I’m pretty passionate about women needing to embrace their own sexuality without shame and without regard to male sexual desire, and today I’m over at The Friendly Atheist to review Dannah Gresh and Dr. Juli Slattery’s book Pulling Back the Shades, their Christian response to 50 Shades of Grey. This [is] a pervasive problem in Christian relationship books…
If a divorced person told you he or she was worried about the wisdom of you marrying your fiancé[e], would you listen? Or would you disqualify her advice because of her failure to make her marriage work? Even if she did everything right according to the Christian system and listened to her parents, waited to…
I feel like Stuff Christian Culture Likes is the comedy version of my Immodesty Rail pieces. If you don’t know Stephanie Drury‘s work yet, check it out. Her best work may be her themed Twitter search-and-retweet moments. So, along those lines: stuff Christian culture likes [to do]: Demand inappropriate justification for deeply personal decisions. Maybe…
Divorce is hard. This year has been hard. The hardest part isn’t the logistics, the moving, the financial untangling, the stress, the aching, or the loneliness. It’s the fact that I still disassociate my self from the fact that divorce is now part of my story. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. I followed…
When one of my friends starts dating someone exclusively, I like to ask questions, to capture in my head not just the story of how he asked her out or how she warmed up to him, but to understand the essence, the thingness of what makes their new relationship attractive to them. What do you…
People come together People go their own way Love conquers few Our love is like a paper airplane flying in the folded wind Riding high, dipping low But innocence is fair game, I’m hoping I can hold it in Our love will die, I know [Alison Krauss, Paper Airplane] When life falls apart, I’m anxious…
My purpose with almost everything I write here is to communicate two things: 1) you are not alone and shame is not from Jesus, and 2) it is possible to develop an authentic theology of the body and live as an embodied sexual being and experience both healthy boundaries and real grace. These two things…
And we’re baaaack. Commonplace links went away when I stopped reading blogs for a month or so. This week there’s been a fantastic rash of posts on virginity and Christian culture, and I’m really excited that this is being discussed. I have been hesitant to say so, but I have become increasingly convinced that the…
I didn’t expect to write two angry-at-abusive-mindset posts back to back, but here I am. This needs to be said. Christians take romantic relationships too seriously. Not even just courtship-only Christians, or virgins-until-wedding-night Christians. Pretty much any sincere Christian who wants to serve God and honor him with how they handle a romantic relationship is…
Disclaimer: This is a semi-fictionalized story blended from a couple different real events in my life. All the guys who inspired this are good and well-intended men who grew up a lot afterwards. The point of this is not the guys themselves, but the ideas they assumed to be true because of the Christian culture…