Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom

Is it better to attend church burnt out and stressed, or occasionally stay home but miss corporate worship?

Ellen Painter Dollar

Several Sundays ago my kids were playing outside when we called them to get in the car for church. They stalled. They whined. They asked, “Why do we always have to go to church?” My responses became less patient and my words sharper, until I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and said through clenched teeth, “Going to church is what we do. Get used to it.”

We all arrived at church grumpy — an unfortunately common state on Sunday mornings. The following Sunday, we used the fact that it was Youth Recognition Sunday (often a particularly long, dull service) as an excuse to skip church. Now that it’s summer, we, like many families, will probably find more excuses over the next two months to not attend. We’ll be away some weekends, the kids have no church school, and we relish breaks from getting everyone up and out the door by a certain time. Judging by the sparsely occupied pews in many churches during this season, we aren't the only family who skips church more often in the summer.

A few years ago, such a lax attitude toward church attendance was unthinkable to me. We were die-hard churchgoers, in the pews every Sunday barring illness or vacation. But being a die-hard means that you are given jobs, and when you do those jobs well, you are given more jobs. Sunday worship ceased to be a time of renewal; it was work. When we joined our current parish two years ago, I was determined to be more deliberate and cautious about volunteering. Being less involved makes Sunday mornings more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to skip Sunday services altogether because we have fewer responsibilities.

Our kids are thrilled when we take a Sunday off. But our newly relaxed attitude toward church attendance raises important questions: Are we modeling a nebulous spirituality, teaching our kids to pick and choose from among religious practices while rejecting anything that requires real commitment? Is it possible to engage in life-giving, sacrificial commitment without falling into energy-draining, resentment-breeding burnout? Perhaps most important: How do I instill faith in my children, and how important is church attendance in that endeavor?

A living faith requires both communal obligations and private disciplines. We as a family pray before dinner, read Bible stories, and teach the religious meaning of major holidays with traditions such as Advent candles and Lenten mite boxes. When one of my kids is struggling with disappointment or fear, I offer prayer as the best thing to do when you don’t know what else to do.

Is all of this enough for their budding faith to withstand occasional Sunday mornings spent digging in the garden or reading a good book instead of at church?

I’m not sure. My own faith journey has been unpredictable. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, the daughter of a talented and supremely likable Episcopal clergyman. I am an Episcopalian again, but only after years of trying other styles of worship — an evangelical college fellowship, an urban coffeehouse church. Although my father has influenced me, my faith journey has been my own, just as my kids’ faith journeys must be their own. I can provide a foundation, but I cannot control which people, places, or experiences will most influence their eventual embracing or rejection of faith.

I want to give my children all the things that experts say make children resilient and happy, then sit back knowing that they will be all right. Such assurance is impossible. A few weeks ago, I was immersed in reading Beautiful Boy, David Sheff’s haunting memoir about his son’s meth addiction, as my children played outside with the neighbors. As I read while listening to the kids’ joyful noise, I thought, “It’s not enough. None of these benefits — unstructured outdoor play, caring parents, a safe and friendly neighborhood — are certain to protect them from addiction, illness, betrayal, despair, or failure.” I want faith, along with family dinners, reliable routines, healthy friendships, and loving parental supervision, to inoculate my children against all that would harm them and all the ways they can harm themselves. But there is no such vaccine.

I can only hope that our faith and practice, including going to church often but also embracing occasional Sundays spent at home, will help our kids reach toward the light, trusting it is there even when they are swallowed up in darkness. And I do strive to hold Sundays up as a different sort of day even when we do not go to church. My personal discipline of honoring the Sabbath means no writing work, refraining from computer usage other than a quick e-mail check now and then, and only doing chores that we can do as a family, such as gardening. We spend most Sundays at home, together.

The other night, my daughter approached me and asked, “Do you have to pray to God out loud, or does God hear your prayers if they are silent?” I assured her that silence was just fine. I don’t know what she was praying about, though I have my suspicions. But this — a desire to connect with God — is really what I want for my kids. I want faith to be what we do, a way of living and seeing the world that buttresses our life together, even if we take a summer Sunday off from church now and then.

The Perils of Christian Chick Lit

How my sugary-sweet chick lit relationships turned on me.

Ruth Moon

Mandie Shaw, Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, and Elsie Dinsmore were close companions of mine throughout the teen years. I also enjoyed as occasional playmates Sierra Jensen and Christy Miller.

I now regret some of those friendships.

As a voracious reader, I devoured practically everything that came my way, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to the entire Anne of Green Gables series to War and Peace and even an ill-fated attempt at James Joyce’s Ulysses. And while I initially loved homiletic literature like In His Steps and the Elsie Dinsmore series, and the ubiquitous Christy Miller and Sierra Jensen novels, I’ve since wondered if those novels did more harm than help.

Ruth Graham’s excellent article in Slate discusses the merits of Christian “chick lit” as a “grounded alternative to the Gossip Girl landscape.” This is likely a fair comparison, although admittedly I haven’t read the Gossip Girl book series, now eclipsed in popularity by the TV series of the same name. What I question is whether Christians should be reading, or writing, anything that merits comparison to Gossip Girl, and whether today’s variety of popular Christian fiction is healthier — or more “grounded” — than its secular counterpart.

Elsie Dinsmore, for those who haven’t met her, is a very good 12-year-old in the antebellum South, who is cared for hand and foot by slaves and spreads kindness and doormat-like subservience among everyone she meets. Questions of slavery and Dinsmore’s pampered upbringing aside, Dinsmore’s Christianity is unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere — including the Bible. Even Jesus and Paul got angry when occasion demanded; in the 26-book series, Elsie never does.

