We could live in a future world where people pick and choose the traits their babies have, but it may not be the right thing to do.

It’s just one of the many ethical dilemmas that Francis deSouza, CEO of genomics testing company Illumina, who was interviewed by CNBC’s Christina Farr Wednesday at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. llumina sells DNA sequencing technology to companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

“There was a wealthy industrialist mogul from Silicon Valley who was curious about designer babies for him and his partner,” said deSouza. “With that much power, there are lots of questions that we will have to address about what it means to be human.”

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The May 18 mass shooting at Santa Fe provides the latest evidence of a phenomenon that researchers have in recent years come to recognize, but are still unable to explain: The mass shootings that are now occurring with disturbing regularity at the nation’s schools are shocking, disturbing, tragic — and seemingly contagious.

Interviews with law enforcement officials, educators, researchers, students and a gunman’s mother, as well as a review of court documents, academic studies and the writings of killers and would-be killers, show that the school-shooting copycat syndrome has grown more pervasive and has steadily escalated in recent years. And much of it can be traced back to the two killers at Columbine, previously ordinary high school students who have achieved dark folk hero status — their followers often known as “Columbiners” — in the corners of the internet where their carefully planned massacre is remembered, studied and in some cases even celebrated.

Investigators say school shootings have become the American equivalent of suicide bombings — not just a tactic, but an ideology. Young men, many of them depressed, alienated or mentally disturbed, are drawn to the Columbine subculture because they see it as a way to lash out at the world and to get the attention of a society that they believe bullies, ignores or misunderstands them.

The seemingly contagious violence has begun branching off Columbine, researchers say, and is now bringing in more recent attacks, many of them building off the details and media fixation with the last.

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For ‘Columbiners,’ School Shootings Have a Deadly Allure https://t.co/ACt1A9rvTS pic.twitter.com/21cKrzaSoM

— YourNews24H (@YourNews24H) May 30, 2018

After legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage in recent times, Portuguese lawmakers will decide Tuesday on another issue that has brought a confrontation between faith and politics in this predominantly Catholic country: whether to allow euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.

The outcome of the vote is uncertain and is likely to be close, but Portugal could become one of just a handful of countries in the world to permit euthanasia under certain circumstances.

Euthanasia — when a doctor kills patients at their request — is legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In Switzerland, and some U.S. states, assisted suicide — where patients administer the lethal drug themselves, under medical supervision — is permitted.

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Hard but important reading–go through them all.

A 7 year old’s letter to the dad he lost in Afghanistan: “I wish you could see me play soccer… [Mom] says you have the best seat in the house from Heaven. But I would rather have you here.” https://t.co/4sI3gjDkpu #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/Ko5gLLwumD

— Ellison Barber (@ellisonbarber) May 28, 2018

I’d like us to focus our thoughts and actions on the true meaning of Memorial Day – because it matters.

All of us who have served in the military, especially those who served in wartime, have comrades and friends who did not return home that we think of everyday.

We must never forget the self-sacrifice that a select group of Americans made from the founding of our country through the Global War on Terrorism. Nothing is more painful than the loss of a comrade, father, mother, son or daughter. We owe a great debt to these men and women that we can never repay, but we must try, and we invite our friends, neighbors and co-workers to do the same.

I want to ensure no one forgets the true meaning of Memorial Day and no one forgets that behind every name is the legacy of someone who gave their life so we might live in freedom in our great nation.

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Eisenhower at cemetery in Normandy, France, with graves of D-Day soldiers, 1963: pic.twitter.com/W0dKXlJdS9

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) May 28, 2018

Ireland has voted by a landslide margin to change the constitution so that abortion can be legalised, according to an exit poll conducted for The Irish Times by Ipsos/MRBI.

The poll suggests that the margin of victory for the Yes side in the referendum will be 68 per cent to 32 per cent – a stunning victory for the Yes side after a long and often divisive campaign.

More than 4,500 voters were interviewed by Ipsos/MRBI as they left polling stations on Friday. Sampling began at 7am and was conducted at 160 locations across every constituency throughout the day. The margin of error is estimated at +/- 1.5 per cent.

Counting of votes begins on Saturday morning at 9am with an official result expected to be declared in the afternoon.

However, the size of the victory predicted by the exit poll leaves little doubt that, whatever the final count figures, the constitutional ban on abortion, inserted in a referendum in 1983, is set to be repealed.

