Here are my top 5 recommendations of what to read or listen to from the past month that I shared in my monthly update (you can subscribe to the updates here).
I’ve read a number of excellent essays related to racism and abortion lately. These are heavy topics, but they also remind me that it is only by facing and addressing pain that we can begin to heal:
What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism
Eboo Patel’s essay for the New York Times reminded me that I want to teach our kids what we are FOR as a family. His words are a helpful reminder to me that I want my life to be lived FOR people and ideas, not against them.
And I want to teach our children to live the same way.
Read the essay and more about why I resonated with it…
America Isn’t Ready to Truly Understand the Buffalo Shooting
I’ve struggled a bit to understand how much the Buffalo shooting should be understood in a wider context of racism in the United States. Esau McCaulley’s essay for the Atlantic last week has helped me to understand the reasons to insist on connecting the dots between a legacy of enslavement, Jim Crow, ongoing racial violence, and recent education battles. He also gives a glimpse of hope for healing the wounds of racism:
Read the essay and more of my reflections on it…
There’s a Better Way to Debate Abortion
In the weeks since the leaked draft of the Supreme Court opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade, many of us have been revisiting our thoughts, questions, beliefs, and emotions around abortion. It seems that most of us—whether we classify ourselves as pro-life or pro-choice or something else—have more questions than we do certainty and more compassion than condemnation when it comes to this issue.
Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, wrote an essay in the Atlantic that helped underscore the confusion—and the desire for a better way—that many of us feel. Moreover, he expressed how that confusion could lead us to a place of conversation and care.
When an Abortion Is Pro-Life
Matt Loftus writes for the New York Times about why, as a pro-life missionary doctor, he needed to perform an abortion. His essay underscores the complexity of this debate as well as the need for compassion and care.
Let’s Talk About Abortion & Disability
I’m grateful to the women of The Lucky Few podcast for wrestling with the nuances of the abortion debate as it pertains to people with Down syndrome—they even used a post I wrote about disability and abortion as a starting point for their conversation: “People on both sides of the abortion debate use people with disabilities in troubling and dehumanizing ways.”
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