The first race I ever trained for was a marathon. I was twenty years old and had never run more than a mile in my life. I simply needed an outlet—and a goal to make progress toward. Running became my conduit for stress relief. At the time, my uncle was an active runner and marathon […]
Letter from The Editor Winter 2021 C. S. Lewis says, “the right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.” How do we inculcate just sentiments in our children’s minds? In our own minds? We can do this with good books. Good books impart just sentiments and soothe parched thinking. It is said that […]
Most adults can recall feeling a momentary panic in a math class at one time or another, but some children feel despair about math daily. They may struggle through math lessons for many reasons: attitude, handwriting difficulty, poor number sense, language-based learning disability, or difficulties with memory, fear, or discouragement. We can address these effectively […]
On the Feast of St. John the Evangelist in 1571, a baby boy named Johannes Kepler came into the world. Born prematurely, he was weak and sickly as a child. By the time he was born he had two brothers and a sister. When Johannes was five years old, his father left the family. When […]
How long can you stare at hieroglyphs you can’t decipher before you shrug your shoulders, smile, and move on? Without a cipher, or the ability to translate the pictograms into meaningful sounds or images, they would be just fancy lines and dots to you. I sometimes imagine that to the child with a language impairment, […]
I received a lovely note the other day thanking me for an article Cheryl Lowe—not I—had written. With two people in one publishing house named Cheryl, things can become confusing. Let there be no mistake: I was but a quiet mother of toddler twins in Missouri when Cheryl Lowe founded Memoria Press in 1998. Two […]
One morning a welcoming cohort gathered with me around a seminar table for the course “Difference and Human Dignity in the Great Tradition” at Templeton Honors College at Eastern University in Philadelphia. A cohort, I had learned prior to my arrival, is “a group of people who are banded together.” The intelligent faces around me […]
What is it to be human? And how does our response to this question shed light on how we orient our hearts toward persons with disabilities? These two questions have guided much of my reading and thinking over the past few years as I have designed a course called “Difference and Human Dignity in the […]
A friend and I brought our children to a playground one summer many years ago. As heat, humidity, and noise intensified, one of my twins became unruly and unkempt and had a wild look in the eyes. My friend’s child quickly backed away with fearful disgust and exclaimed, “A monster!” My friend quickly chided, “That’s […]
If you appreciate the covers and beauty of design throughout our magazine, you must meet the designer who lends elegance and artistry to every issue. A quiet young woman, she approached me with tears in her eyes after our Sodalitas conference sessions on struggling learners one year. Assigned to photograph our sessions, she had also […]