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How to Pray

From Web Exclusives

As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »

Thoroughly Modern Mommy

From the April 2007 Print Edition

Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother by Peggy Orenstein Bloomsbury, 240 pages, $23.95 Waiting for Daisy is the chronicle of what happens when a busy, . . . . Continue Reading »

Powers: The Party of Responsibility?

From Web Exclusives

The Republicans seem to have lost the values voters in the midterm elections. William Saletan, author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War and frequent contributor on the subject of abortion for Slate.com, sees this loss as a chance for the Democrats to capture these voters, if . . . . Continue Reading »

Powers: Boomers, War, and Sacrifice

From Web Exclusives

We were walking through Central Park in Manhattan, just south of the Naumburg Bandshell, when we came across what we thought were the remains of an ancient churchyard. Like an ancient churchyard, it was seemingly untended and abandoned. On closer examination, it turned out to be a grove across which . . . . Continue Reading »

Powers: Slavery and Abortion

From Web Exclusives

An academic colleague of mine has carved out considerable expertise for himself in the area of slavery. I roused his ire once by asking if, two centuries from now, people might regard abortion the way we now do slavery. This was at a meeting of Enlightenment-period scholars. There is in all of us a . . . . Continue Reading »

Powers: The Real Clinton Legacy

From Web Exclusives

On the same day my husband applied for Social Security benefits, we watched the purple-faced Bill Clinton defending his record as terrorist hunter-in-chief in the infamous Fox-TV interview with Chris Wallace . All the obfuscations the former president brought to bear also brought to mind the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Self in Full

From the November 1999 Print Edition

An autobiography is a strange beast. While it offers unique access to the inner life of an individual from the perspective of the only person capable of assessing it, it is problematic precisely because the self-knowledge of first-person narrators is problematic. Autobiography also posits a . . . . Continue Reading »