Christian fundamentalism and Christian patriarchy hurt men too. I’m sobered and thankful for this guest post by my friend Tim. -h *** I have been avoiding this all day. All week. In one way or another, I’ve been avoiding this all my life. Some of you may think you know me, but you don’t, not…
Indulge me, for a moment or two? I’m going to be the cantankerous language nerd here for a bit. This post has been written many times before by people smarter than me. But I still hear [straight, white] people telling me that they like the stuff I write and talk about, but they’re not feminists…
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…
Yesterday the Feminisms Fest was all about why we’re feminists. Today’s question is: why does it matter? I read Emily Joy Allison’s post this morning about how feminism matters to her because of her younger sisters, and chuckled, because she basically wrote my post for me. But there’s a difference in our stories, and I’m…
I was sitting with her, pouring out some woeful stories close to my heart. And when I finished, she chuckled and said this: “Weak men are intimidated by strong women. They don’t know what to do with them. They’re afraid of them.” And I’ve been mulling that over for two weeks. I call myself a…
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…
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…
I’ve been stewing on this one for a long time. It’s controversial. It’s probably something we don’t want to admit that we do. But I think it needs to be named and noticed. Within the church and western culture, our assumptions about gender roles create some tensions between the personality of an individual and the ideal…