Sometimes I wonder how I sound to the rest of the evangelical world, to those who weren’t subjected to fringe patriarchal teachings from grace-forgetting complementarians, those who never fought the fear that comes with legalism from your pulpit, those who don’t have to shake the guilt hangover from their childhood churches or Christian communities. Those…
We hide our gazes in blue-lit boxes, hurtling into the dark, dutifully ignoring the scene if we pass daylight, sliding our glances away from the searing contact of other eyes. After my morning meditation of group isolation I rise to the fifth floor and wash the subway off my hands, Having passed through the brood…
I feel like I should have posted more this week. I know I wanted to write another Immodesty Rail post, and I wanted to tell you about the author readings and book signings I’ve been to this last month (Lorin Stein, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins). But it’s been an exhausting week, and some people took…
Worldview textbooks and classes bother me. They were good for addressing my middle school cravings for knowledge and understanding of the outside world and how other cultures and religions understood God or the numinous. But they left me hanging. I have always desired to know more. I was the restless twelve year old who complained…
I often struggle with jealousy. I go to a wedding where the couple is wholeheartedly celebrated by their parents on both sides, and I feel small and petty watching them from the sidelines as they make toasts and can’t say enough positive things about their children. I would hear friends talk about how restful their…
I’m terrible about reading my Bible regularly. Reading the ESV or NASB still gives me flashbacks to sermons from my spiritually abusive church, or to high-stress mornings with my family during our years at that church. But my relationship to Jesus hasn’t been stunted. It’s grown stronger, and I’ve stopped being afraid like I used…
This week’s collection is a little more light and brief than the last few have been. Enjoy! Joy Bennett writes on “all you need is Christ” and the inherent Gnosticism in that idea. I get so excited when other bloggers discover the significance of embodiment and the incarnation! One blogger writes on why complementarians as…
Marianne is one of the most interesting people I have ever met, and I’m excited to have her do a guest post! She graduated from my alma mater some years before I came through, and is still a legend in the English department, especially because of her play interpretation of Till We Have Faces (which I…
Shortly after her breakup with her serious boyfriend of two years, a friend confided in me that she worried that no good Christian guys would be interested in her, because of the things she had done with her ex. “What sorts of things?” I wondered. Her response: nothing more than your average youthful makeout sessions,…
“Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels.” – Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” One afternoon during college, a professor was lecturing on the idea that college is a…