Making Sense of Shooters: a Self Reflection

| joshsabey

High profile shootings have surrounded my hometown. I grew up in Colorado ten minutes from Columbine, fifteen minutes from the Aurora theatre shooting, and then two years ago my little brother was at Arapahoe high school when Karl Pierson attempted another Columbine.

The first article I ever published on this blog dealt with the Arapahoe shooting. In that article I discussed these shootings as a metaphor for a more common problem our society suffers from at large: certitude. But now I believe these shootings may be more than a metaphor but an actual exhibition of this unhealthy mentality prevalent in our society. This certitude is a mental illness but not the kind of issue that can be dismissed by the words “crazy” or “insane.” Rather, it is very familiar and most of us suffer from the same or similar ailments. Continue reading →

Learning Not to be My Sister’s Keeper

| sp

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One of the hardest parts of moving (and lacking the funds to justify an $800 round trip ticket) is missing major family events.

This week, my sister had a baby girl. She has ten fingers, and ten tiny toes, a mouth, ears, elbows, kneecaps, lungs, liver, and two eyes too large for their still half sealed lids. It is all a miracle, because the baby came six weeks early. Failure to thrive. She weighs 3 pounds and has no baby fat on her tiny, wizened body. I love her already.

It is not so different from when her brother was born. Jasper had wrapped the umbilical cord around his face, so his eye was swollen and his face was bruised and his nose was smashed. Our little Quasimodo, my sister said. Continue reading →

Early Pregnancy: What I Wasn’t Expecting

| alizabethworley

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I feel that I have frequently been advised that parenting, while certainly a blessing, can be difficult and painful. However, I was not aware how much this could apply to simply being pregnant. Certainly, the opportunity and ability for Michael and I to be expecting a baby is a blessing, something we have hoped for and haven’t been sure would be ours, since Michael has Cerebral Palsy. At the same time, my first trimester of pregnancy has been incredibly difficult. I’ve been very sick and have found unrelenting, day and night nausea (a condition that before now, I would hardly think could be serious or debilitating) to be more difficult than the most pain I have ever experienced, even while on medication. Continue reading →

Let’s Talk About Sex: A Note to My Future Son

| briansabey


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Dear son,

You have known about the birds and the bees for many years; the basics of human sexuality and reproduction are no mystery to you—though no doubt you have a healthy dose of natural curiosity about what sex is like to experience. (Don’t panic! This note will not attempt to answer that question!) Without saying much about what sex is like, I want to say something about what sex is not like, in order to explain why pornography offers something totally different from sex. Continue reading →

How Romance Taught Me Religion

| davidsabey

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Romance:

Before we were married and while we were still in the midst of determining if we were truly compatible, my girlfriend (now wife) and I came to that brink that all relationships eventually arrive at–when you have progressed as far as you can without either taking the next step together or drifting apart. For us, that next step was marriage. Was she the one? Would our love and happiness last a lifetime? Did we really love each other enough to get married? Was there someone else out there that would be more compatible with me? Continue reading →

A two sided look at abortion

| joshsabey

Jessen-Ohden

In light of the congressional testimonies concerning abortion, and because abortion has been a popular topic on our blog, I thought I would try and look at the issue from both sides. As with all debates there is a lot of complexity and I don’t see an easy answer. To me, the differences between the pill, the day after pill, and an early abortion seem tenuous and somewhat arbitrary—the location of a few cells. No matter how you do it, birth control is unnatural and stops somethings natural. And yes, I am including abstinence in the list of unnatural acts, particularly among a married couple. But there are many unnatural things that have improved the world, and I think birth control is one of them. And here I can sympathize with some of the pro-choice arguments.

Woman’s liberation has been more than a political movement; it has also been a technological feat. Continue reading →