Here is a typical narrative arc in the Sierra Jensen genre: The heroine goes about daily life, interspersing said life with prayers, generally out loud, beginning “Dear Lord, please . . . .” When crisis hits, Jensen prays more earnestly, and a miraculous coincidence resolves the crisis to everyone’s satisfaction. And life goes on.

Granted, author Robin Jones Gunn includes some character development and a plot structure on par with Nancy Drew (which isn’t saying much, but certainly made me happy at age 12). But the series’ approach to faith is supremely unrealistic and could even be damaging to young readers. Heroes and heroines in Christian teen novels progress along a normal life trajectory, for the most part parallel to secular books in the adventure/romance genre, but add prayer and subtract four-letter words and sex scenes. The basic message: The Christian life is basically the secular life, with a little addition and subtraction.

This should not be.

The Christian life is or at least strives to be entirely different from a secular one. Christians have a different focus, a different purpose, a different incentive for living. The faith we share should change our lives at the core, not just at the frosting level of prayer before breakfast and during trauma.

This is why I don’t quite agree with Graham’s categorical lumping of Christian chick lit with Catherine Marshall’s beloved Christy. In Christy — one of my favorite novels — a girl sets out to conquer the world and, in so doing, meets her God, herself, and her spouse. Faith is dealt with unflinchingly as a sometimes harsh and unfathomable reality; it is not icing on the cake, the “Dear Lord, give me this dress, and I will be happy” faith of so many teen Christian novels. It’s a faith that allows Alice, one of the main characters, to be raped in her teens by a pastor friend, and allows Christy to see death up close for the first time in the barren backwoods of Appalachia. The faith is one that grows and stretches its followers rather than letting them escape reality.

Of Christian chick lit, Graham writes, “As far as girlish escapism goes, it’s better than holding out for a Prada purse.” But is it really? “So fixed on heaven they are no earthly good” was a popular derogatory description in my grandmother’s generation — and could just as well apply to the heroines of Christian chick lit today. Perpetuating faith as a golden key or get out of jail free card when trouble hits doesn’t encourage readers to grapple with the reality of a faith that often does not answer prayer, at least not in a way we can understand or expect. It’s easy enough to disengage from the world’s problems; we don’t need popular literature to tell us that faith is at root a quick fix.

I want books that offer a faith that is real, a faith that informs my view of the world and helps me inhabit it better. Adding prayer and deleting bad language and sex scenes from a mediocre chick lit novel seems a terrible recipe for healthy entertainment. Perhaps such novels are best left in the bargain bin at the Christian bookstore.

Why Dads Matter

The role of fathers may be changing, but it's no less essential.

Amy Julia Becker

Last Sunday morning, my daughter Penny helped me make breakfast for her dad. He likes it simple: coffee, OJ, a bowl of cereal with raisins. We assembled it all on a tray, complete with the newspaper and a card: “Happy Father’s Day I love my dad” in 4-year old block letters. While I was retrieving her little brother, Penny snuck away and climbed into bed with her dad and shouted, “Wake up! I made you breakfast in bed!”

According to recent sociological studies, this scene is less usual than it used to be. One in three children in the United States live apart from their biological fathers. Moreover, according to a recent piece in The Atlantic, our Father’s Day breakfast may have been insignificant to Penny’s development. Pamela Paul asks, “Are Fathers Necessary?” She cites evidence that lesbian couples are the most effective parents, and she concludes: “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution” (my italics). Scenes such as the one described above might be subjectively essential, but apparently the data doesn’t support my sense that Penny’s relationship with her father is a crucial one. Paul isn’t suggesting that single-parent households are best for the kids. She’s just saying that fathers in particular don’t matter. My husband might just as well be replaced by another woman. Our kids would be fine.

Bruce Feiler, author of Council of Dads, responded to Paul’s article in the Washington Post: “Science can’t prove fathers matter. That doesn’t mean we don’t." He writes, “if social science has not proved that having dads present is helpful, it has demonstrated that not having them around is dreadful for the kids.” He cites a host of statistics that imply the problems kids face when their fathers are absent: crime, obesity, poverty, and trouble in school. So how do we make sense of these contrasting claims?

The data itself is not as conclusive as Paul implies. As W. Bradford Wilcox, of the University of Virginia, writes: “the vast majority of the published studies they relied upon are deeply flawed from a methodological perspective." Wilcox details some of the studies’ flaws at familyscholars.org.

But even if the statistical and sociological data did support Paul’s conclusions, we’d still have a problem. Men comprise a biological necessity for child bearing. And the majority of households with children consist either of a single-parent or a heterosexual pair. Given the prevalence of men, in other words, fathers are here to stay. And for Christians, given the biblical witness to the significance of fathers within a family unit, the fact that so many fathers are absent from their children’s lives, and this recent suggestion that fathers don’t matter, poses a spiritual problem above and beyond the sociological one.

The household codes in the New Testament include admonitions for fathers: Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4); Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. (Colossians 3:21). These passages envision fathers as spiritual mentors, teachers, and coaches, actively involved in their children’s lives, modeling and explaining how to live a godly life.

Biblically speaking, fathers matter, as a crucial source of stability, encouragement, and spiritual leadership. Moreover, the central image of God in the New Testament is that of a father. From Jesus’ parable about the two sons and their father (Luke 15) to his suggestion that we pray to God as our “Abba” (Daddy) (Matthew 6:9) to his own words about his relationship with God in John’s Gospel (John 15), God is depicted as a good and gracious father. Of course there are other passages in Scripture that depict God as a mother (see Psalm 131). The point remains that earthly fathers (and mothers) are meant to model, even if imperfectly, the kind of love and care God demonstrates for his children.

