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The Christianity Today women’s blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.
Her.meneutics was co-founded by Katelyn Beaty and Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
August 24, 2012 8:45 AM
She stood in front of a crowded room of young women eager to hear her speak. Unbeknownst to the crowd, Jennie Allen was gripped with fear. All she could think of was how she was being perceived and the waves...
June 26, 2012 8:54 AM
Maybe it was the tragic trifecta of bangs, glasses, and braces that marked me a prime target on bus rides to Northmont Middle School in the fall of 1997. It could have been a certain demeanor, a silliness that peaked...
February 9, 2012 9:43 AM
We’ve been hearing a lot about masculine Christianity lately. By now we’re used to hearing Mark Driscoll campaign for more masculine church leaders and expressions of Christianity; late last year, Reformed pastor Douglas Wilson invited Driscoll to his church to...
September 23, 2011 10:51 AM
Each week, it seems, stories of parents arrested for spanking their children make the news. Periodically, proposed bans on spanking are considered, but are typically shot down on grounds that such bans tread on parents' rights. Such bans are also...
August 23, 2011 10:49 AM
Yesterday on the blog, we heard from theologian William Webb, an egalitarian who says the Bible's "redemptive movement" shows that because of Christ, women are more, not less, free to exercise gifts in church ministry and beyond. Today we hear...
August 22, 2011 11:41 AM
Submissive wife and president of the United States — an oxymoron, if you ask many journalists analyzing the faith of 2012 hopeful Michele Bachmann. In a recent GOP debate, responding to the question of whether she as president would submit...
March 29, 2011 4:50 PM
Americans are becoming more biblically illiterate than ever. The Barna Group reports that fewer than half of us can name the four Gospels. Sixty percent of us couldn’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and fewer still could name two...
March 9, 2011 9:44 AM
It’s hard to do justice to a lifetime of Christian service in just over an hour. But for a group of 75 professors, students, and family who gathered this weekend at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Kaiser Chapel for the memorial service...
February 1, 2011 12:15 PM
I have never once second-guessed my gender, my sexuality, or my femininity. But a new book has tempted me to. Even though I recently spent eight years either growing babies in my womb or feeding them from my breasts, according...
December 20, 2010 10:50 AM
The blogosphere has been agog recently over one feminist journal’s feature-length article, “House Proud: The Troubling Rise of Stay-at-Home Daughters.” If you are like me and hadn’t heard of the stay-at-home daughters (SAHD) movement, here’s a primer. SAHD is connected...
November 5, 2010 11:25 AM
The difficulty some of us have remembering others’ names is explained, at least in part, by the fact that when being introduced to someone new, the name we are listening for is our own. That kind of listening was going...
August 25, 2010 9:10 AM
I met Dale Hanson Bourke at a meeting of women involved in promoting women’s health and economic empowerment in Zambia. I admired her intelligence, curiosity, and breadth of experience as a journalist and women’s health advocate. Later, I traveled to...
August 23, 2010 9:34 AM
Jeffrey Kluger’s recent Time magazine cover story, “What Animals Think,” explores new research about the human-like intelligence of animals. A Bonobo (cousin of the chimpanzee) can learn hundreds of words. Dogs demonstrate social skills by following a pointed finger to...
May 5, 2010 10:30 AM
The Pill turned 50 this year, and Time magazine commemorated the anniversary last week with Nancy Gibbs’s cover story, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill." Gibbs thoroughly and thoughtfully provides a scientific and sociological history of birth...
March 30, 2010 9:51 AM
Last night’s sunset marked the beginning of Passover for millions of people worldwide. It is the only major Jewish holiday recognized by most mainstream calendars and celebrated by the U.S. President. Although the Jewish holiday lasts all week, until sunset...
March 18, 2010 3:03 PM
The word retarded has made the news lately. The Special Olympics designated March 3rd as a day of awareness about the hurtful and inappropriate ways that word is used. Before that, Sarah Palin excoriated Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of...
March 15, 2010 9:26 AM
Cultural commentator Al Mohler recently covered an unusual study that compared passenger behavior on the Titanic, in 1912, and the Lusitania, in 1915. The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that men...
February 4, 2010 10:39 AM
J. D. Salinger, best known for his teen-angst novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), died last week at the age of 91 after living as a recluse for 50 years on his 90-acre compound in Cornish, New Hampshire. His...
