Juanita Bynum Returns to Conference Stage

“This too shall pass,” Pentecostal teacher Juanita Bynum wrote to fans after months of intense media attention following a 2007 parking-lot assault by her husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks. Now, it appears it has.

Renaming herself “Juanita Bynum II” on her website, Bynum has signaled a return to speaking at conferences for Christian women. Now, with media attention swinging her way once more, the question is how — and how long — Bynum, who first gained notability for drawing large crowds at T. D. Jakes’s “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” conferences, will be defined by her past.

In a strange case of symmetry, last month Paula White, a high-profile Pentecostal teacher whose marriage unraveled around the same time as Bynum’s, made news when she took the helm of Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Florida. The two break-ups made headlines in part because they seemed to reveal a pattern, leading Charisma and Time magazines to ask, “Is Marriage Still Sacred?” and “Are Mega-Preachers Scandal Prone?” Time interpreted the incidents as proof that “divorce, once a taboo in evangelical culture, is now a fact of life.”

In 2007 and early 2008, Bynum’s appearances on TV shows like Divorce Court and during the court proceedings (during which Weeks eventually pled guilty for aggravated assault) led some to doubt her role as a spiritual leader. The test of Bynum’s popularity will play out in coming weeks, but a mostly female audience in Plant City, Florida, welcomed Bynum’s return to the stage August 27. Pastor Calvin Collins, whose Greater New Hope Anointed Ministries sponsored the event, introduced Bynum by saying, “She's traveled the world. She's been through storms. And she's come out on the other side."

Comparisons between Bynum and White are probably inevitable due to the timing, and it is true that White’s comeback seems less dramatic than Bynum’s. (White’s announcement involved ex-husband Randy White, who stepped down as pastor of Without Walls and named her his successor.) No one can know all the details of a marriage relationship — and only God knows the heart — but because White and Bynum lead their lives as public figures, they are held to higher standards.

Is that fair? Christians should be aspiring to a higher standard than the world, no matter how publicized their lives — or their mistakes. Unfortunately, it is the mistakes, especially of those who are held up to be role models, that attract the most attention. According to Charisma, news about Christian celebrity couples like the Bynums and Whites has a “domino effect,” creating distrust and discouragement about marriage within the church. Yet we are told in the Bible to learn from our elders in the faith (1 Tim. 5:17), and that Christian women can have a powerful and needed influence over the younger (Titus 2:3–5).

So, who is worthy to be a Christian role model? And who makes that decision?

Quest for a Father’s Love

In The Girl in the Orange Dress, Margot Starbuck chronicles her quest for her birth parents, for healing of physical and emotional pain, and for the unfailing love that is promised in Scripture, but which she had never felt.

Written with a light tone, the book contains episodes of outlandish behavior by its author—as she struggles through denial, insecurity, seminary, relationships, and an intense period of “seeking.” Alicia Cohn spoke with Starbuck about her book, which provides a personal encounter with the message that there is freedom in the love of Christ: freedom to be in health relationships, and freedom to be who he’s made each person to be.

What does it mean to be “heard, seen, known”?
At the end of Exodus chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3, when God’s people are suffering in Egypt, God says, “I see your suffering, I hear your cries, I know and I care.” Then God tells Moses to go do it, which kind of seems like a dirty trick. But as I began to look around the circle of people that God had put in my life, I became more and more convinced that that is exactly how God does it. God sees us, God cares about us, and God’s method is using human faces to liberate the oppressed, to seek justice, and to tell us the truth about who we are. God’s big plan is for a person to be a redeemer. Moses, my therapist, my friends, my husband function that way in [my] life. It feels as though that redemption was in the same pattern of God choosing to come as a person, in the person of Jesus Christ.

Is there a particular desire in women to be “heard, seen, known and loved” by a man?
If we haven’t yet received that in our bones from God, that is a burden to put on a man. When I was able to have that deep need met in God’s love for me, then I found that—not in a desperate way, but in a natural way—I would see in my husband’s face a reflection of some of the things that I longed to see in God’s face. He became kind of a human reflection of those.

How did you learn to deal with the tension between forming attachments and becoming clingy to people?

The knowing that we have in our bones, from our earliest relationships with caregivers, teaches us whether forming attachments means that we’re safe, protected, nurtured, or whether attachments are scary. To form an attachment means that we’re at risk of being hurt again. I’m afraid that our temptation is to think that God could fix it all with a magic wave of his healing wand, which was exactly what I wanted. The process was that I had to face those losses before I could move on and form healthy attachments with others. I really wanted it to be the healing magic, but we have to be brave enough to face those losses, to deal with the conflicts that we’ve experienced, before we’re able to move on and establish those healthy relationships with others.

Can we ever be completely healed from scars in our past?
Although I think we’re always going to live with a degree of brokenness, I do believe that God’s heart is to put us back together in such a way that we’re able to be in healthy relationships with others. There’s a degree to which emotional pain and physical pain keeps us preoccupied with ourselves. God is about freeing us up so that we can love God and others, to be for others, the same way that God is for us.

How does our “adoption” as Christians inform our identity?
The first conversation I had with my birth mother, when she told me about who my birth father was, ignited a hunger and a longing not just to see that face but to be seen and known by that face. But what I heard God saying was “turn toward me, I am the face in whom you will find out who you are.” I really was at an age and a place in my life where I was asking all of those questions: Who am I? What am I going to do? Who am I going to be? To think that that’s found not just in a mirror, because that’s where I was looking—I was looking in a mirror of myself to find out who I was, gazing at my own navel—but in God’s face. I began to learn about my value, worth, identity by looking into the face of the Father and the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”

Do we need to do that continually?
We live in that tension between the lies that we’re not really worth loving and the truth that we are worth loving because of who God is. We have two choices. The first, which I did for years, is to avoid conflict and build a protective shell around our hearts. This shell does protect us from hurt, but it also prevents intimacy with others. The second choice is to bravely face our past with the confidence that we are not alone. God sees, hears, knows, and cares. There are moments when I tend to listen to the voices that speak lies about who I am, but God’s always calling us to stay in that place of living in God’s grace.

The Girl in the Orange Dress was released July 31 and is available at ChristianBook.com and other retailers.
Alicia Cohn previously interned at Christianity Today magazine. She has written previous blog posts for Her.meneutics on "So, How Are Those Summer Reading Lists Coming?" marriage in Florida, the Breast Cancer Bible, and The Stoning of Soraya M.

Half the Sky: A Must-Read Book

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 magazine with a title like that. In fact, these are real, global, and serious issues that should have the attention and ministry of Christians everywhere. More on that in a moment.

The lead feature was an excerpt from the forthcoming book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn,a former Times correspondent who now works in finance and philanthropy. Here's a summary of the book, titled Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide — one that includes an honest fact about abortion that I was stunned to read in a mainstream publication. This is a good indicator of the journalistic veracity of this book's research:

Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.

After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at pro-democracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.

Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 107 million.

Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age. In addition, ultrasound machines have allowed a pregnant woman to find out the sex of her fetus — and then get an abortion if it is female.

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

These are shocking, sinful statistics. They must be challenged and changed. For that reason, I am very grateful for the journalistic efforts of Kristof and WuDunn. For the same reason, I was also very grateful for the attention Secretary Clinton brought to the status of women in Africa during her visit last week.

