Archive
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Articles
How to Fix a Hole in the Heart
The doctor turned to face us. He was a tall man, athletic and thin, put-together and with a quiet, intellectual air. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he...
Magdalena
M agdalena loves potatoes. Doesn’t matter what kind. Red, yellow, Idaho, Irish, boiled, baked, or mashed. French-fried is best, but she’ll eat potatoes any way you make them and...
St. Michael, Pray for Us
I’m a student of pubs. Maybe it’s because my dad owned one. Maybe it’s because they smell so good, especially that front-door bouquet of stale beer, hamburger, air-conditioning, and...
Rambling Shambling Brian Doyle
Eight Whopping Liesby brian doylefranciscan media, 192 pages, $18.99 The biographical note at the back of Eight Whopping Lies, Brian Doyle’s latest and last collection of parcel-sized personal essays...
Everything in Its Place
A place for everything; everything in its place—that’s what crossed my mind as I listened to the surgeon talk. He was explaining the medical mystery of the appendix vermiformis, the...
Pack Your Bags
When you’re sick and know you’re going to die you do what’s called putting your affairs in order. The phrase calls to mind matters financial. More often, however, the...
Love Among the Artifacts
There’s nothing like a good flyleaf inscription. Salutations from an ancient friend inside the cover of a long-forgotten book are a rich thing. But time-travelers beware. You might just...
Pro-Life or Pro-Information?
Amy Julia Becker is a writer and mother of a child with Down syndrome. For several years she has sought to debunk the frequently reported claim that 90 percent...
Don’t Make Down Syndrome A Death Sentence
In her Yahoo! Parenting article “I Terminated My Baby with Down Syndrome,” Sophie Horan is not shy about painting her abortion as choice made with her baby’s interests in mind....
That Our Children May Be Born
A bill before the Indiana state legislature has revived what is becoming a perennial debate: what information should be provided to pregnant women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of...
The Down Syndrome Community’s Death Debate
Let’s try an experiment: Imagine you are a high school junior just starting to think about college. You have your heart set on The Big Catholic Football School with...
Editing Each Other
I am an editor. My job is to improve manuscripts submitted by authors and prepare them for publication. I approach every new piece sceptically. I probe. I attack. I...
A Loving Place, Inside Me
I was not at all interested in reading Judy Nicastro’s New York Times op-ed. Not at first, anyway. A piece in any newspaper titled “My Abortion, at 23 Weeks”...
People-First Language
There is a movement gaining steam among advocates for the disabled to spread awareness of so-called “people-first language,” that is, usage that puts a little distance between an individual...
Guns, Glee, and Down Syndrome
Last week, Glee aired a “ripped from the headlines” episode meant to capitalize on the debate over gun control. According to the Washington Post , the program featured “long,...