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The questioning went on for days. Did she allow her children to watch a Christmas video? Did she include plastic Easter eggs as part of her celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim? Did she use English nicknames for them, instead of their Hebrew names?

This grilling of Chavie Weisberger, 35, took place not in front of a rabbi or a religious court, but in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, during a custody battle with her ultra-Orthodox Jewish ex-husband after she came out as lesbian and decided to leave the ultra-Orthodox fold. The stakes could not have been higher. In fact, the judge, Eric I. Prus, eventually ruled that she should lose custody of her children, largely because she had lapsed in raising them according to Hasidic customs.

Ms. Weisberger’s case, which was reversed on appeal in August, is still reverberating through New York courts that handle divorce and custody matters for the state’s hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

A New York State appellate court ruled that Justice Prus had erred in making religious observance the paramount factor when deciding custody. The court also said he had violated Ms. Weisberger’s constitutional rights by requiring her to pretend to be ultra-Orthodox around her children, even though she was no longer religious, in order to spend unsupervised time with them.

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One piece of inherited wisdom is the value of the two-parent family. It’s not fashionable to talk about this. How people raise their children is a matter of preference. But it is not really up for debate that the two-parent home is, on average, better for children.

First, two parents can provide more resources to children, including emotional support, encouragement and help with homework. One conscientious parent, no matter how heroic, cannot do the work of two. Second, single-parent households have a lower standard of living, which is associated with lower school grades and test scores.

Here is an example of the success of intact families from one of my psychology classes. The professor asked students to anonymously respond to a question about parental background. Out of 25 students, only one other student besides me did not grow up in a traditional two-parent family. It’s no accident that most of my peers at Yale come from intact families.

Outcomes are worse for foster children. Ten percent of foster children enroll in college, and only 3 percent graduate. To my knowledge, among more than 5,000 undergraduates at Yale in the current school year, the number of former foster children is under 10.

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“If I wanted to describe her to someone, I’d describe her as all woman,” Shabazz said. “She was very generous, motivated, dedicated to her family, her work ethic was amazing… she was just a caring loving person.”

Her pregnancy had been going well, Shabazz said. She was not high risk and had been regularly going to her prenatal visits.

“I was excited… because this is what I always wanted, I always wanted a family,” he said.

But during labor, Dickey began having trouble breathing. Within minutes, she went into cardiac arrest and doctors performed an emergency c-section to try to save her and the baby.

“[I thought] this can’t be happening, it seemed like a dream,” Shabazz said. “They asked me to step out. I stepped outside of the room and I could just hear him saying … we’re trying to bring her back, trying to grab a pulse.”

Doctors delivered the baby, but for Dickey, it was too late.

Read it all (the video is highly recommended if you have time).

1/ Please watch:

This @Nightline segment both uplifting & wrenching, illustrates gap between how deeply we value American mothers and how unreliably we support their wellbeing.

Better is possible. Paying attention #BeyondMothersDay a good first step…https://t.co/Gu2gMPTZr7 pic.twitter.com/fYK9kNxXUP

— Neel Shah, MD (@neel_shah) May 17, 2018

Marriage may have changed over millennia, but it still offers partnership to two individuals. Given that loneliness is the scourge of our times would it not make sense to campaign for a relationship that counters isolation? Even uber-feminists might be reconciled to such a support network.

Then there are the health statistics. Married people are less likely to suffer strokes, stress or heart attacks, and more likely to adopt safer behaviour, like driving within the speed limit, and drinking the right number of units. Studies also continue to show that marriage is good for mental health – boosting confidence and communication skills. Think of the savings to the NHS, if our parliamentarians could fog-horn the benefits of getting hitched.

But it is children, most of all, who benefit from marriage. Children thrive when their biological parents stay together and marriage is almost twice as likely to survive a child’s birth than cohabitation. A recent study found that children of married couples did better on a vocabulary test than those of cohabiting or single parents. Marriage, especially now that it is being freed from expensive trappings like white weddings and Magaluf-bound hen parties, could emerge as the secret weapon in the battle for social mobility.

A social enterprise that promotes well-being normally has politicians rushing to champion it. What are you waiting for, Mrs May? Give us some policies that show marriage tops your agenda. Like the forthcoming Royal Wedding, this is a good news story. That’s a rare thing, these days: let’s celebrate it.

