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A Quest to Question Mainstream Media
Connecting the dots between what we see on screen and who we become.
Many people who know me as an author and women's ministry speaker are often curious about why I started a film company. They seem to assume there is a split focus there. Perhaps there is, but because I see media in a more holistic way, one of the reasons I started Citygate Films was to influence the diet, so to speak, of what is being consumed in mainstream media. I also have a heavy concern that the "screen generation" is being fed more harmful images and narratives than uplifting ones.
For example, this is how my day has gone so far. I checked the news, and saw stories about a 15-year-old girl who was brutally gang-raped by anywhere between 7 to 10 men outside of a high school while at least a dozen others stood by and watched it without interfering, and a sadist who allegedly raped, murdered, and stowed the bodies of at least 10 women in his home. Those are just the stories in CNN's headlines — the tip of the iceberg nationally. There are numerous local stories about child sex abuse and murder that don't even make the national news.
Next, I checked my Twitter feed, which carried news of many nonprofit organizations (Christian and mainstream) that are working to improve the conditions of women and girls around the world. High on their list of concerns is sex trafficking and enslaved prostitutes.
I then started work by listening to a media panel about "transmedia" efforts — telling a single story across a variety of media platforms. One of the panelists spoke without shame of working with a clothing company that sponsored an interactive game about a stripper. The gamer controls the stripper's actions, which this media expert cheerfully said allowed the player to either make the stripper engage "in the most depraved actions" or "save her." It's an odd sponsorship, given the fact that the sponsor's clothes aren't seen very often. (The clothing company wasn't mentioned in this panel, but I wish it had been so that I would not patronize their stores or product.)
Continue reading A Quest to Question Mainstream Media...
November 4, 2009Planned Parenthood Puts Restraining Order on Former Director
The director had resigned after watching an ultrasound for an abortion.
Planned Parenthood has found itself in a legal battle with a former director who said she had a change of heart after watching an ultrasound for an abortion and quit the organization .
KBTX of Bryan/College Station, Texas, reports that Abby Johnson worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years, and two years as director, but joined forces with the Coalition For Life earlier this month, praying with volunteers outside the clinic.
Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian churchgoer recently became convicted about. "I feel so pure in heart [since leaving]. I don't have this guilt, I don't have this burden on me anymore that's how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion."
Planned Parenthood filed a temporary restraining order October 30 to prevent Johnson from disclosing information about the organization.
Johnson told Fox News that she became disillusioned after she felt pressure to increase profits by performing more abortions, which cost patients between $505 and $695.
"Every meeting that we had was, 'We don't have enough money, we don't have enough money — we've got to keep these abortions coming,' " Johnson said. "It's a very lucrative business and that's why they want to increase numbers."
Continue reading Planned Parenthood Puts Restraining Order on Former Director...
November 2, 2009The Day We Let Our Son Live
It ended up being the most important day of my life.
When it comes to the chance for those with genetic defects to live, the news has not been good on either side of the Atlantic. Last week’s Telegraph reported that of all women in the U.K. who find out through prenatal testing that their baby will have Down syndrome, about 90 percent choose to have an abortion. And yesterday, ABC News reported a near-identical rate among women in the U.S.: 92 percent of those who find out their child will have the chromosomal defect decide to abort. One geneticist at Children’s Hospital Boston found that, without prenatal testing, the number of Down syndrome births would have increased by 34 percent between 1989 and 2005. Instead, the number of Down syndrome births has dropped by 15 percent over that time.
Upon hearing such news, I remembered Ellen and Al Hsu (pronounced shee), a Christian couple who works at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois, and who faced the same situation as the women above. This is Ellen’s story of Elijah, their 4-year-old with Down syndrome, as originally told on their family blog, Team Hsu.
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I gazed in wonder at the blurry form on the screen. “Hi, Baby,” I whispered. The image of our baby was much clearer on the level-two ultrasound. The technician rolled the ultrasound wand over my growing abdomen, and I marveled as I watched our son squirm and suck his thumb. A new life forming within me.