Fathers are often absent in our culture. And with the rising economic power of women (see another Atlantic article: “The End of Men”), fathers have found their roles changing, and they aren’t sure where they fit anymore. Much as the recent sociological studies that undermine the role of fathers demonstrate research bias, Christians must also pay attention. Christian men need to step up as fathers who model God’s love, grace, and faithfulness to children. Christian women need to recognize the value their husbands provide within the family. For years to come, I hope my children will honor their father on Father’s Day. And I hope he will offer them a glimpse of the love, support, and the faithfulness of God.

Before the Next After-Sex Pill

Moral, theological, and ethical questions behind ‘ella,’ a new pill to prevent pregnancy.

Ellen Painter Dollar

Medical experts, pro-life advocates, and women’s groups are once again debating the moral questions raised by so-called “morning-after” pills. On June 17, an advisory panel recommended that the FDA approve an emergency contraceptive known as “ella” for prescription use. Ella differs from Plan B, an emergency contraceptive FDA-approved for over-the-counter use, because it is effective for up to 120 hours after a woman has unprotected sex, while Plan B is only effective up to 72 hours after sex.

The controversy over ella centers on scientific uncertainty about its mechanism of action—whether it only delays ovulation, thereby preventing fertilization altogether, or whether it might also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. The manufacturer has conducted studies showing that ella can delay ovulation. They have neither studied, nor do they plan to study, whether ella can also prevent implantation.

Because ella is a close chemical relative to RU-486, a pill that can terminate an early pregnancy, pro-life groups oppose FDA approval of ella because of its potential capacity to prevent implantation. Advocates for ella argue that the FDA should take a “just the facts” approach that solely evaluates whether the drug is safe and effective for its intended and studied use—preventing pregnancy after unprotected sex by delaying ovulation.

Given the potential for ella to prevent implantation, it makes sense for pro-life groups to oppose the drug’s approval. But in reading news coverage of the debates, I was struck by the tenuous nature of moral arguments centered on inconclusive scientific data. Both opponents and proponents of ella are focused on what science hasn’t yet made clear—whether or not the drug can prevent implantation. Without that crucial bit of knowledge, the ethical debate is reduced to the two sides stating and restating their competing interpretations of scientific data. Such a debate is unlikely to change anyone’s mind or lead to consensus.

I became interested in reproductive ethics for very personal reasons: Eight years ago, my husband and I underwent preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD, which is in vitro fertilization with genetic screening) to try to conceive a child who would not inherit my disabling bone disorder. In an e-mail discussion at the time with a theologian friend about the ethics of PGD, we explored theological perspectives on whether fertilized eggs have the moral status of human beings. Some theologians use scientific criteria to inform those views. For example, some argue that during the time after fertilization when it is possible for embryos to split and form twins, an embryo cannot be classified as a human being because it is potentially several people, rather than a single, unique person. 

After several e-mails in which my friend and I tossed bits of scientific minutiae about embryonic development back and forth, he suggested that science provided an insufficient framework for examining the moral status of embryos. Approached from a scientific perspective, the question of whether a fertilized egg is a human being can be answered in different ways depending on the information we have and how we interpret it. The more important question, my friend argued, is whether we approach embryos reverently, as gifts whose worth is determined by the nature of the God who gives them, or empirically, as bits of flesh whose worth is determined by our scientific understanding of their particular traits at particular times.

Medical technology perpetually offers us new ways to have or not have babies and determine what kind of babies we do have. The vital questions raised by reproductive technology both incorporate and go beyond scientific data about how human bodies and medical science work. These questions have to do with our bodies as both mortal flesh and the dwelling places of those made in God’s image, and our status as both God’s dependent creatures and God’s beloved children. They have to do with intentions, world view, and context.Answering such questions requires significant reflection and engagement, which may not be easy, but holds potential for our culture to actually decide on some acceptable guidelines for reproductive medicine, rather than opposing sides continually talking past each other, trading different interpretations of unclear scientific data.

Ellen Painter Dollar is a writer who focuses on Christian reproductive ethics and disability theology. She is writing a book for Westminster John Knox Press (forthcoming in 2011) about the ethics and theology of assisted reproduction and genetic screening. She blogs at ChoicesThatMatter.blogspot.com and Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.

Q+A: Selling Girls on Craigslist

Rebecca Project founder Malika Saada Saar explains how Craigslist became the medium for human trafficking.

Davita Maharaj

On Saturday night I attended a dinner party in Laguna. A guest seated next to me pulled out a snazzy looking camera, and raved about how he got it for a steal on Craigslist.

In the car, I asked my sister if she’s used Craigslist. “Of course! It’s the best. It’s where all the college students look for housing and jobs.” The online classifieds service is one of the most popular websites in the US today.

It’s also used for selling women and underage girls.

Last year, Craigslist changed their “erotic services” name to “adult services.” They also promised to manually monitor the section for any instances of child prostitution or human trafficking. And they started charging $5 to $10 per sexual service post.

The result? The privately-owned company’s revenues for prostitution have gone up. This past April, the FBI arrested 14 Mafia members for selling girls ages 15 to 19 on Craigslist in New York and New Jersesy. 

