Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

One of the blessings that comes with parental territory is that children tug you into experiences you're pretty sure you'd never otherwise contemplate.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.