Our OB/GYN had referred us for a level-two ultrasound after he noticed choroid plexus cysts on our baby’s brain during the standard 20-week ultrasound. I was anxious about what the maternal health specialist might find. We knew a couple whose ultrasound also had showed choroids plexus cysts, but whose baby was perfectly fine when he was born. We had spent the past week praying for our baby and hoping for the best.
Al walked into the exam room as the technician was finishing up. She hadn’t said much and explained that the doctor would be in to take a look for himself and to explain what he found. Al and I chatted quietly while we waited. I was relieved that he had made it before the doctor came in. Little did I know how much I would need him.
The doctor came in and began his exam. I was delighted at the chance to see more images of our baby. But my world was shaken when the doctor finally began explaining what he saw. “Something is very wrong with this baby.”
He continued to roll the wand over my tummy as he pointed to various spots on the screen and began listing all the “abnormalities”: larger than usual nuchal folds; clenched fists; possible club feet; something wrong with the liver; enlarged ventricles in the brain; possibly no stomach. My tears flowed as his list grew longer. My delight at the new life within me turned to icy fear, and I clutched Al’s hand tightly.
The doctor suspected a chromosomal problem, possibly Trisomy 13 or 18, birth defects caused by an extra 13th or 18th chromosome. He explained that both of these conditions are generally “incompatible with life.” We were told that if our baby was born alive, he was likely to die within a day. If we were lucky, he might survive for 6 to 12 months. We wondered if we should begin preparing for death instead of life.
Continue reading The Day We Let Our Son Live...
November 2, 2009Wheaton Students Advocate for Woman President
An open letter encourages selection committee to commit to 'ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.'
Out of the 111 members schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), six are led by female presidents. Some current and former Wheaton College students are hoping their alma mater becomes the seventh, once president Duane Litfin retires in mid-2010.
An “Open Letter to the Presidential Selection Committee” — penned by ’05 male graduate Ariah Fine and posted online Friday, October 23 — “strongly encourage[s] the committee to search diligently for a female or minority candidate to be in the final pool of candidates.” Circulated primarily on Facebook, the letter calls on the committee to uphold its stated commitment to hire someone who will “champion ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.”
As of November 2, the letter has garnered 351 signatures, and was sent to the committee right before the application deadline of November 1. Fine said he received confirmation that the committee had received this letter and a similar one he sent this spring, but hasn't heard from any of the committee members.
The letter claims that the number of white male presidents leading CCCU schools is much higher than those leading secular U.S. colleges, citing the statistic that only 2 percent of CCCU schools are led by females, compared with 21.1 percent of secular schools. Fine said he found these statistics from a 2005 Christian Higher Ed article summary available online, and makes this screenshot available.
Continue reading Wheaton Students Advocate for Woman President...
October 30, 2009Reforming a Girls' Reformatory
A Kansas facility's shuttering reveals the successes and pitfalls of 19th-century moral reform.
In August, Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility in northern Kansas closed its doors. Heather Hollingsworth’s coverage for the Associated Press highlights the triumphs and downfalls of one of the country’s longest-running girls’ reformatories.
Beloit was started in 1888 by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which ran it for a year or two before handing it over to the state. A separate reformatory for juveniles was still a relatively new concept; up until the mid-19th century, children and adult were jailed in the same facility.
Beloit's WCTU had good intentions to shape “incorrigible” youth into morally upright women. Like other reformatories, girls at Beloit worked in the gardens or at nearby farms and took care of the institute’s animals.
“But with the high-minded ideals of the reformers, there was a dark side as well,” explained Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council for Juvenile Correctional Administrators in Braintree, Massachusetts. “These kids were an eyesore for the upper classes of society. The solution wasn’t to change the conditions they were growing up in, the poverty and lack of parental supervision. The view was to get them out of sight. Then people forgot they were there, and abuses crept into the system.”