Human rights activists continue to call Craigslist the “biggest online hub for selling women against their will,” according to The New York Times. But Craigslist’s two largest shareholders, company founder Craig Newmark and chief executive James Buckmaster, appear unperturbed by the complaints of human rights officials and authorities.

One human rights activist watching Craigslist is Malika Saada Saar, who founded the Rebecca Project for Human Rights while attending Georgetown Law. As director of the Rebecca Project, Saada Saar joined forces with other organizations to fight human trafficking in the United States, including trafficking on Craigslist. The Rebecca Project produced the YouTube video on the left with the FAIR Fund youth advocate, and Crittenton Foundation.

Saada Saar recently spoke with me about the problem and her efforts to fight it.

An estimated 100,000 minors in the U.S. are trafficked into prostitution. Why is Craigslist a major hub for trafficking?

[Craigslist] is this iconic, convenient way that we are able to purchase items. And because of the adult services section that Craigslist allows to be part of that process, individuals can purchase a girl for sex in the same manner that they are able to purchase a piece of furniture. Craigslist makes in very convenient. 

When you look at who tends to purchase girls for sex, the research shows us that these persons are usually white men who are married and in their 30s and 40s. So it’s more convenient and discreet for them to simply go onto Craigslist and purchase a child for sex, than to go out onto the street and do that, or to go to a more taboo site like Backpage or myRedBook.

How many illegal Craigslist posts have been documented?

At any point in any city, you can go onto the adult services section and see children who are being trafficked. This is not only an issue within the U.S. borders; it’s also an issue within Criagslist Vietnam, Thailand, and India.

How many illegal posts are estimated?

We went onto the site last week because it’s often used as a way of trying to see if Criagslist is in fact manually removing those advertisements for sex that are obviously for children. Those days that we went there, we were able to track at least one girl each day that was up for being sold.

The other part is that there’s been some really good research that’s coming out of the Shapiro Group, a research group hired by the Women’s Funding Network. What their research shows, in the state of Georgia, was that Craigslist was used three times more than Backpage and myRedBook, and that 47 percent of individuals, once they were told that this was a girl under the age of 18, whom they were purchasing, continued with the purchase of the child. Something that’s interesting to note is that Craigslist issued a cease and desist order regarding the research, but the Women’s Funding Network released it anyway.

Upon clicking on “adult services,” Craigslist’s visitors must agree to “report suspected exploitation of minors or human trafficking.” Why are girls still falling through the cracks?

Many of the individuals who are going to that section are trying to find girls under the age. They’re not trying to report those girls; they’re trying to purchase those girls. And also, there isn’t that type of comprehensive monitoring of the girls -- and the boys as well -- who are being put up for sale. If there were that type of exhaustive monitoring, then we wouldn’t see these numbers, not just for child prostitution but prostitution in general.

What is the Rebecca Project’s response to the Craigslist controversy?

We purchased a half page in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is Craig Newmark and and Jim Buckmaster’s hometown paper, [with] an open letter to Craig Newmark, that was written by two young girls who were trafficked for sex through Craigslist, asking him to shut [the adult services section] down.

And we did a YouTube piece as well. You can go directly to Facebook as well, to write something to Craig Newmark, or go directly to his own blog.

Is there anything that concerned Christian women can do to help?

Be very aware that all of our girls are really at risk of this issue of sexual violence. There is a statistic that 1 in 3 girls, by the time she reaches 18, will have suffered some form of sexual violence. So I think it’s important for us to honor the sacredness of our daughters, and recognize that too often our girls are sexually victimized. Whether it is a trafficker, or someone who purchases our girls, or the next door neighbor who goes onto Craigslist, we have to be able to hold accountable those persons who subject our girls to sexual violence. We should be able to honor our girls’ sacredness, to talk to them, and to recognize that they deserve only to be honored in their bodies, not hurt, not criminalized.

Davita Maharaj is pursuing a master's degree in international human rights law at Oxford University. You can find more about her on her website or follow her on Twitter. Last year, Katelyn Beaty spoke with child advocate Kaffie McCullough about Craigslist.

Glee: Stereotype Me!

Why the introduction of a stereotypical Christian character on the popular show Glee could be reason to celebrate.

Laura Leonard

 When Glee creator Ryan Murphy announced that the popular TV show would add a female Christian character in its second season, a “Carrie Underwood” type, I worried that she might be just another outrageous caricature representing the worst people think of us. But in the hands of a show like Glee, which combines choreographed musical numbers with high school drama and teenage self-discovery, this might just turn out to be a good thing.

 

“We've taken a couple jabs at the right wing this year, so what I want to do with this character is have someone who Christian kids and parents can recognize and say, ‘Oh, look—I'm represented there, too!’ If we're trying to form a world of inclusiveness, we've got to include that point of view as well,” said Murphy. He insists that the character will “speak her mind and be listened to and respected” while refusing to accept one character’s homosexuality and the glee club’s sexually suggestive dance numbers.

 

Each of the characters on Glee is an intentionally exaggerated stereotype: the jock, the cheerleader, the diva. For all they talk about individuality and wanting to be accepted for who they are, the kids in the Glee Club, and the rest of McKinley High, look like the kids you would find in any high school across the country. They have an image they would like to project, and they carefully choose their clothes, their activities, and even their friends to reflect that ideal. But what the show tries to prove is that while you might know what someone values based on these things, you might not know how they will respond to another human being when they find common ground.

