Susan sent me to Marcia Falk's "Book of Blessings "for an alternative blessing.
That ceremony — officially, the "Cosmic True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humanity Cheon Il Guk Book of Life Registration Blessing" — would cap a week of activities that thus far had included an arts festival, a survival skills contest and a goat-butchering demonstration.
Emily Bazelon's discussion of Wendy Mogel's book, "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children," was a welcome antidote to the "too precious child syndrome" (Oct . 1.
Clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel, an expert on parenting and author of the books The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and The Blessing of a B Minus, has been grappling with these issues.
As God put it to Abraham in the book of Genesis, "I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you, and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed".
Yet in more affluent neighborhoods, active parent engagement, as the clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel has argued in her latest book, "The Blessing of a B Minus," can interfere with children's necessary maturation and strides toward independence.
"When you go through something like this, you lose your faith in a benign universe," Ms. Mandell said of her own family's experience, which she has chronicled in a harrowing book, "The Blessing of a Broken Heart".
In September he will release his new book, The Blessing of Enough.
The HLS professor, who is also on the faculty at the university and the Radcliffe Institute, spoke to the Bulletin about her latest book, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination," co-written with Peter S. Onuf.