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From the NPR description–‘So much of parenting is dealing with the unexpected and having to figure things out as you go. In this Mother’s Day episode, we hear from moms whose decisions left a lifelong impression on their kids’.

Listen to it all. We spent the whole car ride in tears as a result-KSH.

amily unity is among the biggest factors for American evangelicals advocating for immigration reform; it comes up in almost every statement, prayer, and open letter rallying believers around the cause.

Despite the pleas from top evangelical leaders—including some of President Donald Trump’s advisers—to protect the family unit, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced this week that all adults caught by Border Patrol would be prosecuted as criminals while their children would be separated and treated as if they entered the US as unaccompanied minors.

“I have put in place a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple,” he said on Monday in San Diego, where a caravan of migrants, many of them mothers and children, had arrived a week before.

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From CTmagazine: RT Rondell_Trevino: Honored to contribute to this .CTmagazine article critiquing new policy that separates Immigrant children from asylum seeking parents from Central America.

When policies focus on separating families, then this shoul… https://t.co/lViWRA8Hkz

— Carol Flohr Giles (@giles_carol) May 11, 2018

Canada’s largest province has issued its first non-binary birth certificate, marking the culmination of a successful human rights claim against Ontario.

Joshua Ferguson had waited nearly a year after petitioning the provincial government for a new birth certificate in order change the document from male to non-binary, as Ferguson identifies as neither male nor female. Instead, the film-maker uses the pronoun “they”.

“It’s a victory for me. It’s a victory for the trans community,” Ferguson told reporters on Monday.

Born in Ontario but now residing in Vancouver, Ferguson had travelled to Toronto to apply for the new birth certificate, which they said would better reflect their identity. Ferguson’s successful application follows a push by the transgender activist Gemma Hickey, whose non-binary birth certificate in Newfoundland and Labrador last year marked a first for Canada.

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One brave student from the 2016 trip was injured in the boat accident in the Galápagos. The boat was destroyed, but she soldiered on. Then, three weeks later, she was nearly crushed when the five-story unreinforced masonry hotel she was staying in collapsed during a major earthquake. She was lucky: Almost everyone in the building died. She and another student dug themselves out of the rubble.

Her recovery was long and painful. She — a serious ballet dancer — was wheelchair-bound for months. After a year of surgeries, crutches and other frustrations, she caught me off guard. Despite everything, she said, she would do it all again. The trip had been that important to her.

In advance of these study-abroad trips, I led long conversations about risk, how to assess it, what we perceive our own relationship with it to be. We discussed how risk is different in landscapes that haven’t been rendered safe by liability lawsuits and in which medical help is a very long way away. We talked about the hidden hazards of the jungle — rising water, tree falls — compared with the familiar ones, like snakes and big cats, that people are primed to be scared of. In the tropical lowland rain forest — the jungle — you might get stuck in deep mud and perhaps need help to get out. Look before you reach for a tree for leverage. Some trees defend themselves with nasty spikes, and a branch might be crawling with bullet ants, so named for the intense experience of being stung by one.

But it turns out that risk and potential go hand in hand. We need to let children, including college students, risk getting hurt. Protection from pain guarantees weakness, fragility and greater suffering in the future…

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'The discomfort may be physical, emotional or intellectual — My ankle! My feelings! My worldview! — and all need to be experienced to learn and grow' 2/2 https://t.co/Zlge7OA2qN #perspective #learning #usa

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) May 4, 2018

“Beauty educates,” said Serena, quoting Giussani. The children who come here often feel tossed aside. One used to be awakened by her mother with the words, “Get up, you piece of [expletive]. Breakfast is ready, you piece of [expletive].” But beautiful surroundings make the children who come here feel important, welcomed and cherished. If a toy breaks at Cometa, it is fixed right away. Likewise, every child is recoverable.

The people in Cometa don’t only treasure beauty, they assume it. In a world of distrust and betrayal, they assume there is beauty in each person and in every situation, so they lead with an almost unnerving level of hospitality.

The vocational high school curriculum is built around the idea that machines will soon be doing most physical tasks, but no machine will be able to create the feeling of a loving home. Whether they are being trained as waiters, carpenters, fabric designers or pastry chefs, students are taught to understand and create hospitable experiences. “Everything is a home,” said Mele. “Everything says, ‘Welcome to my home.’”

The idea is to give students the power to welcome others, born out of a sense that they have been welcomed. One of Giussani’s mottos resonates through Cometa: “Reality will not let you down.” You can take the radical leap, because life ultimately is beautiful.