But having researched the history of feminism in the Western world for my own book, I am also reminded of the course of our women's history. In many ways, though perhaps not as extreme, we issued the same complaints. Women in the 19th century complained of men making the same poor financial expenditures on alcohol and prostitutes, that women didn't have equality in education, and that maternal health was a neglected medical priority.

But as women fought for equality, we found the fight remained long after the battles were won. Because men were identified as the problem, the gender war has never been fully resolved. Instead of unifying marriages and families, this ongoing battle continues to fracture them. So my concern is that we will import some of these same values into our efforts to help women around the world.

In fact, the opening illustration of Kristof and WuDunn's article illustrates this perfectly. It is about a Pakistani couple where the husband is sinning terribly against his wife by beating her and otherwise neglecting her. She is in despair until she receives a microfinance loan, which enables her to set up a small embroidery business. Soon she is the village business mogul, able to employ many others and pay off her husband's debts. He no longer beats her because she is too valuable, and he has come around to the view that girls are just as good as boys.

And that's where the story ends. Yay . . . but only half a yay, really. He stopped beating her, but where is the true partnership? Where is the true repentance? Only the gospel can address sin and redemption. Economic parity can't be the ultimate solution because it can't address the heart issues. And this brings me back to why I think Christians need to be involved. If we preach equality because it's found on page one of the Bible, then we should be leading the charge in this area. But our solutions will be different because our end goals are different. Yes, we want to empower women. Yes, we want women to be educated. Yes, we want families to be healthier and more prosperous. But we don't want to do this by lifting up one person in the family at the expense of another. We have to help men change, too, by preaching the gospel and teaching them to truly apply the Ephesians 5 mandate to love their wives as Christ loved the church -- without concern for cultural practices or restrictions. They must fear God and his Word more than the opinions of other men and the way things are done in their culture.

As Christians, we have an opportunity here to help families around the world by both standing against incredible injustice against women and by preaching the gospel of reconciliation. Let's not lose any ground to lesser solutions.

Carolyn McCulley is the author of Radical Womanhood and blogs at SoloFemininity.blogs.com. This post was adapted courtesy of the author.

The Lutherans and Twister Theology

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 Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in Minneapolis. Members of America's largest Lutheran denomination voted to allow non-celibate gays to become clergy and paved the way for same-sex blessing ceremonies. Conservatives I talked to were devastated by the convention, but even they admitted that before the meeting began August 17, they knew they did not have enough votes to prevent the juggernaut.

Then the tornado came.

It was just before 2 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19, right before one of the first significant votes of the assembly. The Lutherans were slated to vote on a sexuality statement that, for the first time I know of, gave the gay-friendly view a place at the table as one of four theological positions Lutherans could have. If the statement passed, it indicated where the convention would go from that point on.

Then someone rushed into the press room and told us to vacate the place fast. A tornado had touched down close by, we were told. The police wanted us in a safe place away from the glass windows that encase the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Everyone rushed into the main hall to join some 1,045 voting members who were listening to a Bible study being led by a female preacher. (A few blogs say the debate on the statement had already begun, but that is not true. I was there). A palpable blanket of fear descended on the entire group as the doors to the outside hallways were shut, enclosing us in the giant hall, which was apparently was the safest place to be. We could hear the winds howling outside. I thought of my rental car parked nearby and hoped it would stay in one piece. After the Bible study, ELCA President Mark Hanson read the 121st Psalm to calm everyone down.

"We trust the weather is not a commentary on our work," said the Rev. Steven Loy, chairman of the ad hoc committee on the sexuality statement.

And a tornado was headed our way. Just after 2 p.m., the twister knocked the cross off the steeple of Central Lutheran Church, across the street from the convention center. I walked outside afterward to look at it; the steel cross was dangling high up in the air.

Things got even weirder. The sexuality statement needed a two-third majority to pass. Many folks weren't sure there were enough Lutherans there who would vote that way, and the vote came up rather suddenly near the end of the day. When the totals were announced, everyone gasped — the statement had passed by an exact two-thirds vote. One vote less would have killed it.

Later, some of us in the press room were discussing whether the Almighty had sent a tornado to send the Lutherans a message. After all, one of the reporters said, the ELCA endured an electrical storm during one of their previous conventions — where human sexuality was also on the table — in Orlando.

A Lutheran pastor I was talking to vividly remembered the Orlando incident. She felt the tornado was a message from God, a warning to not go in the direction the assembly was bent on following. She had been a missionary in Africa and over there, she said, people would have seen the dangling cross, stopped everything, and reconsidered.

If God was speaking in downtown Minneapolis through the twister, no one was listening. In fact, proponents of ordaining openly gay clergy could have seen the exact two-thirds total as a vindication of their point of view. And, if God had wanted to get through to the assembly, why didn't he send the tornado a day earlier so word would have gotten through to everyone?

Because most of the folks in the convention hall didn't even hear of the steeple incident until well after the vote. Some of the natives told me it was very weird for a tornado to even go through downtown Minneapolis. Not only that, the weather folks had failed to forecast a tornado that afternoon. The tornado, I heard on the news, just showed up.

John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church across town from the convention center, thought the tornado signified a warning from God to the Lutherans and posted this blog, which, within a few hours, had gotten more than 200 comments. (There were 674 last I looked; Piper posted a clarifying blog on Saturday) One clarification: Tornado winds did strike a few other places, mostly south of town, but fortunately no one was killed.

In contrast, Marty Duren of the Atlanta Southern Baptist Examiner warns people of ascribing motives to the Almighty for natural disasters. Is it possible that God already knew the Lutherans were going to vote, so he ripped off the cross from the nearest ELCA to show what he thought? Or does he simply not leave his calling card in such dramatic ways? If last week's events do not constitute God's warning — or judgment — what does?

Breast-feeding Dolls: Cute or Creepy?

Let me start this post off by saying that I'm a little bit of a lactivist. I don't think I'm the scary kind, but I do champion the rights of nursing mothers, practice child-led weaning, and, well, use words like lactivist.

And I'll admit to having filched the toy bottle out of the package before giving my daughter a new doll for her birthday, in an effort to minimize the bottle-as-normative aspect of our culture. (See what I mean? That's lactivist logic.)

So having said that. My reaction to the news of a new breast-feeding doll from Spanish toy company Berjuan?

Eww. Gross.

Meet Bebe Gloton — which translates out to "Baby Glutton" according to The New York Times, and "Greedy Baby" according to The Daily Mail. (I'll hold my comments on the name.) The doll, sold in both baby boy and baby girl versions, is being marketed as the world's first breast-feeding doll. When held up to the chest of young mommies-in-training, electronic sensors in Bebe Gloton's mouth "suckle" at strategically-placed daisies on the girl-sized halter top that comes in the box with the doll.

I'm creeped out just writing that. And I'm not alone. Bebe Gloton is garnering criticism as videos of the doll in action go viral, with readers' comments ranging from concern about the sexualization of young girls to fear over an unhealthy ramp-up in early maternal desires.

I think both of those criticisms are a little silly. As fellow Her.meneutics blogger Christine Gardner wrote for CT a few months ago, breast-feeding is not sexual; it's the way we were designed to feed and nurture our young. In my time as a nursing mother, I've come to view breast-feeding with the same sense of awe and wonder that I feel for much of God's creation. That milk, my milk, is capable of feeding and sustaining life, providing everything my babies need to thrive and grow, is nothing short of amazing.

