Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Edwidge Danticat on the way mass shootings have made violent death seem normal, and how to resist it.Read the article.

Peter and Susannah chat with Brittany Petruzzi about her interview with Susannah in the current issue of the magazine, Chanting Psalms In the Dark. During the past year, Brittany went permanently blind as the result of a brain tumor, and in the midst of that diagnosis, she started a psalm-chanting YouTube channel. Inspired by her love of and need for God’s word as well as her musical theater background, she discusses this project’s origins and future.The three of them also talk with Paul Buckley about the challenge of incorporating psalm chanting into Protestant worship, and how ingraining psalms into your life can allow them to show up for you when you need them.Then, Pete and Susannah speak with Stephen Michael Newby about the tradition of Black spirituals, about the absolute necessity of racial reconciliation, and about the role of music in that reconciliation.They discuss how spirituals work: their theology and their practice of bringing the events of Scripture into the immediate lives of those who are singing them.

Peter and Susannah open the Music issue podcast series with a discussion of Anabaptist music: the beautiful and occasionally grim songs of the Radical Reformation.But what is music for anyway? They talk about music as a crucial aspect of the human Telos, and the need for the body of Christ to worship Him in song. The sheer power of music has been recognized in all the philosophical traditions of the world as well: music can call out the best in you, and can make you worse. It is not something to be taken lightly.Then they bring on Mary Townsend to talk about Dolly Parton and her exhibition of the Aristotelian virtues of magnificence and magnanimity: the way in which she spends money out of thoughtful love for the public good, and the way that her generosity in song reflects a fundamentally Christian experience of having been given a gift of song. In this way, Dolly may serve as a truly Christian corrective of Aristotle’s more masculine and humorless magnanimous man. The petite blonde woman from Tennessee may be the closest thing we have to a living example of public and thoughtful greatness that is also good and beautiful.

Russian novelist Eugene Vodolazkin finds the ludicrous and the heartening even in the funeral of his own father.Read the article here.

Kelsey Osgood on looking for Jewish community, still finding that her family is set apart, and wondering how much to let the world in.Read it here.

What’s it like to raise a child with profound physical disabilities? Six mothers around the world talk about the hard days... and the amazing ones. Read the article.

At twenty weeks there were only two things I knew about my daughter, both of them scientifically derived facts: her physical abnormality and her biological sex.Read the article.

Victoria Reynolds Farmer on the Magnificat and how her disability taught her to trust a God who raises up the weak and brings down the mighty.Read it here.

Faced with a frightening diagnosis, a couple was hours away from an abortion when one conversation made them reconsider. Their daughter owes her life to a young man with Down syndrome.Read it here.

Peter and Susannah answer listener questions: How should we think about the so-called “social model” of disability? Why shouldn’t we abort children who may not live long? How can we talk about human worth with those who don’t share our Christian convictions? And are there any downsides to designing for disability?They also reflect on what they’ve learned in doing this issue. As it turns out, disability is not a “niche” topic: it cuts to the heart of what it means to be human, and to the heart of Christian hope.Thinking well about disability also challenges us in our times of ability to realize that making the most of our talents, developing our strengths, in order to be able to help others, is an obligation: we need to be needed, and we need to give, in order to be fully human.