parenting

Stranger Things reassures us that the stories of the past can give us the courage to face whatever danger looms.

It’s too bad that Bad Moms sets up its conflict as one between women.

Why and how I bless my children

Are today's young adults more immature than their age mates in previous generations? Yes, says Julie Lythcott-Haims, but it's not their fault.

We just took our son to college for his first year. It was hard for me, scary/exciting for him, and wounding for his mother.

I knew life was a gift to be shared, not a possession to safeguard, even before my wife collapsed on the kitchen floor. But it was abstract knowledge then.

Sometimes it’s the child’s job to let go of old memories in order to make room for the new. Our task is to hold the old ones and to remind her that she was young once.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was the book of my youth. I didn’t grow up poor in Depression-era Alabama, but I identified with Scout as I read it several times in my teens. My childhood was a middle-class family in the integrated Bronx, but Scout and I shared a house full of books and a lawyer-father blessed with a firm, centering integrity. Later, studying journalism at NYU in the 1980s, I heard that if you wanted to learn what good writing was, read Mockingbird every year.

Calling my wife and me “special” suggests that there is an alternative—that it would have been acceptable to refuse to receive our child.

I don’t know what a perfect first-century family looked like, but I’m certain that Joseph and Mary didn’t qualify.

“Are we alone in the universe?” is always a question about God’s existence. The film Interstellar shows this clearly.

The rewards of foster parenting are many, but that doesn’t change the fact that it, like all parenting, can be difficult and emotional work.

Even those who have raised a brood of their own biological children may not be fully prepared for the circumstances of foster parenting.

I recently read The Circle, Dave Egger’s dystopian novel about a benevolent Internet company that eerily creeps into every aspect of our lives, taking it over, one smiley emoticon at a time. Think about it like this: a company encompasses Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and then it begins to partner with the government.

Preaching on biblical passages about labor and childbirth is important, but it's also dangerous.

Parents are committed to keeping children safe. But the reality is closer to Benh Zeitlin's vision of chaos than we care to admit.

I often wonder what Jesus was getting at when he asked his disciple, “Who do you say that I am?” Was Jesus testing the waters, trying to figure out if the people and his friends understood the nature of his divinity? Was he trying to figure out if his rabble rousing was about to get him killed? Was he concerned with how his identity was formed by the community? Or was he simply wondering what people thought about him?