This takes stubborn determination.

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'The people in Cometa don’t only treasure beauty, they assume it. In a world of distrust and betrayal, they assume there is beauty in each person+in every situation, so they lead with an almost unnerving level of hospitality' https://t.co/BCoehXJJjj #italy #beauty #faith #hope

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) May 1, 2018

This is emphatically not an argument for parents to impose quacks on seriously ill children. But the NHS has an institutional antipathy to experimental forms of cancer treatment, even in cases where it knows its own methods hold no prospect of a lasting cure. I can’t help thinking a system in which patients and their parents are not themselves paying (except compulsorily as taxpayers) encourages the attitude that they should keep quiet and be grateful for what they get.

Still, the vituperation directed at the staff of Alder Hey is unconscionable. They looked after Alfie to the very best of their ability, and must also have felt distress as his condition — the result of an inexplicable degenerative disorder that attacked the brain of an apparently healthy newborn — worsened. But for him to have ended up as, in effect, a prisoner until death of the state that had earlier removed his ventilation against his parents’ wishes is no advertisement for the English medico-legal system. It’s one thing to give up the medical fight for the child’s life; quite another to say to the parents, “But, all the same, you can’t take him away from us, either back home to die or to a foreign hospital prepared to treat him at its own expense.”

Even if such treatments are pointless — our courts had decided there was no further point in the existence of Alfie Evans — it offends against our entire idea of family to treat the feelings and wishes of loving parents as irrelevant. This love is not just the indispensable basis of a good society. Maternal love is the most powerful force in the known universe. It demands more respect than this.

That truth is about to be put before the courts in another case, in which my wife is involved. With two other mothers whose adult children, like our younger daughter, have what nowadays is called “learning difficulties”, she is bringing a test case before the Court of Protection. As the law stands, the parents of such adults, whether in residential care or not, have no right to a decisive role in how their children are treated. The carers would be obliged to give the parents such a right if the mother or father were appointed by the courts to be their adult child’s welfare deputy. But the current code stipulates that this can be agreed by courts only “in the most difficult cases”.

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[The New Yorker’s Rachel] Aviv focuses on the Kafkaesque odyssey of Julie Belshe, a mother of three who spent years extracting her parents from the talons of a woman, April Parks, who was later indicted on charges of perjury and theft. But Parks flourished in a larger system designed around the assumption that old people are basically better off without their kids, because offspring are probably motivated either by raw emotionalism or by gimme-gimme avarice, as opposed to the cool wisdom of expert doctors, professional guardians, and wise judges.

Such a system is custom-built for the coming world of post-familialism, the world bequeathed to us by sexual individualism and thinning family trees. Just as more and more children are growing up without the active fathers who fought for Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans or the extended kinship network that saved Jahi McMath, more and more people will face old age without sons and daughters to care for them or to challenge the medical-judicial complex’s will.

It is the tragedy of our future that for many people there will be no exit from that complex, no alternative means of receiving care. But it is the task of our present to ensure that where the family still has the capacity to choose for an aging parent or a dying child, the family rather than the system gets to make the choice.

Yes, that choice may be wrong; it may have its own dark or foolish motivations. But those are risks a humane society has to take, so that in our weakest moments we can hope to be surrounded not just by knowledge or power, but by love.

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My Sunday column: Alfie Evans and the Experts:https://t.co/Bu7zUpPtAI

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) April 29, 2018

One of the most important rights throughout human history is the right of parents to make decisions concerning their children’s welfare. Almost every culture and civilization has honored this principle—formally or informally–as a basic human right and a necessary foundation for family flourishing. Western countries often recognized parental rights as natural rights—rights that cannot be compromised by government interference. But in the case of Alfie, the state is redefining parental rights so that they extend only as far as the government or other elites, such as the medical elites, determine.

Furthermore, unlike the Charlie Gard case, Alfie Evans has only been examined by one medical team or acute care team. As Charles Camosy has pointed out, those acute care teams of medical experts often make the wrong decisions regarding the inevitability of death. To put the matter bluntly, there are numerous cases in which medical authorities said an individual would surely die, but those people are still alive.