 

Take, for example, Mercedes Jones. Mercedes is “the sassy black girl,” a plus-size soul singer who resents singing back-up for most of the club’s songs. But when she develops a friendship with Quinn Fabray, the former head cheerleader and president of the Celibacy Club who lost her social status after an unplanned pregnancy, both girls demonstrate an empathy and loyalty that define them more wholly and more accurately than their prescribed social labels. While we might be able to tell a lot about a person by how they choose to present themselves, the show demonstrates, we can tell much more through their relationships with other people.

 

Despite all the emphasis on personal expression, most people—teenagers especially—tend to explore individuality only on a micro scale, within the safe boundaries of an established norm. We have an idea of who we want to be, and we try our best to dress the part. This reflects not only how we see other people, but how we see ourselves. Call it the Facebook effect: we tend to think in cultural shorthand. We have learned to communicate our identity in a list of interests, books, shows, and movies, and we carefully craft the image we would like to project. And this is nothing new. I think of my own middle school and high school years, when I refused to buy clothes anywhere but the same three or four stores every other person in my school shopped. Even more than I wanted to be different, I wanted to be the same.

 

By creating obvious caricatures, Glee moves past the superficial trappings of identity and shifts the focus to what actually matters—the desire to find and hold onto the things that make us the same without compromising the things that make us unique. The great thing about the Glee club is that it’s okay for a jock to be a jock, and a diva to be a diva—through a common activity they develop respect for each other and begin to see the labels they have chosen for themselves and each other for the good things they represent. There is a reason, the show posits, that a jock wants to be a jock, and a diva wants to be a diva. These identities represent our values and our longings. In this sense, a stereotypical Christian character is a good thing—it demonstrates that there are real teens who desire first and foremost to pursue God with their whole lives. That’s a pretty radical idea for a teen show.

 

I anxiously await Glee’s interpretation of the American Christian teenager, having been one myself and knowing many who currently choose to identify themselves with Christ in the halls, and playing fields, and choir rooms, of their schools. If she can demonstrate Christ’s love in her relationships with others without giving up the values and beliefs that form her identity, it will be a great success indeed—even if she hangs a Kirk Cameron poster in her locker or greets her fellow Glee Clubbers with a side hug.

 

What are your hopes for a Christian character on Glee? What shows or movies have depicted Christians particularly well?

 

 

Ooh La La over Lady Gaga

Why I showed my son a music video from one of pop culture’s hottest artists.

Jennifer Grant, guest blogger

Okay, true confessions time: I showed my 14 year-old son Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video.

No, it wasn’t a mistake and yes, I’d do it again. You might be asking, “Who is Lady Gaga?” Or maybe you’re shaking your head and tut-tutting to yourself, “What in the world was she thinking?”

I’ll explain.

First, I should point out that nearly every teenager in this country has heard of Lady Gaga. Yes, even yours. Even if you tell me that your homeschooled daughter rarely leaves the pristine confines of your 500-acre ranch in Wyoming, I’ll still insist that I’m right.

Blame it on the People magazine sitting on the empty chair at the dentist’s office, or even blame the little screens above the check-out counter or gas pump whose job it is to keep us distracted, sell us things, and feed our culture’s desperate, insatiable hunger for celebrity gossip.

You could even blame Time magazine for exposing your child to Lady Gaga. Just a few weeks ago, the magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Why did they honor her that way, this singer with the bizarre fashion sense and lyrics that include “Don’t be dirty ice cream, baby” and lots of “rah-rah-ah-ah-ah”s and “GaGa, ooh la la”s?

(It may have something to do with the 15 million albums and 40 million singles she’s sold. Just one week after her latest video, Alejandro, was posted on YouTube, it had already been watched 20 million times.)

My point is that she’s a huge presence in popular culture right now and had I not showed my son “Telephone,” he likely would have seen it at a friend’s house or while flipping through the cable channels at his grandparents’ house, sooner or later.

You’re probably wondering what this big lead up is all about. How bad could it be? Well, “Telephone” is thick with raunchy sexual material, bad language, and even clunky product placement. (While making sandwiches, Lady Gaga is careful that the Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip labels squarely face the camera.)

In it, singer Beyoncé plays a character who bails Lady Gaga out from a rather … ahem … unconventional prison. Together they drive to a diner and poison its customers who, near the end of the video, lie dead around them as they do a big dance number.

If this makes you want to see it, let me recommend that you avoid the “official explicit version.” Actually, I’ve never seen that one, but having seen the “official clean version,” I feel qualified to say so.

One afternoon, when his younger siblings weren’t home, I asked my son if he’d seen “Telephone.” He hadn’t, but it heard it being described at the lunch table. I asked him if he’d like to see it. He shrugged, either because he’s more into artists like Jack Johnson and Coldplay or because he didn’t expect I’d show it to him. But I did. We skimmed through, pausing to talk.

I asked him questions.

Are prisons really like this?

Do you find the video respectful of women? What does it communicate about same sex relationships?

Is sexuality dirty? Does this make sexuality seem dirty?

Is Lady Gaga making a statement, actually showing how silly celebrity worship is, by acting out in such extreme ways?

What’s the message here? Is there one?

Do you know what nihilism means?

What’s clever or beautiful about this video?

What draws you in?

In what way can the words that we pray every week at church, the ones about respecting the dignity of every person and about seeing and serving Christ in them, relate here?

My son and I had a good long talk.

He talked about the lack of expression on Lady Gaga’s face, both when she was in the prison and after the killing spree. We talked about what makes people unplug from their feelings. Abuse? Disappointment? Despair?

He said that the outrageous costume pieces (such as the sunglasses constructed of burning cigarettes) make him want to keep watching to see what bizarre or “random” thing will come next. (Yes, me too.) We agreed that the music draws us in, even when the lyrics are vapid.