As for an unhealthy increase in maternal desire, and the claim that Bebe Gloton is somehow going to contribute to a rise in teen pregnancy rates, I don't really see how Bebe Gloton differs from any other baby doll, in that respect.

But still. There's an ick factor that I can't put my finger on. I'm not creeped out by children pretending to nurse; in my house my daughter nurses her dolls, and my son nurses his trucks. Larger stuffed animals nurse smaller ones, with little regard for species or even genus. Polar bears nurse baby rabbits. Mama monkeys nurse ducks. I've never seen this as anything but the imaginative play children engage in as they mirror the world of adults, no different from draining imaginary pasta while pretending to cook dinner.

But Bebe Gloton freaks me out. Maybe it's something about the electronic sensors, mechanizing something that derives much of its beauty from the fact that it needs no electricity, no sensor, no prop? Or maybe it's the fact that the daisies look like pasties.

Either way, I know this: Bebe Gloton isn't going to be on any of our Christmas lists this year. Admittedly, I can't put my finger on why, but I know creepy when I see it.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go nurse my baby.

Running in the Shadow of 9/11

I have loved New York City my whole life. By that I mean since I was a preschooler living across the Hudson in North Bergen, New Jersey. Even from the relative distance of the Jersey Shore, where my family moved when I was 6 and where I’ve spent most of my days, “the city” has been as prominent a backdrop as the cool green Atlantic. From trips up north to see family, I watched the derided Twin Towers get built. While flying into Newark Liberty International Airport when I lived in California post-9/11, I pondered the void.

It was as a hometown girl that I ran (and walked) the New York City Half-Marathon last Sunday on behalf of the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF). I love to run and have been doing it since winning ribbons at elementary school field days. Running with CTF’s NF Endurance Team for research into a disease that may have contributed to my son Gabriel’s death is a particularly rewarding experience. Not only is CTF the world’s leading non-government funder of neurofibromatosis research, it has given me education and encouragement ever since Gabriel was diagnosed with NF as an infant.

CTF is headquartered on Pine Street in New York City, so it was a hometown race for the team as well. It was more than that for me though. Life for my family had been pretty idyllic for a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two nights before those attacks, Gabriel’s friend Christopher Braca was at our house. His dad Al picked him up. Al Braca worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and had lived through the first World Trade Center bombing. He didn’t live through the second. He was known as “The Rev” at work because of his outspoken faith. Stories came back to his family after his death that on that fateful morning, when all hope of survival was lost, Al had gathered people around him to passionately invite them to go to heaven with him.

A week after the attack, I dropped Gabe off at Christopher’s house to hang out. His mom, Jeannie, said, “I realized last night that Al isn’t coming home and neither is his body.” A little later, I got a call that I needed to come pick Gabe up. Despite Al's body having fallen more than 100 stories amidst tons of debris, it was found intact. We called it a miracle in the midst of unspeakable tragedy.

As it happens, our hotel near the finish line at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan was a block from Ground Zero. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had I spent time there since volunteering at a relief worker respite station in spring 2002. On Saturday morning before the race, my husband and I strolled around the site and took in the changes, including a visitor center and a bronze memorial to firefighters who had died there. Locals were giving tours, telling tourists about human remains found as late as a year ago.

I began to cry and said to my husband, “This is when it all began to go bad.” I was referring to our idyllic lives. He said he had been thinking the same thing. I said something else: “I’ve long wondered if the way Gabe was fixated on dying, as evidenced in his drawings and poetry about jumping from a precipice, was connected in some way to this?”

On Sunday morning, the race began with a seven mile loop of Central Park. We emerged from the park onto 7th Avenue to the sound of cheering crowds. A smile crossed my face so big it made me laugh. Owning Times Square for a moment felt as magical as I imagine it must feel to be a Broadway star. We turned right onto 42nd Street and loped over to the West Side Highway, where we were greeted by showgirls and guys dancing and singing us on to victory. It was about then that my legs began to get heavy and tight, but I ran a really smart race. I paced myself, stayed in the shade, stopped at every fluid station, stretched, and ate packets of salt as advised in the 87 degree heat. Someone later asked if I ever thought of quitting. No! I was having too much fun taking pictures and tweeting as I ran and walked!

Besides, how could I quit with Dribble the World runner Ashley Ten Kate bouncing her basketball a few strides ahead of me for 13.1 miles! According to its website, Dribble the World “exists to save the lives of orphans in sub-Saharan Africa using the game of basketball.” There was also the 13.1 Virgin runner, who I thought was running in support of abstinence until someone who doesn’t write about the sexual revolution and its consequences informed me was probably a first time half-marathoner. Duh.

Sprinting for the finish line a couple hundred yards from Ground Zero, though, I started to cry again. It was as if all the happiness and pathos of my life was represented in that course.

I reveled for a bit in my 2:42:18 finish time and ran into another team member who didn’t know anyone with NF, but wanted to support a charity that benefits childhood cancer. After a quick shower, my husband and I sped out of the city for my niece’s baby shower. A woman sat next to me whose face was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Finally she reminded me that she was a “9/11 widow” for whom my niece had babysat for several years. Her husband was also a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, and their only child was born in December 2001. As we kibitzed over a new generation of gifts, she said, “That was the hard part, figuring out how to put those things together.”

When Gabriel was diagnosed with NF, I thought it was really unfair given the challenges he was already facing as the black child of a white unwed mother. After much wrestling with God, I realized that, if his grace is sufficient for the challenges of my life, it is sufficient for everyone’s, including my son’s. I also adopted Job’s words as a motto to stave off fear of debilitating tumors and disfigurement. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” are words I have lived by my whole adult life. Much, no all, of that life has been lived in the kinetic shadow of New York City. Last weekend, I owned that city’s streets for a couple, three hours. It’s only fair. They’ve long owned me.

Teaching an Old Dogfighter New Tricks

I was home in Philadelphia last Thursday when the news broke that my beloved Eagles had signed Michael Vick to a two-year contract. This came just four months after his release from prison on charges related to dogfighting. Local reactions were immediate and impassioned; people picketed the Eagles’ offices, called for boycotts on team sponsors, and returned their season tickets, which some estimate to have between a 400- and 4,000-year wait. “Hide Your Beagle, Vick’s an Eagle” was a popular rallying cry on the nightly news.

But others lined up at sporting goods stores to see if they could get one of the first Vick jerseys printed on Eagles green, nearly salivating as they described the new life Vick might breathe into the offensive strategy. While Philly fans are known for their passionate, vocal responses — both positive and negative — to their teams, it seems like since Thursday, even people outside Philadelphia and even the sports world have had something to say about it.

The big question is whether Michael Vick should ever be allowed to play football again, especially in the nation’s premier league. He’s had his chance, and he messed up. Big time.

But this is a story about second chances. Michael Vick wants one. The Eagles are giving him one. Will we extend him the same courtesy? How do we decide who deserves a second chance, and what form that might take?

