Matthew Hennessey

Magdalena 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 any way you dress them up. Magdalena loves potatoes so much she’ll even eat them with the skins on. Not every kid can . . . . Continue Reading »

The prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is a reminder of the existence of the devil and the presence of true evil in the world. Continue Reading »

If Brian Doyle's style was unconventional, it was also unique and it was also good, which is the main thing.  Continue Reading »

A place for everything; everything in its place—that’s what crossed my mind as I listened to the surgeon talk. Continue Reading »

Preparing for death requires much more than putting financial affairs in order. Continue Reading »

This business of signing the inside covers of books is both charming and macabre. People die; books live forever. Scrawling on a flyleaf is a down payment on immortality. Think of me, it says. Memento mori. Continue Reading »

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 of babies with Down syndrome are aborted. Technically, she’s right. It’s not accurate to say that 90 percent of all babies with Down . . . . Continue Reading »

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. She claims her unborn baby “deserved better than a life of struggle and frustration due to a condition that he or she would never be able to change.” Bad news, Sophie Horan, this is true for all of us, Down syndrome or no. Continue Reading »

A bill before the Indiana state legislature has revived what is becoming a perennialdebate: what information should be provided to pregnant women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome? The bill in question proposes to ban abortions due to either the sex of the fetus or a prenatal diagnosis of a genetic difference such as Down syndrome. The law would criminalize the actions of doctors who encourage and perform such abortions, not women who obtain them. Continue Reading »

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 A Good Academic Reputation. But your mom and dad want you to have options, so they make you go onto the websites of a few other schools and ask them to send you their application materials. When these arrive in the mail, you toss them into a corner where they sit for months and months. After all, your mind’s already mostly made up—there’s really only one school you’re thinking of going to. Continue Reading »