We talked about how we feel when we watch U2’s “Vertigo.”  We both love the song and have watched the video several times. The way the blowing wind seems to disintegrate the band members as huge torrents of color stream behind them is visually stunning. And, after we watch it, we feel that difficult-to-define sense that it’s good to be alive. “You give me something I can feel…”

I said that after watching “Telephone” for the first time, I felt a little sour. I don’t want to accept a world where murderers stare blankly at their victims and then start to dance. I like to connect love and romance with sexuality and not see a kind of brittle sexual exchange glamorized.

My son nodded.

But, I said, it’s not Lady Gaga’s job only to paint beautiful pictures. She aims to shock, to stun, to disturb. And she succeeds. Some of Lady Gaga’s biggest fans compare her work to that of avant-garde painters. If I wouldn’t shove my son into a gallery full of Kandinskys or Mondrians without giving him some context, how can I choose to ignore pieces of art or music that occupy a central place in his environment?

I want my children to know that I’m not shockable and that we can talk about anything. But, more than that, I want them to seek authentically after God, engaging with culture, contributing to it, and finding true joy by seeing Christ in others. And I don’t believe that pretending Lady Gaga and raunchy music videos don’t exist is the way to do that.

Laura Leonard previous wrote on Lady Gaga's comments on abstinence. Jennifer Grant is a journalist, freelance writer, and mother of four who writes a column and feature stories for the Chicago Tribune. Find her online at www.jennifercgrant.com.

What a Father Remembers

Sometimes the most meaningful moments get lost in the busyness of life.

Caryn Rivadeneira, guest blogger

The other night my husband, Rafi, and I clicked through old photos on his laptop. He stopped on a picture of our son, who is now 8 years old but was 4 in the photograph. Rafi smiled at our son’s short hair and big smile and said, “Remember how he looked when he didn’t talk back?”

I laughed: My husband is quick to blame our son’s now-long hair for every misdeed. I tried to remind him that our short-haired boy acted plenty naughty. But Rafi didn’t hear me. He remained on that picture a few minutes longer while I tapped on the computer and then rolled my pointer finger at him. I was ready to move on; he clearly was not.

I didn’t think anything of this, really, until a friend sent me a link to “Moments When Children Grow Up,” a post at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. I appreciated (and echoed) Lisa Belkin’s admissions that she couldn’t remember many milestones from her children’s lives, that she really never paused to mark them. After all, how can you know that the last time you carry your child will be the last time?

But I was more struck by the paragraphs she included from the book, What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To and Letting Go of Their Daughters, edited by Andrea Richesin. In these paragraphs, novelist Robert Dugoni shares a simple story of what Belkin calls his 8-year-old daughter’s “pivot away from him and toward her future as a young woman.”

When I read that Dugoni cried after realizing his daughter’s need for bathroom privacy meant she was no longer the same little girl, I thought of Rafi, frozen on that photo of our son. And then I thought of my own dad and the seemingly random things he remembers from my childhood—these are the moment-markers Belkin describes.

As far as my family is concerned, I realize I have failed to appreciate another aspect of the wonderful role of a father. I think of all the times Rafi’s made us late (in truth: even later) because he had to run back in to grab the camera. Were it up to me, there’d be nary a photo of my kids. We’d only have my blog posts and random mentions in book chapters and magazine articles. In no way do I want to say that because my husband paused, and because Robert Dugoni cried, and because my dad remembers weird things that we have enough evidence to speak for all fathers. (I make a living speaking out against stereotyping mothers—I should certainly give fathers the same courtesy.) But to Rafi, the photos and the home movies reflect his desire to capture, note, and remember each stage in a way (and this pains me as a writer to say) that only visual images can. He wants to grab these moments so we can hang on and look back.

As a work-at-home mom, busy beyond what I can manage most days, I have been too consumed and concerned with the “take care of this and move on” aspect of child-rearing to allow myself to stay in any moment for too long. It’s sad, now that I think of it. It seems my inability to mark moments is the downside of a pretty privileged form of motherhood I enjoy.

I’m able to earn money, use my gifts, snuggle with my children, kiss boo-boos, and slather up PB&Js all within a few moments of one another. I can hit “send” on the article I’ve written and drop my kids off at school without losing flavor in my gum. My life is tight and blurred. The way my roles mesh (or sometimes tumble) together offers many good things—but allowing space for marking moments is not one of them.

It’s different for my husband. He seems to have a greater sense that this parenting craziness will pass—and that one day we’ll miss it and need to remember it, not in crazy blurs solely focused on getting through it, but in clear pictures intent on savoring what we have now.

This is one awesome way the dads in my life mirror God. Our heavenly Father gave us 66 books in a Bible to capture the moments of his children, so that we might know of his love for us. He gave us the Moment of Moments, when his only Son died on the cross, and he marked it with a torn curtain and a sun that “stopped shining.” He did it so that the witnesses would know his love for them, and for us.

Now, maybe the dads in your life are not moment-markers. Maybe you are. It doesn’t matter who marks the moments—and it certainly shouldn’t fall down gender lines. What matters is that moments get marked. And remembered.

Since Father’s Day is this Sunday, why not use it to mark a few moments, and to ask the dads in our lives about their favorite moments? Maybe we’ll all see some things we’ve missed.

Caryn Rivadeneira is the author of Mama’s Got a Fake I.D.: How to Reveal the Real You Behind All That Mom. Visit her at www.carynrivadeneira.com.