This all hits close to home for Eagles head coach Andy Reid, who took time off two years ago when his two sons were arrested for drug charges. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on Reid’s introduction of the newest Eagle at a press conference, which was uncharacteristically personal in tone:

“I'm a believer that as long as people go through the right process, they deserve a second chance. Michael has done that. . . . He has some great people in his corner, and he has proven that he's on the right track." Reid also admitted that his personal life influenced his strong feelings about Vick, referring to the arrests of his two sons . . . "I've seen people that are close to me who have had second chances that have taken advantage of those. . . . It's very important that people give them an opportunity to change, so we're doing that with Michael. The other side of that is we're getting one of the best football players in the league.”

Even Donovan McNabb, whose security as the Eagles’ starting quarterback is threatened by a new superstar QB who has held the position with another team, has vocally supported Vick’s return to the Eagles. He writes on his blog that he brought the idea to Reid first, advocating for his friend and future rival, because he believes the situation will give Vick the best support to move on and practice the lifestyle changes he says he wants. “I want to see him continue to grow as a person, spend time with his family and re-establish himself as a leader on and off the field,” McNabb writes. “Due to the nature of what happened and the attention it has received, it may not always be easy for him but he seems up for the challenge. Fortunately, with a tremendous individual like Tony Dungy in his corner, he will have the support he needs.”

Dungy, the former Indianapolis Colts coach and a committed Christian, sat by Vick’s side at his first Eagles press conference. Since retiring in January, Dungy has worked with imprisoned young men as part of his Christian outreach program. Of Dungy’s visits to Vick’s cell, the Los Angeles Times reports:

"I talked to him about where he wanted to go in the future," Dungy said. "That's one of the things my dad always used to say to me when he was alive. . . . And that's what I kept asking Mike. 'Where are you going to go from here?' "And the other thing I asked him was where the Lord was in all this. We talked about him growing up and having that side, that Christian background, but really getting to the NFL and feeling like he was his own guy. Somewhere in the course of all this he realized that he had left that spiritual side. When he kind of described that to me and the fact that he needed to get back closer to the Lord, that's when I said, 'I'm going to stay involved in this. I'm going to help you.' "

When Vick’s agent approached the Eagles to discuss a future relationship, Reid said Vick brought with him a wish list that included no guarantees of playing time or a lucrative salary (though there is that), and hopes for a coach that would be a mentor and teammates who would support him as he tries to turn his life around.

We can look at what Michael Vick did with horror — as well we should. We can insist that we would never do such a thing — we probably won’t. But it’s just not that simple. We are not Michael Vick, and we don’t know what it’s like to be surrounded by a culture that celebrates and normalizes the things he did. Dungy acknowledged as such, saying, “Dogfighting is just one situation. I've dealt with guys, and they don't see the harm in it. But eventually the light goes on and they change. That's part of coaching, that's part of being a parent, that's part of helping young people grow into adulthood."

Vick’s brush with the law forced him to do some growing up. As with many celebrities, NFL stars growing up in the spotlight can get trapped in an adolescent mindset. In his 60 Minutes interview, Vick said:

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, it's no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights. And that put it all into perspective . . . I let myself down, not being out on the football field, being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you know. That wasn't my life. That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool. and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me lying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself.

Animals inspire great passion in people, and it’s difficult to see beyond the anger at what Vick did to them. But the more I read and listen and think about who Vick has become, and what he’s now asking us to do, the more I cannot ignore the call to forgiveness.

Vick paid the sentence asked of him, now admits his wrongs, and is seeking help in the form of Christian counsel. He’s already lost his money and his reputation; now he can pursue a career in the only field he knows. It if will help him turn his life around, I’m ready to offer my forgiveness and support.

Jenny Sanford Offers Forgiveness After Husband's Affair

You have to dig a bit, but Vogue's feature story on South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford is sprinkled with hints at the importance of her faith. The wife of Mark Sanford left the governor's mansion earlier this month to live in their home on the coast after her husband admitted to having an affair with an Argentine woman.

Unlike other women in high-profile political scandals, Jenny Sanford was praised by many for not standing idly by her husband during press conferences to save him face. She gave her first post-affair interview to Vogue, explaining how startled she was about the affair. "The person I married was centered on a core of morals," she says. "The person who did this is not centered on those morals.”

The reporter's first description is a bit odd (the Sanfords have wine on the kitchen counter!), but it sets a scene for the rest of the article.

The Sanfords are conservative Christians, but they’re not the teetotaling, proselytizing sort. There are bottles of wine on the kitchen counter. Ayn Rand is on the bookshelf, but so is Gabriel García Márquez. The Bible sits front and center on the coffee table, alongside Forbes magazine. “You could be friends with her for 20 years, and she would never bring up the religious stuff,” says her friend Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina and a self-described liberal who once worked for The Nation.

So we discover that Christians can drink wine and read and be friends with liberals. Moving on.

The author explains that faith was an important part of Sanford's childhood, but only touches on it briefly. "As a girl, she saw her father kneel next to the bed in daily prayer," Rebecca Johnson writes. "Faith also helped the Sullivan children cope with their mother’s longtime battle with skin cancer and the debilitating treatments she underwent to fight it."

It was clear from her first statement after the affair that Sanford's children are her focus. “At heart, I am an old-fashioned woman," she says. "If the Lord blessed me with children and family, I knew that would be my calling.”

Sanford comes across as hurt when she says that her husband's revelations about “crossed lines with other women” were nothing short of “punches to the gut,” but she shows firmness. Sanford said that during pastoral and marriage counseling, her husband was obsessed with seeing the woman. "I have learned that these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography," she explains. "They just can’t break away from them.”

She also appears forgiving of her husband's mistress. "I also feel sorry for the other woman. I am sure she is a fine person," Sanford tells Vogue. "All I can do is pray for her because she made some poor choices."

The best part is buried at the end, so read all the way through.

“If you don’t forgive,” she says, “you become angry and bitter. I don’t want to become that. I am not in charge of revenge. That’s not up to me. That’s for the Lord to decide, and it’s important for me to teach that to my boys. All I can do is forgive. Reconciliation is something else, and that is going to be a harder road. I have put my heart and soul into being a good mother and wife. Now I think it’s up to my husband to do the soul-searching to see if he wants to stay married. The ball is in his court.”

So, How Are Those Summer Reading Lists Coming?

With the end of summer in sight, your summer reading list is probably still untouched. If so, you are not alone. Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin wrote last week on “the lost art of reading,” in which he muses on his past as an avid lover of the printed word and wonders what happened to his craving for books.

Our attention-deficit-inducing era of video games, multi-tab browsers, and YouTube videos hasn’t been around that long. If you’re like Ulin, you might have grown up devouring books only to find yourself now reading this, wondering, When was the last time I didn’t have to remind myself to sit down and read? Ulin admits that “some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down,” and only then by forcing himself to stay focused. He writes:

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Ulin raises another question when he writes, “There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago." When Ulin writes that “reading has become an act of meditation,” he is talking about text itself — any text. But as Christians, perhaps we ought to consider this as a matter of biblical importance. As Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and so is the Bible as the written revelation of him. How difficult is it for Christians in the digital age to sit still and allow the unchanging Word of God to permeate what Ulin calls “the buzz . . . a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age”? Or, as Ulin put it, “How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

Alicia Cohn is an intern at Christianity Today magazine. She has written previous blog posts for Her.meneutics on marriage in Florida, the Breast Cancer Bible, and The Stoning of Soraya M.

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I’ve finished three of the six books on my summer reading list. Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry will probably most interest those who either take psychotropic drugs themselves or have loved ones who do.

