Lift Up Your Hearts!

 No More Christian Nice Girl, by Paul Coughlin and Jennifer D. Degler (Bethany House, 2010)

No More Christian Nice Girl?  Yuck.

Don’t judge a book by its cover—or title—I told myself; there must have been a reason why I accepted this book from the publisher for review.

Flip to a random chapter.  Yeech.  If the title made me gag, this chapter nearly made me lose my dinner.  Well, accepting the book is a promise to review it, which implies I must read it.

I didn’t care much for the beginning, either, but fortunately, it got better.  I don’t like the authors’ style, so it helped to separate that from the content.  They do have some good points to make. (More)

I’m thankful for the progress we have made in welcoming people with handicaps into the mainstream of society.

If you’re a baby as yet unborn this is not a good time to be handicapped, as you have a good chance of not surviving till birth.  But if you get that far, it’s better to be here and now than in an earlier time.  Here are just a few of the improvements I’ve witnessed:

• Major advances in neonatal medicine
• Amazing prosthetics
• Braille signs in elevators and other public places
• Acceptance and promotion of American Sign Language for the Deaf
• Wheelchair cuts in curbs—which are also a great help with bicycles and strollers
• Ramp access to buildings
• Handicapped parking spaces
• Specially equipped restrooms
• Integration of handicapped students in regular school classrooms
• Special Olympics and similar events that encourage sports participation for the handicapped
• Greater understanding of and openness about mental illness
• Computers, with their ability to open the world to people with many different forms of disability
• Laws against unfair discrimination

If progress remains to be made, and it does, it's good to remember how far we've come, and to be aware that gains achieved can subsequently be lost.  I've seen hints of a disturbing backlash against handicapped children, on the grounds that "they should never have been born."

I am thankful for the baby formula that is available today.

I know.  Me, the Notorious Despiser of Artificial Baby Feeding, thankful for infant formula.  But it’s true. (More)

On the day after Election Day^* I felt some commentary to be necessary, so I struggled to find something about our political system that is better now than in the past.

I considered the 19^th Amendment:  that’s a significant improvement.  But I’m not so old that I was ever disenfranchised because of my sex, so it doesn’t really count.

The 26^th Amendment did make a difference in my life, but I have mixed feelings about that one, seeing as extending the voting age downward corresponded with an upward movement of the age of responsible maturity.

Much about our political system has taken a turn for the worse during my lifetime.  (I’m not saying it was always better—we’re not longer literally tar-and-feathering our opponents.)  But one positive change I am thankful for on this third day of November is openness. (More)

Continuing with the Thanksgiving/Good New Days series, today (and every day) I am thankful for smoke-free restaurants, homes, airplanes, offices, grocery stores, and even bowling alleys!  This is a societal sea-change that is most definitely for the better.

You youngsters simply cannot imagine what it was like. (More)

Liz at Smithical has issued a challenge to honor Thanksgiving by blogging about something we're thankful for each day of November.  It will be a bit of a trick to accomplish, as I already have more posts in the pipeline than time to work on them, and I hope to liberate myself from my computer for several days this month.  But it's a grand idea, so I'm going to plunge in.  She didn't say the posts must be long, or profound.

The concept fits nicely with an idea for a post I was in the middle of constructing:  The Good New Days. (More)

Temple Grandin (HBO, NR)

Why are you reading this post when you could be rushing to your nearest video store (is that phrase as passé as "dialing a phone number"?) and grabbing a copy of Temple Grandin?  It would be trite to say that this is one of the most amazing and inspiring movies I have ever seen, though it is.  It would be understatement to say that Temple Grandin is an incredibly amazing and inspiring person.

"Highly functioning autistic" doesn't begin to describe this brilliant visual thinker—and university professor—whose humane designs have revolutionized livestock handling.  My introduction to Temple Grandin was through her TED lecture, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.  That's a good place to start, but don't miss the movie.  (As far as I can recall it is completely grandchild safe.) (More)