Growing Gardens to the Glory of God

Lessons gleaned from Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s tale of eating only homegrown food for a year.

Jillian Hathaway, guest blogger

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is Barbara Kingsolver’s captivating account of a year spent eating only homegrown and locally raised food. Known best for The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 novel about Christian missionaries in the Congo, Kingsolver uses beautiful language and humorous anecdotes to take readers through the ups and downs of her family “. . . ma[king] every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew.”

With her husband and two daughters, Kingsolver begins the journey by moving from Tucson to a farm in Appalachian country, Virginia. Once there, the family patiently waits for the asparagus to bloom so they can begin their year living as locavores (not to be confused with femivores). Kingsolver winds in and out of stories told chronologically about raising turkeys, entertaining 100 guests on locally grown food, and feeling apprehensive in the scarcity of winter and joyful in the abundance of summer. The stories made me laugh out loud, share the book with friends, and prompted more than a few good discussions.

Kingsolver makes the same point that writers like Michael Pollan and the documentary Food Inc. do: Most of us Americans have forgotten where our food comes from, and don’t recognize the environmental cost of having that food brought to us. To counteract this forgetfulness, Kingsolver encourages eating foods in season, which she says helps appreciate that food more (not to mention that the taste of food picked and eaten immediately can’t be beat). Eating only in-season food might feel daunting to many of us, but Kingsolver argues that’s “only because we’ve grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always.”

One particularly engaging chapter explores the history of heirloom vegetables. “Seeds get saved down the generations for a reason,” Kingsolver explains, “and in the case of vegetables, one of the reasons is always taste.” She says she grows and buys heirloom vegetables because the alternative — genetically modified vegetables — are “bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience of packaging, and a tolerance for hard travel.” Heirloom vegetables are part of our country’s food culture, and I appreciated Kingsolver’s call for a return to that culture.

Packaged in a lively narrative, the information in the book is surprising and inspired immediate changes for me (including cheese making). For example, Steven L. Hopp (Kingsolver’s husband and a contributor to the book) explains that if we all ate one meal each week of locally raised organic meat and produce, we could reduce U.S. oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels per week. Kingsolver notes that “government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled,” so why do we so often purchase bottled water? Her research into such topics is vast, and she presents the facts with such passion, one almost can’t help being swayed by her vision. 

The book makes clear that living only on homegrown food can be a full-time job. It requires time and energy that many people simply do not have. However, Kingsolver’s point is not to discourage readers, but to offer simple steps that any reader can incorporate into daily living. For example, for people like me who love gardening and cooking but aren’t prepared to give up avocados year-round, I took away a lot.   Kingsolver’s motives aren’t rooted in Christian convictions, but for me, putting the time and energy into eating this way becomes an act of stewardship and gratitude. I’ve personally experienced the spiritual dimension of growing your own food and raising your own animals. Kingsolver alludes to this a little; she writes that her family was “changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.” Cultivating small seeds that turn into food, or raising animals from infancy, can inspire awe and wonder at the sustenance God has built into creation. And working for the food I bring to the table increases my gratitude for that food. That, for me, is the miracle of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Jillian Hathaway is a senior marketing and communications coordinator at Christianity Today International. She blogs at Kaleidoscope.

Sexy Evangelism

Why our narrative about sex, dating, and marriage is a gospel priority.

Amy Julia Becker

My husband runs a dormitory of 30 high-school boys. Recently two of them lounged on our living room floor, asking questions about our faith. It started with theodicy (If God is good, why do bad things happen?). We covered confession and the difference between Protestants and Catholics and heaven and hell. Then we came to the topic of sex.

Two things stood out to me in their questions. One, they longed to hear my husband's and my story, the story of two people who started dating in high school and waited until marriage to have sex — two people who have been together for over a decade and feel grateful for, not constrained by, the protection of marriage. Two, we might as well have been telling a fairy tale: “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.” Our story intrigued them. It might have even attracted them. But they had no context for understanding what we were talking about.

The story of sex as told in mainstream Western culture is failing us, and a recent spate of articles from surprising mainstream sources has picked up on this. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan covers the way teenage girls want to reclaim the “boyfriend narrative” rather than settling for “hooking up” with various boys who expect no commitment or ongoing relationship. In Flanagan’s words, teenage girls are “designed for closely held, romantic relationships.” Flanagan never articulates who is doing the designing, but she argues that sex is not enough for teenage girls. Relationships, in fact, are better.

Then last week, Peggy Orenstein, in "Playing at Sexy" at The New York Times Magazine, argues that the sexualization of young girls (see Her.meneutics' recent post on the topic) is harmful. Neither Flanagan nor Orenstein upholds a conservative view of sexuality. Neither believes that sex belongs exclusively within marriage. Orenstein's concerns ultimately lie with young women's ability to express their sexuality in "healthy" ways. Yet both writers are noting that what we’re doing now isn’t working.

So what is a Christian to do about all this? First, Jesus calls us to be “salt and light” (Matt. 5:13-16), to present an alternative to the cultural norm when that norm is destructive or dehumanizing. Salt makes food taste better. Light helps people see. Christians need to live in such a way that other people look at our lives and say, “I want that": I want the protection that marriage provides. I want the love that deepens with age. I want the assurance that my spouse will be with me, not only when I’m young and beautiful, but also when I’m old and gray. I want a sex life that gets better with time, as we become more and more comfortable with each other.

