Marilyn McEntyre

Words are absorbent. Used often enough in partisan slogans or ad campaigns, or by certain religious groups or by "influencers" (itself a word with a troubling history), or spun into new usages by disaffected teens, they can be diverted from their broader purposes. They become contaminated by association or overdetermined by repetition, and so less usable for more neutral efforts to identify or describe. As words are turned into trademarks or code language, they become harder for speakers outside the…

God unmistakably did call Dr. Ida. Though she was determined not to follow her father and his seven siblings into RCA mission work, determined not to spend her life in "dirty, dusty" India, she found she could do nothing else after being present one night at the successive deaths of three women in childbirth because their husbands refused for cultural and religious reasons to allow male doctors to attend them. As she heard the funeral drums the morning after all…