One of Beloit’s worst times took place between 1935 and 1936 under superintendent Lula Coyner. With a growing belief in eugenics, Coyner forced 62 girls, nearly half of Beloit’s inhabitants, to be sterilized. The girls had to go to the police to stop Coyner, who was planning for more residents to have their fallopian tubes removed. Under other superintendents, girls had been physically and emotionally abused in other ways.
Continue reading Reforming a Girls' Reformatory...
October 29, 2009In the Loop: Down syndrome abortions on the rise
What the women's blog editors are reading today.
In Britain, Down syndrome abortions are on the rise
According to a recent study, around nine in ten British women who are told they are going to have a baby with Down syndrome decide to terminate the pregnancy, resulting in 1,100 abortions each year. Diagnoses of Down’s have also increased significantly, from 1075 in 1989-90 to 1843 in 2007-08, due largely to the rising number of women who wait until their 30s and 40s to have children, the study reports.
Abstinence-only sex education at risk
Newsweek reports on “The Future of Abstinence” as President Obama’s 2010 budget cuts funding for the Title V grant program and all abstinence-only programs. The Senate Finance Committee voted to restore funding to the budget, but the measure is unlikely to pass in the House. "The open question is whether these organizations will continue to thrive when federal funding is no longer available," says Alesha Doan, author of The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (Greenwood Publishing, 2008). "What is the underlying support in society for this?" Many programs may now have to turn to private donations and funding in order to continue.
German Protestants choose first woman leader
Margot Kaessmann became the first female leader of the roughly 25 million German Protestants, and only the third female to head a major Christian church. She is a particularly controversial choice for the EKD, an umbrella group for 22 Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches, because she is divorced, but she received 132 of 142 possible votes, and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) welcomed the choice.
"The election sends a signal to the church worldwide that God calls us to leadership without consideration of gender, color or descent," LWF general-secretary Ishmael Noko told the Ecumenical News International news agency at the synod in Ulm. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church in the United States and National Bishop Susan Johnson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada are the only other female heads of large churches.
Continue reading In the Loop: Down syndrome abortions on the rise...
October 28, 2009It's a Not-So-Happy But Wonderful Life
God doesn't call us to be happy.
A couple weekends ago, I took my kids to an historic farm run by our local forest preserve. The buildings there have been authentically restored, and the staff and volunteers roam the property in costume and in character to give visitors a pretty-close encounter to what it must’ve been like to live and work on a family farm at the turn of the last century.
So when one of the in-character volunteers stopped hammering the chicken-coop roof, stepped off his ladder, tugged up his suspenders, and asked if we had any questions, I wasn’t entirely surprised by his answer to my question.
I pointed to the fluffy black and white chickens racing behind their wire and asked, “What color eggs do they lay?”
“Dunno, ma’am,” he said. Then he smiled, betraying his character entirely. “Chickens are women’s work.”
As he continued on about how his “wife” had an egg-selling business so she could buy “pretty things” from Sears Roebuck, a weird stream of envy washed through me. Truth be told, this same weird stream trickles through whenever I read Edith Wharton or read or watch anything about times and places where gender roles were fixed, expectations rigid, and life (and death) somehow more certain.
This is weird, of course, because I’m a liberated woman. I call myself a feminist — unapologetically. And I have since I was a girl. I was born in 1972, the year Helen Reddy and her woman-roaring made the charts. My early childhood memories are of parents, teachers, and Brownie leaders telling me I could do and be anything.
I grew up aware of the doors being thrown open all around me, the ones I’d be able to skirt through more confidently than any other generation of women in human history. I stood under some ceilings as they shattered, and throughout my professional career, my writing life and my motherhood I have continued to push (with the Spirit behind me) on those doors and ceilings that have yet to budge.
All this to say, you’d think hearing such things like historical “women’s work” wouldn’t make me jealous but rather happy or relieved. And yet, not so.
