One day last month my eight-year-old daughter asked me, “Hey Mom, did you know you can get gonorrhea from riding a tractor in your bathing suite?” My mouth dropped, but I knew exactly where she had gotten the idea, having watched that episode of Seinfeld years before.Let me just say that I consider myself a moderate on the TV issue. We don’t totally abstain from media, like our friends at the Waldorf school, but we don’t usually let our kids watch Seinfeld either. We’re more of a PBS family. But one night when I was debilitated by a sinus infection—barely able to lift my head from the couch with my husband out for the evening—I agreed to let my children watch some evening television just [...]

I usually don’t pray about things like head lice. I prefer to pray for other people, which Quakers call holding them “in the Light.” For example, my mother and my mother-in-law have both had medical issues recently, so we’ve been holding them in the Light. You can translate this as “sending them good energy” or “asking God to take care of them,” whichever makes the most sense to you. I think of holding someone in the Light as praying for whatever is best for that person, without trying to tell God exactly what that is. Larry Dossey—author of Healing Words, among other books—says that studies show that this type of intersessory prayer is actually more effective than specific “Please let mom’s test come back negative” [...]

On May 15 our family went to a peace rally to remember all the people killed in the Iraq war, the 100,000 plus civilians as well as the 1,600 soldiers. My hungry eight-year-old, who wanted to leave and get ice cream, looked around at the clumps of veteran peace activists sitting on the grass listening to speeches they’ve heard before and said scornfully, “This is not going to change George Bush’s mind.” Her criticism stung because it was so true.I’m reading Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics in which he points out that Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” not “Blessed are the peacelovers.” Most of us at that rally were peacelovers, but to actually make peace we need something like an effective strategy, which the [...]

So this is my first day of blogging, a new form of communication for me. My friend Miriam Peskowitz recommended that I give it a try since she has had a good experience promoting her new book The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars through her blog playgroundrevolution.com. My first impulse, I have to confess, was purely selfish; I also want to promote my book Imperfect Serenity when it is published. But as I’ve surveyed other blogs, I’ve started to get excited about the idea of meeting and sharing ideas with other people through this new forum.Just setting up the page has been thought-provoking. How do I describe who I am in two sentences? Am I a religious writer who happens to write about motherhood, or [...]