Sohrab Amari, writing for Commentary Magazine, is on point: “The medical complexities of the case, played up by the court and its defenders, serve to obscure a basic moral principle. No one is asking the UK National Health Service to expend extraordinary measures to keep Alfie alive. All Alfie’s parents ask is to be allowed to seek treatment elsewhere, again at Italian expense, even if such treatment proves to be futile in the end.” The same principle, says Amari, was at stake in last year’s Charlie Gard case. Once more, British courts have distorted the relevant legal standard, the best interest of the child, to usurp natural rights. This disturbing point is a political issue, to be sure. But natural rights are pre-political. Governments do not invent or grant natural rights. The rightful role of government is to respect and protect the rights that exist prior to the state and its laws.

If the state does not recognize parental rights as natural rights and government authorities and elites can subvert the will of parents, then we’re going to witness a long succession of cases just like Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans—and not just in Great Britain.

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Finally got to #Showtime's movie of #TimMcGraw and #FaithHill's 2017 Soul2Soul world tour, my oh my it was enjoyable https://t.co/RQ90ybumF4 #countrymusic #usa #marriage #family #relationshipsarehardwork #children #travel

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 28, 2018

Not quite three years later, Alito’s concerns have already come to pass.

In a Star guest commentary earlier this month, Lori Ross, CEO of FosterAdopt Connect, claimed that a bill currently proposed in Kansas would enshrine “taxpayer-funded discrimination,” calling it “negligent” and “harmful.” By referencing the truly tragic story of a young boy’s suicide, she implied that the bill could lead to the deaths of children in the state foster care system. Or take Republican state Sen. Barbara Bollier’s statement on the Senate floor during a debate on the bill, where she called Catholic teachings on marriage “sick discrimination.” What sort of legislation would draw such vehement denunciation?

The proposed legislation is the Adoption Protection Act. All it does is ensure that faith-based adoption providers will be allowed to continue to operate in accordance with their sincerely held religious beliefs. In other words, the proposed legislation merely preserves the status quo and makes it clear that faith-based providers will not be penalized for serving in accordance with their beliefs.

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Watch it all.

Young people in Europe need political support to start families in countries with aging populations, a French Catholic campaigner said.

While “young people want to form lasting relationships and have children,” they “don’t feel safe” to start families, said Antoine Renard, president of the Brussels-based Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe.

“Unless something is done rapidly, Europe risks a total demographic collapse,” Renard said in an April 19 interview with Catholic News Service after the federation called on European Union governments to “put the family at the center of national policies.”

Young people are “often discouraged by inadequate and individualistic policies and cultures which are hostile to the family,” the federation said in an April 13 statement at the end of its spring meeting in Vienna.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Sophia Grace talks about him every day. Daddy wasn’t great at braiding her hair, she recently said to her mother, but he tried his best. She tells people he’s in heaven now.

The rest of the family talks about Bryan Cooke all the time, too.

On his cellphone, Mike Cooke found a voicemail his son had left him in October. He didn’t listen to it before his son’s death, and he still hasn’t. The message — to hear his son call him “Pops” again — is a gift he anticipates opening.

Lynda Cooke also saved a voicemail from her son. She plays it over and over, memorizing his laughter. She prefers to hear his voice when she can slip out alone to the dock behind their home.

The Matipan Avenue residence the Cookes were working on is now home to Alecia Wright, 47, who lives with her sister and disabled mother. Their lives are peaceful, but they feel for the Cooke family.

With the shooting in mind, Wright hung a sign with a cross on the front door that reads: “Bless our home and all who enter.”

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Mike Cooke was shot and his son was killed during a robbery attempt as they fixed up a home for a family in need. Now Mike is working on forgiveness. "If you cannot find hope, then you remain inside of that tragedy, and it imprisons you." His story: https://t.co/hMwDGZNlEr

— Angie Jackson (@AngieJackson23) April 20, 2018

April 20 is the anniversary of the Columbine massacre. That day in 1999, two Littleton, Colo., high school students killed 12 students and one teacher before killing themselves.

Reed was a teacher at Columbine High School school that day, and still is today. This week, she spoke to NPR from the same classroom she was teaching in before everything happened.

On April 20, 1999, she evacuated with her students as the fire alarm went off, a “Pavlovian” response, she says, to what they thought was a drill or a student playing a prank.

Reed remembers walking out into the sunshine of a beautiful day when kids ran by yelling, “They’ve got guns, they’ve got guns!”

Read it all.

