiritual Community →

Last week, I offered some thoughts on our obligation as (relatively) wealthy, educated women to those less fortunate. I wanted to make the point that we can effect change no matter our role—mother, accountant, bus driver, and so on—if we obey the Lord’s commandments in our daily work and practice charity with compassion and prudence. I wanted to share an interview with a woman who has done and is doing what she can for causes she cares about.

Claire, could you give me some background about yourself and your work?
Continue reading Interview with Claire Lama →

Sometimes I get a lump in my throat when I’m with my children. I look at their chubby limbs and am fortunate that my family has never known hunger; I hold them as they cry over a skinned knee and feel grateful they’ve never felt worse; I talk through a playground fight, thinking how lucky we are to live without fear of oppression.

Most women reading this blog are part of the global and historical fraction of women with access to education, free speech, first-world medical care, and enfranchisement. It’s good to be a Western, 21st century woman and mother.

A few days ago, I scrolled through images of Syrian refugees clutching children, babies, some of them, as they made the dangerous, weary way to a better life. They are helpless, desperate, and vulnerable. I sometimes wonder how I would respond to the hardships so many women have faced: childbearing and illness before modern medicine, war on my doorstep, oppression, hunger, and so on.
Continue reading Selling All We Have →