The author, Edward Shorter, is a medical historian at the University of Toronto, but his book reads like investigative journalism. He explains how effective psychiatric medications were driven out of drugstores as the FDA asserted its power in the 1960s, and as concerns about “addiction” gained cultural dominance. This second point reminded me of renowned pain specialist Kathleen M. Foley's work, in which she has dispelled misconceptions about pain management within the same cultural context. Shorter also explores how the diagnosis of depression came to replace anxiety as a primary description of general malaise. He says this change has less to do with science than with politics and expired patents. What he’d like to see is a revival in psychiatric research that leads to diagnosis and therapeutics shaped less by external pressures and more by intellectual rigor and precision. Here, here!

The second book I read this summer is Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by renowned religion sociologist Robert Bellah. This book, his most famous, nicely complemented Beyond Prozac in tracing and analyzing the advent of a therapeutic, individualistic approach to life in the U.S. Reading the self-perceptions of various interview subjects, I felt as if I was reading my own thoughts and those of my family and friends. Of these subjects, the authors generously conclude, “If there are vast numbers of a selfish, narcisstic ‘me’ generation in America, we did not find them, but we certainly did find that the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think.” This meme verges on passe at this point, but it bears reminding how we got where we are.

The third book is an antidote of sorts to the first two. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is veteran NPR reporter Leif Enger's sophomore effort. Having enjoyed the characters, redemptive themes, and surprising supernatural elements in Peace Like a River, I hoped, if not for more of the same, at least for as much creativity. While this novel employs similar themes, it’s a slower, more subtly imaginative story. Enger uses the occasion of following up his first triumph as a wry framing tool in this work. Anticipating that readers like me will be hungry for particular scenes, Enger tips a hat to us, but doesn’t feed our hunger. This reveals both skill and humor, I think. Again, there’s a flight from the law, with salvation coming not only to the criminal but to other characters as well. It’ll be fun to see to how Enger uses his spare journalistic prose and rich storytelling in the future.

As to the other three books on my list, Honoring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell is on my nightstand, but I haven’t even ordered Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology and Spiritual Theology yet. With the end of summer fast approaching, I doubt I’ll get to these anytime soon. I’m really in the mood for another work of fiction. What suggestions do you have for a rich, engaging novel that I could find at a public library?

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 1921-2009

I saw Eunice Kennedy Shriver once, in December of 1963. I was standing at the back of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., waiting for a Mass in honor of her brother, John F. Kennedy, to begin. Most of the Kennedy family was seated in front when Mrs. Shriver arrived. She rushed past, so close I could have reached out and patted her full-length fur coat.

She was tall, with disheveled brown hair and hastily applied red lipstick. Her face was lined with grief. I saw other Kennedys that day, but Mrs. Shriver is the only one I remember — a 42-year-old, very pregnant force of nature, a woman in pain who knew exactly where she was going. That brief image keeps flashing across my mental screen as I read tributes to one of America’s truly great women, who died Tuesday at the age of 88.

A woman in an era when wealthy women did not work and almost no women went into politics, she may have achieved even more than her more famous brothers. Carla Baranauckas for The New York Times:

“When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” U.S. News & World Report said in its cover story of Nov. 15, 1993.

A child of privilege with personal connections to pomp and power, she worked tirelessly on behalf of the marginalized. J. Y. Smith for The Washington Post:

Her first job was with the State Department in Washington, where she was part of a program to help former prisoners of war become acclimated to civilian life. . . .

In 1947 and 1948, she was executive secretary of the Justice Department's National Conference on the Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency. Having gained control of a $1 million trust fund at 21, she accepted a salary of $1 a year.

In 1950, she became a social worker at the federal penitentiary for women in Alderson, W.Va. In 1951, she moved to Chicago and worked at the House of the Good Shepherd, a youth shelter, and with the city's juvenile court system.

A prominent Democrat who disagreed with her party’s increasingly pro-choice stance, she stood up for the unborn and protested the abortion-rights agenda. The Susan B. Anthony List:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an early supporter of the Susan B. Anthony List and its mission to advance, mobilize and represent pro-life women in the political process. She and her husband, Sargent Shriver, also lent their time and talents to the efforts and activities of Democrats for Life of America and Feminists for Life.

Repeatedly facing personal loss and sorrow — the deaths of older siblings Joe, John, Rosemary, and Kathleen, and younger siblings Patricia and Robert; the mental retardation of beloved sister Rosemary, who lived to age 86 — she founded the Special Olympics, which “has become the world's largest year-round sports program for mentally disabled children and adults,” wrote J. Y. Smith. “More than 2.5 million athletes in 180 countries take part in competitions each year.” Karen Jeffrey and Patrick Cassidy for the Cape Cod Times:

"She believed that people with intellectual disabilities could — individually and collectively — achieve more than anyone thought possible," the Shrivers' son, Timothy Shriver, chairman and CEO of Special Olympics, said in a prepared statement yesterday. "This much she knew with unbridled faith and certainty. And this faith in turn gave her hope that their future might be radically different."

Michael Gerson beautifully reflected on her life and work in his Washington Post article “The Joyful Revolution”:

Shriver seemed to have many motivations for this work: her highly developed sense of justice, her Catholic faith, her love for Rosemary. But all these influences led in the same direction. She refused to accept that anyone was hopeless or worthless. She believed that great causes could involve great joy. And she practiced a kind of vigorous love that did not stroke or pity but, rather, transformed. Compared to her brothers, Eunice Shriver's options may have been limited — but her achievements were not inferior. It is difficult to imagine a higher purpose, or a finer epitaph: She made her nation a more welcoming place.

The Persecuted Rifqa Bary?

Fathima Rifqa Bary's story is quickly circulating on blogs and Christian media as proof of Islam's violent roots and the cost of following Christ. While the latter is true no matter who's doing the following, the former is disputable in the case of the Ohio teen who fled her home two weeks ago to meet up with Blake and Beverly Lorenz, Florida pastors she had met on Facebook.

"They [my parents] threatened to kill me," Bary says tearfully in a YouTube video (above) posted Tuesday. She goes on to explain the logic of honor killings: "They have to kill me. My blood is now hallal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I am from a Muslim background. It's an honor, they love God more than me. They have to do this."

Bary says she hitchhiked and rode a bus July 19 from New Albany, a Columbus suburb, to Orlando, calling the Lorenzes upon arriving. She stayed with the pastors of the nondenominational Global Revolution Church until Monday, when she was placed into emergency custody with the Dept. of Children and Families.

"We are doing everything we can to protect her," Blake Lorenz told The Orlando Sentinel. Beverly Lorenz told The Columbus Dispatch they hardly knew Bary but took her in and called an abuse hotline last Friday, which prompted a visit from state police. Blake Lorenz said that he's "very concerned that the system will let her down."

It's unclear when or how Bary became a Christian. In the video she says she had to "hide her Bible for years" and sneak out of her parents' home to pray and attend church. Bary says her father found out she was a Christian through her Facebook page. The attorney representing Bary's mother told Orlando-based 10TV News that they were "allowing [Bary] to explore her Christianity," and that Bary wasn't fearful until she met Pastor Lorenz, who holds Bary tightly throughout the video.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Jerry Cupp with the Columbus missing persons bureau disputes Bary's claims, telling The Columbus Dispatch that Mohamed Bary has known about his daughter's conversion for months and appears to be caring. And today, the attorney for Bary's parents issued a statement that they have never threatened Bary: "If this case is perceived as a clash of religions, it is because Mr. Lorenz recklessly and without authorization put someone else's child in front of television cameras to publicly renounce her previous faith," McCarthy said in the statement. "The parents who love Rifqa are in the best position now to protect her from the mess that Mr. Lorenz has made."