Paula Reed remembers walking out into the sunshine of a beautiful day when kids ran by yelling, "they've got guns." https://t.co/j4rXcdtgPC

— WBUR (@WBUR) April 20, 2018

The two boys were play-fighting, until suddenly they weren’t. The slap rang out at Northwoods Middle School.

Students at Northwoods are bound by the same rules and consequences as anyone else in the Charleston County School District. But thanks to a pilot program that started at their school and four others last year, the students also have a unique opportunity to face one another and make amends for their mistakes.

The pilot program is known as “restorative practices,” an approach to resolving conflicts that emphasizes personal responsibility and healing relationships. The approach was developed by Australian police to work with juvenile offenders in the 1990s, and it has since spread to schools worldwide.

Read it all.”>Read it all and note the important previous background article there.

Can 'restorative practices' in schools get at the root of bad behavior? The idea is being tested #southcarolina #education #ethics https://t.co/oRqPBKtyA0

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 19, 2018

“Nana, how is suicide okay for some people, but not for people like me?”

Eva Andrade’s teenage grandson, who had previously been hospitalized for suicidal ideation, had asked his grandmother that question recently: Hawaii became the seventh state to legalize physician-assisted suicide April 5, a year after a previous legislative attempt.

Proponents claimed the law would give people with terminal illnesses (and a diagnosis of less than six months to live) the personal autonomy to make that decision. The teenager did not see why the circumstances made a big difference for one group having the legal right to end life on their own terms, while others did not.

“This is a 15-year-old child making this connection on his own, just based on the conversations he was hearing,” Andrade said.

Andrade, spokeswoman for the Hawaii Catholic Conference, told the Register that the “Our Care, Our Choices Act,” which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2019, threatens negative social repercussions and will have a “very detrimental effect on our community.”

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An inspiring graduation photo of a single mom of five children is sweeping the internet.

Ieshia Champs of Houston, Texas, posed alongside her children, ranging in ages from 5 to 14-years old, before her graduation from law school. In her cap and gown, she’s holding a sign saying: “I did it!”

And, wow did she ever.

Champs, 33, will graduate Magna Cum Laude from Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law on May 11. The degree would not be possible without the support of her children, who Champs said quizzed her with flashcards while she was cooking and served as a mock jury.

She also credits her sister, friends and her school — who she said supported her when she had to bring her children to class at times — for her success. But, above all, she said God is to thank.

Read it all.

Single mom of five who is graduating law school with epic photos: I didn't do this myself https://t.co/Mrx0f5dASH via @usatoday

— W Bradford Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) April 15, 2018

More than 60 years after the Army declared Davis as Missing in Action during the Korean War, the Department of Defense has identified his remains. On Thursday, Davis will be buried at North Charleston’s Carolina Memorial Park not far from his wife Violet Davis’ grave.

“It’s kind of like a love story,” said Zachary Boney, a soldier stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Davis’s great-grandson.

“She never remarried, and she never dated. He was the only man she would ever be with because she didn’t want to be with anyone else.”

Boney, a horizontal construction engineer, on Sunday will travel to Hawaii to retrieve his great-grandfather’s remains. The 22-year-old will then fly from Hawaii to Charleston, escorting Davis across the country to deliver him safely to his family.

“I feel honored to do it,” Boney said.

Read it all.

Nearly seven decades after #Koreanwar, a POW's remains coming home for burial #military #veterans #death #history #dignity #southcarolina https://t.co/bj2BcaaAZK

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 13, 2018

Mere paragraphs from the conclusion of his story, Deere is not saying, “This was something I dealt with,” but “This is something I deal with.”

This rawness is rare in the church today. We are often told by leaders that they sin, but Deere’s memoir is refreshingly full of his sin. It is not gratuitous in any form. We never get the sense that he wants to gain our pity or empathy to manipulate us into thinking he’s better or worse than he is. He is simply factual (to our knowledge) and unapologetic to his reader, while increasingly more repentant toward those against whom he has sinned—God foremost among them.

In a world where, all too often, leaders present themselves as one-dimensional characters (primarily speakers, teachers, pastors, musicians, or writers), Deere shows us we are irreducibly complex beings. Our bodies matter. Our souls matter. Our minds matter. Our emotions matter. Our histories matter. These together form the whole of who we are, and any true ministry we do out of the whole is going to be wholly complex. Otherwise, it will be anemic, one-dimensional, and devoid of power. Deere recognizes this now. But it took hell to get him there. I haven’t even mentioned the half of it in this review.

Read it all.