January 15, 2010 8:17 AM
At the time of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, David Bentley Hart, the Eastern Orthodox theologian, wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal that attracted wide attention. Bill Eerdmans, of Eerdmans Publishing, contacted Hart and asked him to...
December 18, 2009 8:01 AM
This Christmas you may hear a sermon or two comparing today's unwed mothers with a well-known one from the ancient Mideast: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Reflecting on the alleged public shame Mary endured as an unmarried mom-to-be, we...
December 15, 2009 10:34 AM
When the New Community Bible first released in 2008, it sold 15,000 hardcover copies in a few short weeks.Yet the resulting hue and cry over certain aspects of the Bible, the first to be produced by Indians, for Indians in...
December 8, 2009 11:38 AM
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released recommendations on breast cancer screenings November 16, stating that too many women were given unnecessary tests based on an initial “false positive” mammogram. The task force discouraged women ages 40 to 49 from...
September 17, 2009 9:25 AM
Renowned evangelist Anne Graham Lotz recently told Amy Sullivan at Time magazine, “Religion can be one of the greatest impediments to finding God.” Newsweek took that as Billy Graham’s daughter “slamming” churches. Actually, I think Lotz is expressing the difference...
September 3, 2009 11:17 AM
As a blog centered on women, it seems only right for Her.meneutics to respond to Zondervan and Biblica’s major announcement that their gender-inclusive language Bible, NIVi (released only in Britain) was a mistake, and that they would no longer publish...
August 27, 2009 9:35 AM
This past weekend, The New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted its entire issue to "Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time." Some very sober and powerful reading there — and not what you might think upon encountering a...
August 25, 2009 9:39 AM
When is a warning from God not a warning from God? Or a "we can't tell whether or not it's a warning from God"? This question came up last week while I was covering the church-wide assembly of the Evangelical...
July 15, 2009 9:15 AM
Gone are the days when personalizing your Bible meant choosing between a leather or patterned Bible cover. The wide variety of Bibles currently on the market allows for customization based on age, sex, and interest. There are Bibles for teenage...
July 14, 2009 8:48 AM
Nancy Guthrie is no stranger to suffering. After her second child, Hope, died within a year of birth from Zellweger syndrome, a rare, fatal genetic abnormality, Guthrie began writing Holding On to Hope, a book about coping with loss...
July 2, 2009 12:15 PM
After the Anglican Church in North America's (ACNA) momentous inaugural gathering, the verdict is out on whether the issue of women's ordination will inhibit the budding alliance from moving forward. Last week more than 800 men and women gathered in...
June 8, 2009 11:29 AM
Writers and artists have for centuries been using their imaginations to make the Creation and Fall accounts in Genesis come alive for readers. John Milton's Paradise Lost is the most epic and well-known example; others include Perelandra, the second installment...
May 29, 2009 11:12 AM
Last night Indian American girl Kavya Shivashankar, 13, won the televised Scripps National Spelling Bee and its $40,000 prize after rattling off the letters in Laodicean (pronounced lÄ-ˌä-dÉ™-ˈsÄ“-É™n). Like most spelling-bee words, the adjective doesn't get much use in everyday...
May 28, 2009 9:53 AM
I admit that for a while I was hooked on certain reality TV shows, but I've pulled the plug on several as of late, keeping my viewing list a lot shorter. (However, I've kept Deadliest Catch on the list...
May 12, 2009 10:56 AM
If you haven't had enough of Miss California yet, she's still reigning in the news today. Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, says Carrie Prejean can keep her crown, even after more racy photos were released online this...
April 24, 2009 9:16 AM
By the time a story like Miss California's has been covered on blogs and in tweets for three days, it seems like old news. On Tuesday, the editors at Her.meneutics discussed how to cover 21-year-old Carrie Prejean's answer to celebrity...
April 22, 2009 8:42 AM
Recently, Rick was trimming a vine around our patio cover and accidentally dislodged a bird's nest with two blue speckled eggs. He brought it to me to see if I thought our grandkids would like to have it. Instead of...
April 20, 2009 2:08 PM
Alisa Harris, editor at Patrol magazine, responded to the question we posed last Thursday, "Where are all the evangelical women in public life?" by pointing to prevalent beliefs about women and spirituality. Here's her helpful analysis: That's what's interesting --...
April 14, 2009 1:42 PM
We've probably all seen them floating around the Internet: those cat pictures, the ones ranging from morbidly obese felines to noxiously cute kittens, captioned with phrases like "Iz mah house!" and "I can has cheezburger?" They're LOLcats, an Internet...