1. This book was developed over several years and has changed quite a bit. Tell us about the book you were originally going to write.

I started out to write a simple book on the moral limits of reproductive and pediatric biotechnologies. But I just couldn't do it. I needed to tell a more complicated story than just "Don't use this procedure" and "Feel free to use this technology."

2. What did you come across that changed your mind?

The life of a real church. While studying bioethics at Yale, I served at a merged, downtown church — African-American and white, working class and bourgeois-bohemian, professors and homeless folks — a church trying to know every child as part of the Body of Christ. In this context, I wanted to ask why so many mainline Christians are frightened to put our children in schools with children with disabilities or children who speak Spanish or children who live in impoverished neighborhoods? How is it that white Protestants, who worship a babe born in a manger, came to view a birth planned through in vitro fertilization as more legitimately a gift than a child conceived by an undocumented Latina teenager?

3. As your book developed, did your intended audience change? Who do you think should read this book?

I am still talking to church people. There are some who already know the story. These are parents of the kids deemed the "loser kids," kids with disabilities, African-American kids growing up in under-funded schools, and Latina immigrant moms chided by social workers for birthing a third child. They had to know this stuff early in order to survive. But many church people will instead find in the book their own story of unfaith. Then, of course, there are secular historians who will find the book merely interesting, but I hope even they will find themselves asking hard questions about how they live, where they live, and who they hope will be their neighbor.

4. If you had to choose, which three images shaped you the most?

The image of the two little girls, from the Ripley's "Odditorium" at the Century of Progress made me vomit with grief (pg 161). The image of the military photographer "invited into the family circle" of the Bikini islanders made me weep over fragile hope (pg 306). I tried to look him up, actually, to ask him how it felt to be offered hospitality from the people whose displacement he was sanguinely to document. The drawing from the article on how servants might influence children, from Parents', changed the whole form of the book (pg 34). I was able then to name what was at stake for so many of the readers of these magazines, even those who could never afford to hire a servant.

5. Do you think your experience as a parent influenced the book? How?

At one point, a male colleague puzzled over the need for images in the book. Why have them at all? My editor (Carol Shoun) and I laughed to one another, shaking our heads. If you have never been responsible for dressing up children for the photograph in a church directory, or if you have never scrambled to fold the clothes on the couch because someone is at the door, then you will not immediately understand why the book has images of children and moms in clean living rooms. Some fathers will "get" this book, the ones who have changed diapers in public and learned to braid hair. Other men will need to be patient, trusting that a mother can still teach grandfathers and grandsons a thing or two about what it looks like truly to trust in the Lord.

6. On the other side, did writing a book about parenthood change your family life?

My children can now culturally interpret everything from American Girl catalogues to the latest Disney movie. Unfortunately for them, this means that they do not believe that the Giant Mouse can point the way to a world in which we are "All in this Together."

7. The subjects in this book are life-long pursuits. Do you think in twenty years you will have re-evaluated or changed your mind on any of the conclusions?

Some critics have said that I have not made any conclusions! I do think that there are some definite prescriptions in the book. I doubt that I will discern a call to advocate for the responsibility of selective termination for disability. I doubt that I will discern that Christians should pull their kids out of public school. And, well, I am certain that I will not change my mind that Christian institutions should have real parental leave and affordable, accessible, on-site childcare. Once SMU and Duke and Wheaton and Christianity Today International and Eerdmans Publishing have all these things, I will be happy to take on another set of challenges.