On a visit to France last week I visited some of the sites of D-Day. More American soldiers died on the first day of that massive invasion than have died in eleven years of war in Afghanistan. Twenty-seven war cemeteries in the region hold the graves of 110,000 dead from both sides, for June 6, 1944, marked only the beginning of a vicious month-long battle for Normandy. Today the battlefields seem like overgrown golf courses, with open expanses of grass ...

The publisher of my books in Poland put me in touch with Hanna Pasterny, a young Polish Christian woman blind from birth, who is researching how to help people who are both blind and autistic.  I cannot imagine the sense of isolation someone with both disabilities must feel. Hanna works as an assistant to the President of the European Parliament and has coauthored a book, Tandem on a Scottish Background, with a Scottish professor living with Asperger’s syndrome. The professor, Helen Halpern ...

Gina Welch is a smart, young, citified Jewish writer who grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from Yale.  In a desire to know more about evangelicals, whom she kept running into when she moved to Virginia, she decided to attend Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg.  As a bonus, she thought her unlikely pairing with Falwell could provide the grist for a book.  In her words, “I considered him a homophobe, a fearmonger, a manipulator, and a ...