Continue reading It's a Not-So-Happy But Wonderful Life...
October 27, 2009Are You Happy Now?
How to think about the inverse trend of women's rights and women's happiness.
It’s been said before: Today woman have more than they have ever had but they are more unhappy than they have ever been. In a recent Time article, Nancy Gibbs, using the newest statistics, enumerates the significant progress women have made in just one generation. But she goes on to acknowledge that as a result, women are also more stressed and burdened by the weight of their new responsibilities.
In my experience, when Christian women discuss this trend, they often do so with a cynical “I told you so” attitude. The common assumption is that women can (and should) realize their greatest potential by staying at home as a wife and mother and leaving the workplace to the man. They would be happy if they just did that, instead of chasing after equality.
But whether or not this assumption holds up to biblical scrutiny, it misses a vital point: It’s not about happiness.
Jesus didn’t address the Samaritan woman at the well — elevating her to a much higher place in society — so that she could be happy. Jesus didn’t allow Mary to sit at his feet and learn — a place often occupied by male students — just to keep her happy. Christians don’t follow God so that they can be happy. And Justin Wolfers, co-author of the study “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” told Time in trying to explain the trend, “As Susan Faludi said, the women’s movement wasn’t about happiness.” It is about doing what is right. Or, as a Christian might put it, about bringing about God’s vision for society.
Continue reading Are You Happy Now?...
October 27, 2009What Christian Women Want Now
How do we respond to recent reports of women's declining happiness?
Get excited, because Her.meneutics brings two perspectives on Time magazine’s recent cover report, “The State of the American Woman.” Author Nancy Gibbs explores the questions, “Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win?” Time, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, conducted a survey to find out how we have responded to 40 years of change as we now approach a time where women will for the first time make up a majority of the American workforce. Gibbs reports, "Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy." Just a few weeks ago Maureen Dowd wrote on the same topic in The New York Times, and now everyone’s asking, “Why aren’t women happier?”
Is it because we now take on double the responsibilities and stress, as Gibbs suggests, that we now report more unhappiness? Is this necessarily a bad thing? And how do we, as Christian women, frame the issue in light of our own gospel call?
Continue reading What Christian Women Want Now...
October 26, 2009Penny Pinching as a Christian Virtue?
The spiritual dimensions of frugal living.
Recently, my child who was home-schooled for six years attended a conference called Gathering Around the Un-hewn Stone. I make note of his educational history because I feel responsible for inspiring alternative ideas that catalyzed more alternatives than I imagined when he was 8.
The event opened with a lecture, "The Ecological Endgame of Industrial Civilization as a Crisis of/for Faith," which was purported to be about the moral bankruptcy of progress as an article of faith in modernity and, by default, of Christianity for the past 300 years. Resistance involves learning how to brain tan a deer, forage for food, and live out “attachment parenting” — a phenomenon about which my son has no need of instruction, given that he clung to me like a monkey when he was a boy.
In her book, In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue, journalist Lauren Weber espouses similar values, which, like rank materialism, are as old and American as Manifest Destiny. Last week Atlantic economics blogger Megan McArdle reviewed Weber’s book for The New York Times, and compared it unfavorably with the work of financial adviser Dave Ramsey, whom she describes as a “popular evangelical guru.”
Weber grew up without much heat in her home and surprised herself by following in her father’s frugal footsteps. McArdle takes issue with Weber’s idealization of fiscal asceticism, but not with Ramsey’s "save now, worry less later" approach. She says Weber’s idea of thrift as a moral virtue is problematic because it unduly worships parsimony. And McArdle rightly notes that if dumpster-diving “freegans” weren’t living off the largesse of their guilty neighbors, they’d have to get jobs like everybody else. The same could be said of Gathering Around the Un-hewn Stone attendees reveling in a buffet of supermarket overstock, but not of trash eaters around the world who have no other choice.
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