No matter, says Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch and author of The Truth about Muhammad. He calls Bary's case a "slow-motion honor killing" that "bring[s] to the fore once again the prevalence within Islamic communities in the West of attitudes and beliefs that foster honor killings and the murder of apostates from Islam." He calls the statement of Hatim Hamidullah of the Islamic Society of Central Florida that Bary's story does not represent Islam "smooth deceptions."

Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World also writes, "We Christians should be in prayer for our new sister in Christ, Rifqa Bary . . . The other side has already brought in spin-meisters to imply that she is in no danger. But Rifqa knows better. May God protect her."

The Christian Post audaciously lists Bary's story in its "persecution" news file, claiming that "The situation worsened last month when Fathima’s mother found a Christian book in her room. Fathima’s mother reportedly said she is dead to her unless she renounces her Christian faith."

Of course, believers can rejoice that this teenager has come to Christ in a cultural context in which it would be difficult to betray her parents' teaching. And if Bary's claims are true, we can also hope that her legal case is handled fairly and wisely, and that she finds support from Christian mentors and friends. But none of this requires that Christians be quick to use Bary's claims to prove that Muslims — in this case, her parents and mosque leaders — are intent on killing Bary because their beliefs make them inherently violent. We should also remember the Christians worldwide who actually risk death by Muslims for following Christ: like those in Pakistan and Nigeria, to name just two recent cases. Seeing persecution where there is likely none keeps the church defensive, improperly focused, and forgetful of the triumph it already has through Christ.

Deciphering the Pennsylvania Gym Shooting

It seems from his blog that George Sodini had a longstanding anger toward women. The isolated 48-year-old took a gun to a Pittsburgh-area gym last week and opened fire during a fitness class. Three women were killed and nine were injured before Sodini killed himself.

ABC News posted Sodini’s online journal, in which he writes about his hatred for his mother and brother, his frustration of “never having spent a weekend with a woman,” and executing a “plan” as early as November 2008.

“Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend,” he said. “This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded.”

Sodini also made a list of people and places that angered him. First on the list was the church he attended sporadically for 13 years, Tetelestai Church in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.

“Religion is a waste,” Sodini wrote on his blog of Alan “Rick” Knapp, pastor of Tetelestai, a nondenominational church focused on group Bible studies. “But this guy [Knapp] teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven.”

When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette questioned Knapp, he said, “The message of the word I preach never reflected such a thing,” asserting that Sodini acted on his own, out of “bitterness and rage.” Knapp said in a special church service after the shooting that “[Sodini] acted culpably and he acted alone. . . . Yet from what he put in words, he projected the blame on anyone who had authority in his life."

According to another Tetelestai member, deacon Jack Rickard, Sodini was a benefactor of the church’s firm teaching of “once saved, always saved.” “George is going to heaven, but he's not going to get his rewards,” Rickard told the Valley News Dispatch.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert expresses shock at the shooting, saying it represents society’s bias against women.

“We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected,” he writes.
Herbert compares this shooting to the 2006 Amish schoolhouse shooting of five girls.

“There would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews,” he writes. “But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.”

The solution, Herbert says, is to “acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.”

Sodini blamed church and religion, at least in part, writing, "I think his [Pastor Knapp's] crap did the most damage"; Herbert blames a misogynist culture. How do you make sense of shootings like these?

Beauty Pageant for Landmine Victims Scrapped

The Cambodian government last week banned the Miss Landmine beauty pageant, slated for Friday in the capital city of Phnom Penh.

Government officials initially supported the contest but changed their view, saying the contest would damage “the dignity and honor of people with disabilities." Besides the view that beauty pageants inherently objectify their participants, many people believe Miss Landmine mocks the disabled. (The contest logo is a one-legged female outline sporting a crown with a danger sign in the background.) In Miss Landmine Angola 2008, women took turns walking and posing on the catwalk, many of them supported by crutches.

Norwegian film director Morten Traavik launched Miss Landmine after a 2003 visit to the country of Angola in southern Africa. Civil war had recently concluded, and many landmines remained in the ground, causing injuries. When some children asked him to judge their own beauty pageant held in an alley, Traavik combined the idea of a pageant with raising awareness and support for landmine victims — or survivors, as the Miss Landmine manifesto prefers to call them.

UNICEF ranks Cambodia as the third most landmined country in the world. An estimated 4 to 6 million landmines remain in the ground 30 years after the military conflict between Cambodia’s former Communist regime, Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam. According to the Halo Trust, Cambodia is home to an estimated 25,000 amputees.

In both Angola and Cambodia, more women applied to participate than the organization could handle. Cambodia’s contestants are in various stages of life, ranging in age from 18 to 48, and include wives, widows, and mothers. In addition to vying for a prosthetic leg and other prizes, contestants are photographed wearing designer dresses and jewelry. The pictures are aesthetically tasteful and featured in art exhibits.

It helps, too, that the women themselves want to participate in Miss Landmine. Cambodian contestant Song Kosal, 24, told The Phnom Penh Post, “Even though we are disabled, we also have the right to be beautiful, to participate in society's activities, and to have equal rights with non-disabled people.”

Traavik finds in Miss Landmine a “. . . need for and joy of being seen, appreciated, taken seriously and — something so simple — not being patronized by neither bigoted neighbors nor well-meaning aid workers.”

But Lim Mony, an officer with the Cambodian human rights group Adhoc, sees the contest itself as inherently patronizing. "The [women] are disabled, but being taken to participate in a contest like that — it's not right. It is as if they are being made fun of," she told The Phnom Penh Post.

People can still vote for Miss Landmine Cambodia online, and Traavik once spoke of holding a global Miss Landmine pageant in 2015. Will people support it? Should they?

Top 10 Most Popular Posts, July

Here are the posts you clicked on the most during the fourth month of Her.meneutics. Thanks to regular readers and visitors for helping to make the CT women's blog a success. And stay tuned for coverage of Not That Kind of Girl, Carlene Bauer's memoir of reconciling her evangelical faith with life among NYC's cultural elite; an interview with Margot Starbuck, author of The Girl in the Orange Dress, newly out from InterVarsity Press; and other news and analysis from evangelical women.

(10) "Where Does Francis Collins Stand on Stem-Cell Research?" by Katelyn Beaty // Comments: 7
The question is more pressing now that he is heading the National Institutes of Health.

(9) "Building Up Without Walls," by Elissa Cooper // Comments: 4
Paula White steps up as senior pastor of the troubled Pentecostal megachurch.

(8) "Jimmy Carter Speaks Up on Women," by Sarah Pulliam // Comments: 9
The born-again President recently penned an op-ed condemning gender inequality in the name of religion.

(7) "Journalists Link Rising Teen Pregnancy Rates to Bush Administration," by Ruth Moon // Comments: 12
Rates of teen pregnancy, STDs rose during 2006-2007. Does this mean abstinence education isn't working?

(6) "Corrupt Clergy and Forgiveness," by Christine A. Scheller // Comments: 6
Cases like last week's organ-brokering scandal in New Jersey leave no room for cheap grace.

(5) "The Charismatic Alberto Cutie," by Julia Duin // Comments: 1
Time will tell if the celebrity priest lives up to Church of the Resurrection's lively tradition.

(4) "Harry Potter and the Vampire Battle," by Laura Leonard // Comments: 14
Yet another reason for evangelicals to embrace the boy wizard.

(3) "The Urban Chicks Movement," by Lisa Graham McMinn // Comments: 8
Living out faith can include 'just food.'

(2) "The Anna Syndrome," by Julia Duin // Comments: 44
When hanging out at church only hinders single women.

(1) "Dancing Down the Aisle," by Laura Leonard // Comments: 27
What a viral wedding-dance video can teach about the meaning of marriage.

Women Pastors Remain Scarce

Members of the Assemblies of God elected the first woman to the denomination's Executive Presbytery. The Ledger reports that 18 percent of the pastors in the denomination are women (where they have long allowed women to lead), but women have not been in the AG's top leadership.

The General Council elected Beth Grant who is a missionary in India with her husband where they run a ministry for prostitutes and sex-trade workers.

Grant said between the 1970s and 1990s, the percentage of ordained women in the Assemblies of God had gone down, and concerned leaders in the Assemblies asked her to chair a task force on the problem.

...In her address to the General Council, Grant admonished the male pastors present to encourage girls and young women to consider the ministry.

"You can say to little girls in your churches, 'God's hand is on you. God is calling you,'" she said.

Nationally, just 8 percent of all congregations are led by women, according to the National Congregations Study released earlier this summer.

Because many of the churches are small, about 5 percent of churchgoers attend a church that is led by a woman.

Here are more results from the survey:

-- 51 percent of churches do not allow women to become head pastors

--33 percent of churches do not allow women to preach

--37 percent of liberal congregations are led by a women (only 9 percent of congregations describe themselves as liberal)

Duke University professor Mark Chavez writes that the number of women seeking M.Div. degrees may have stabilized at about 30 percent after three decades of rapid increase.

Do you attend a church led by a woman? Would you?

Pants-Wearing Woman Challenges Sudan's Decency Law

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has thrown in support for a Sudanese woman who faces 40 lashes for wearing pants in public, a display the Sudanese government says violates its Shari'ah-based laws on public decency.

"We will continue to work with [Lubna Hussein] to help in her struggle, which is the struggle of all women," Sarkozy wrote in a letter Thursday. Hussein, a journalist in her 30s working for the United Nations, was among 13 women, some of them Christians, arrested at a Khartoum restaurant July 3 for wearing pants.

Ten of the women were flogged and fined the next day, but Hussein and two others went to trial to challenge the law, in place since 1989, when President Omar al-Bashir instated a strict interpretation of Shari'ah. U.S. and international agencies have consistently ranked Sudan as one of the worst human-rights violators, particularly for its complicity in the ethnic cleansing in Darfur since 2003, and for its failure to uphold religious freedom.

After a protest on Tuesday outside a Khartoum courthouse where police fired tear gas at a crowd of about 100, Hussein told Associated Press she is "not afraid of flogging. ... It's about changing the law," which she believes violates both Sudanese and Islamic law.

"If the [rulers] claim this is based on Islamic Shari'ah [law], can anyone show me a verse in the Qur'an or in the prophet's teachings that speak of flogging women because of their dress code?"

In June Sarkozy spoke out strongly against the wearing of burkas — a garment covering women head to toe — in France. "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic," he said. Five years ago France banned Islamic headscarves and other conspicuous religious symbols, such as cross necklaces, in state schools. The U.S. State Department estimates that Muslims compose 10 percent of the country of 65 million.

Meanwhile, the Khartoum judge has adjourned Hussein's trial until September, where she might have immunity for her job at the U.N., which she recently quit. However, Hussein has said she's willing to waive her immunity in order to fight the law: "[I]f the constitutional court says the law is constitutional, I'm ready to be whipped not 40 but 40,000 times," she told Middle East Online.

How might Christians respond to stories like this? In light of Sarkozy's comments, might condemning all Islamic women's traditional clothing actually impede on their freedom to express religious beliefs as they see fit? Or, in light of Hussein's case, might there be some religious practices — like flogging Sudanese women if they wear pants — that clearly violate basic standards of human dignity, and should thus be condemned?

The Horrors of Orphan

If nothing else, the latest box office horror flick has people talking. In Orphan, 12-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman plays the eponymous Esther, who is adopted by John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) after their third child is stillborn.

(Yes, you read that right, John and Kate. I'll try not to get too derailed by non sequiturs involving other Jon and Kates.)

This John and Kate bring the newly adopted Esther home, only to learn that "happily ever after" apparently wasn't in the script. Bad things start happening — this is, after all, a horror movie — and Esther turns out to be a whole lot more than anyone bargained for.

Which is a problem, according to some people, especially for the Christian Alliance for Orphans, a Virginia-based parachurch ministry. Through its newly created website Orphans Deserve Better, the alliance is hoping to start a grassroots movement that will counter what it sees as the negative impact of Orphan. "However far-fetched some stories are," the alliance says, "they can still subtly shape our values and perceptions. So when a major motion picture leaves a lingering impression that orphans are damaged goods and that adoption can tear apart your life, those who know the deeper truth must speak up."

Rubbish, says Salon writer Kate Harding:

"If a horror movie is enough to dissuade you from adopting an older child, then that child is probably better off without you." Harding raises excellent points in her article, most notably, the question as to whether or not the alliance's campaign focuses too much on the "warm fuzzies" and not enough on the reality of adopting an older child. But I find myself pausing over her "it's just a movie" logic. The impact of media on our culture is a known phenomenon; we discuss Hollywood's effect on everything from our romantic relationships to our relationship with the planet. Why would we think our attitudes toward adoption would remain untouched?

"What," Harding writes a friend of hers asked, "they're afraid people won't want to adopt white girls anymore?" Actually, yes. That thought had crossed my mind.

Adopting an older child isn't without its share of challenges and difficulties. Let me go out on a limb here, though, and say that parenthood isn't without its share of challenges and difficulties. "Later-adopted children are more likely to show mood or behavioral disorders that require professional help than non-adopted children," Psychology Today's Jean Mercer writes in her blog about the movie, but "it is hard to tell whether some of their parents are prone to seek professional help because they already believe the myths about adopted children."

Amid the debate about Orphan, I find myself returning to this truth: As Christians, we are all adoptees. And I find myself singing the words of hymnist William C. Dix:

Alleluia! Not as orphans are we left in sorrow now;
Alleluia! He is near us, faith believes, nor questions how.

How glad I am that someone saw fit to adopt me.

CT Movies writer Annie Young Frisbie reviewed Orphan here.

The Charismatic Alberto Cutie

It's been about three months now since we heard of Alberto Cutie, the former Roman Catholic priest who was caught kissing his girlfriend on a Miami beach. No sooner was he removed from his post than he left the Catholic Church altogether for the local Episcopal diocese, which welcomed him with much fanfare and sent him to pastor a local church.

As I looked at photos of Cutie, I realized there was something very familiar about the background: I used to attend that church.

That was when I was a reporter for the Hollywood Sun-Tattler, a daily of about 35,000 circulation when I moved there in 1983 as a general assignment reporter. Hollywood is a few suburbs to the north of Biscayne Park, where sits the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Father Cutie's digs.

Back then, the church is not the smallish place it is today. Many of us drove 20 or more miles to attend Resurrection because it was the only openly charismatic church in the diocese. Two others were somewhat into the charismatic renewal, but Resurrection was huge on the prophecies, healings, and speaking in tongues the renewal movement is known for. It also had a healthy emphasis on the Bible and weeknight home groups.

It also helped that the rector, Cliff Horvath, and his wife, Nedda, had been committed to the place for years and held to rock-solid evangelical theology. Cliff was a risk taker when it came to things charismatic, and he drew many like-minded people to sit under him. The parish flourished with involvements in everything from Cursillo to Life in the Spirit seminars, and what was a quiet Anglican worship style when I first arrived became a full-blown swinging-on-the-chandeliers (I exaggerate a tad) church by the time I left in 1986 for a job at The Houston Chronicle.

My parents would joke that I was more committed to my church than my work, and I'll admit, my workplace was a sweatshop I hated. Church was my one relief. Resurrection was probably the most theologically conservative church in the diocese - it was probably the only diocesan church that went to the 1985 Billy Graham crusade in Ft. Lauderdale - and many other parishes looked down on the place. But Cliff was of a generation that believed you bloomed where you were planted, and he stuck it out for years in a hostile diocese, refusing to leave the Episcopal Church for greener pastures.

But Biscayne Park was in a changing area, as they say, where whites had long since flown the coop to Broward and Palm Beach counties to the north. The neighborhood had filled up with Jamaicans and other folks from the islands, which made for a very international church. Hispanics and blacks to the south were moving up, so even while I was there, we were wondering what we'd do once the neighborhood became totally Spanish-speaking.

A few years after I left, Cliff and Nedda also left for a parish in Oklahoma. The rector who replaced him wasted little time in deciding to leave the Episcopal Church entirely and join a new denomination, the Charismatic Episcopal Church, in 1996. He took 200 parishioners with him and settled in Hollywood, then in nearby Miramar. It was left to the local bishop to pick up the pieces but apparently Resurrection never recovered from that exodus.

Fast forward some 13 years, when an exile from the Catholic Church is sent to shore up the faithful remnant. When they call Fr. Cutie "charismatic," I am not sure they mean it in a theological sense or just the fact that the man as good looks and an arresting personality. How interesting it would be were it the former as well. Because that is the tradition from which Resurrection comes.

Meanwhile, Cutie has since married, and one assessment of his behavior - from a conservative Episcopal view - can be found here. Cutie was also seen at the Episcopal General Convention in Anaheim in early July, being wined and dined with his new wife. I'm looking forward to seeing what, if any changes, he manages to bring about once he becomes a newly minted priest.

Florida's Other Marriage Amendment

The key to a lower divorce rate and healthier marriages starts before the vows are taken, according to advocates for mandatory premarital counseling.

Many states, including Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Arizona, have laws in place that provide economic incentives for couples who attend a specified number of hours of marriage education. Citing research proving the success of premarital counseling in reducing long-term divorce rates, some organizations are pushing for legislation that provides even more reasons for couples to attend premarital education.

In Florida, the Marriage Preparation Act proposes to raise the price of a marriage license by a $100 fee that can be waived if the couple attends eight hours of premarital counseling. It also raises the number of required hours from four to eight and promotes a premarital inventory test as part of the education. The act, which increases the statute already in place, is supported by the Christian Coalition of Palm Beach County and the Florida Family Policy Council, both Christian organizations that promote pro-life and traditional marriage legislation in the state.

However, couples seeking premarital education can choose a "secular" version, as well, potentially raising questions about just what defines premarital counseling. Some popular marriage inventory services, such as FOCCUS, provide "general" and "Christian" versions. The marriage handbook provided by Florida State steers clear of religious overtones, instead emphasizing the magnitude of marriage through lessons on divorce's economic and legal impact.

Opponents complain that the act is equal to cash in the pockets of the church, because while the required premarital counseling does not necessarily have to be Christian, much premarital counseling comes from that perspective. In Texas, for instance, where the license fee is similarly reduced after eight hours of premarital education, a list of approved classes indicates that many - though not all - counselors are based out of a variety of denominational churches (categorized as "faith-based organizations"). It's hardly a monopoly, though it makes sense that since Christians respect the institution of marriage, they would be actively seeking the tools to make it to work.

Other faith-based organizations, such as Marriage Savers, are avoiding the legal system by creating partnerships between local churches. Its Community Marriage Policy (CMP) requires local clergy to "sign a covenant agreeing not to marry any couple who has not had a specified, substantial amount of pre-marital counseling." More than 200 communities have active CMPs, according to its website, and the organization was featured on ABC News in 2007.

What do you think? Is state-based legislation the most effective way for Christians to promote healthy marriages and counteract the staggering rate of divorce in the U.S.?

Alicia Cohn is an intern at Christianity Today magazine. She has written previous blog posts for Her.meneutics on the Breast Cancer Bible and The Stoning of Soraya M.

Young Pups in Love

Forty-one years ago last March, when my husband, David, and I went to get our marriage license, he had to bring a letter of permission from his parents. In California in 1968, a woman could marry without permission at age 18, but a man had to be at least 21. I was 19 and David was 20 - though in the excitement of the moment, he forgot his age and told the clerk he was 18. Good thing he had that letter.

Twenty-one years later, our 18-year-old daughter, Molly, brought an entire choir to our Illinois home from Rice University in Houston, Texas. After the choir left, one young man stayed. As we were getting ready to sit down for Sunday dinner, Molly said, "Byron and I have something we'd like to discuss with you and Dad. Would you rather do it now, or after dinner?"

I gulped, thinking of only two possible conversational topics. "Now," I said.

"Okay," said Molly. "We would like to get married as soon as we can support ourselves. We were thinking maybe next year."

"Whew!" said David and I.

This was the first time we had met Byron, and at age 19 he had a lot in common with a half-grown yellow lab. We trusted Molly's judgment, though - and besides, I had clear memories of my parents' reservations about the young pup I had brought home when I was exactly Molly's age and he, exactly Byron's. "Are you sure?" they asked me (they thought his manners needed polishing, and they didn't quite get his sense of humor). "Are you sure?" David's parents asked him (they were concerned that I ate too much and that my bikini was too scanty). "Yes!" we both said, and all four of them kindly switched into supportive-parent mode.

I believe in young marriage. When I saw sociologist Mark Regnerus's cover article in the August issue of Christianity Today, "The Case for Early Marriage," I sat right down and read it, smiling the whole way through. It makes sense to marry when your sex drive is strongest, your body is most fertile, and you're young enough to adapt to someone else's idiosyncrasies. That is, if you've figured out how to support yourself (or if your parents are willing to help), if you've met the person you want to spend your life with, and especially if both of you believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment and are willing to take one another "for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health."

It's been 20 years since Molly and Byron made plans to marry, and 42 years since David and I did. Our two granddaughters are now teenagers. I don't know if, in four or five years, they'll be bringing home young pups for their parents to inspect. If they do, Molly and Byron, take a deep cleansing breath and - if you reasonably can - give them your blessing. If young marriage turns out as well for them as it did for you and for us, we'll all be blessed.