Second, we need to introduce people to Jesus. For the teenage boys in our living room, our story was an artifact, a fascinating but inaccessible series of choices. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to convince them of the merits of delaying sexual gratification for when they met the right girl. Instead, I told them that my view of sex only made sense if God is real and God cares about us personally. I told them that I believe God has demonstrated that care in the person of Jesus. And I told them that Jesus invites all of us to live with him, a life that is sometimes hard and yet very good. I told them that before they rejected our antiquated notions, they might spend some time reading one of the Gospels and see what they thought about this Jesus.

Third, we need to tell a different story. Flanagan noted the ways teenage girls are looking again for “the boyfriend story.” They want a story of commitment, a story of relationships that go beyond the physical, that include the emotional and spiritual and personal. Christians are equipped to give them that story. The story that humans will fail one another, repeatedly. The the story of Christ and the church, mirrored in marriage. The story of “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” They need the true love story. And we need to tell it, in our words, and in our lives.

Women with the Self-Doubt Syndrome

Some high-achieving women have the 'impostor syndrome' — the ingrained sense that they don't belong at the table of influence.

Lynn Cohick

A few years ago, a colleague of mine asserted that pride was the original sin shared by everyone. I thought for a moment, and had to admit that I did not resonate with his assessment. Pride assumed that one had more confidence than they should, or that it was misplaced. But I — and many of my female colleagues and students — hardly suffered from that. Instead we struggled to believe we had anything to contribute. Self-doubt, not pride, was our demon.

Call this the impostor syndrome, a psychological term for someone’s overall inability to internalize their own accomplishments, and the topic on Scot McKnight's blog recently. Sufferers attribute successes not to their gifts and achievements but to luck, sheer timing, affirmative action, or their ability to trick others. They tend to downplay success when someone congratulates them. According to a study cited by McKnight, “This syndrome is thought to be particularly common among women who are successful in their given careers and is typically associated with academics. . . . It is also widely found among graduate students."

McKnight cited an e-mail from a female colleague, an academic who, due to ingrained ideas about intellect and gender, had internalized the sense that she didn’t belong at the table:

Even being a woman myself, I'm aware that I don't value women as much as I value men. While I read many books by and about women or girls when I was younger, as I got older I somehow acquired prejudice against them. I even noticed that if I was enjoying a book and then found out the author was female I would be disappointed and immediately, on those grounds alone, think less of it. I'm starting to recover from that now, as I learn that being female or feminine does not make someone or something intrinsically worth less in significance, value, or virtue. It's nice not feeling I have to distance myself from all things feminine to have value or be valued by other people.

Perhaps impostor syndrome's prevalence among women is a result of the deeply rooted idea that women belong only in the household sphere while men own public life. The ancient world borrowed this model from Aristotle, and the Victorians echoed the sentiment as they responded to the industrial revolution by bifurcating family structures. But the gospel of Christ undercuts this vision of divided society as it enables both women and men to engage their gifts and accomplishments in God’s service.

By labeling as “impostor syndrome” the failure to internalize levels of expertise, we take steps to control and manage it. Once I know that others believe themselves to be impostors, suddenly I am no longer fighting a personal battle alone. Instead, I experience together with others a social pressure that minimizes our accomplishments, or at least suggests that it is not ladylike to have them. Once a larger social community is aware of the syndrome, steps can be taken to mitigate its effects. The simplest and most effective way forward is for those not suffering from this syndrome to be sensitive to others who might be.

As a professor at a Christian college, I should be especially alert to students (and there will be more females than males in this category) who resist positive feedback and risk selling themselves short in terms of further education or career choices. To my colleagues (again, mostly female), I should model sincere interest in their work, take their contributions seriously, and encourage them to reach beyond what they think they can do. I regularly ask my female colleagues to read my work and comment on how I can improve it. And I make myself available to read their work.

I am also fortunate to have received encouragement from several male colleagues, who not only repeatedly push me to write but also read my drafts and offer helpful suggestions. In my case, it is especially important to have male input, as academia is generally seen as a male domain. Having women in positions of authority, such as department chairs, deans, or college presidents, also helps shape expectations for women’s competencies in academic settings. As more women take up leadership responsibilities successfully, fewer men and women assume that women as a group are inferior to men in achieving workplace goals.

Finally, Christians have the opportunity to challenge the impostor syndrome in at least two ways. First, we can critique the assumption that a person has value based purely on how productive or intelligent he or she is. Second, we can address the implicit competition that makes scholarship and learning a zero-sum game, with only winners and losers. Instead, we can view each person’s growth and success as a benefit to the wider goals of greater knowledge and more active service.

Lynn Cohick is professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, and author most recently of Women in the World of the Earliest Christians (Baker Academic). She has written for the women's blog about men and women on the Titanic, Jesus' mother, and mammograms.

When a Daughter Must Parent Her Parents

A new study shows why caring for aging parents more often falls on women than on men.

LaVonne Neff

A few minutes ago I got the news that my daughter’s mother-in-law has stage 4 cancer. I was still staring at the computer screen, trying to digest the information, when a friend forwarded me a report on a Canadian study with this headline: “Female Caregivers Face a Heavier Toll.”

Yes, we do. My mother died almost exactly 15 years ago, four months after my father died. Both had Alzheimer’s disease. Both were in a nursing home about five minutes from my house. I visited them at least several times a week, sometimes daily.

“We’re so glad we had a daughter,” my mother used to tell me. “It’s only the daughters who visit.” She wasn’t entirely right: Several sons joined the many women who visited regularly. Though the study said six in ten caregivers are women, in my parents’ nursing home the number must have been closer to eight in ten.

Warning: If you are a woman with a spouse, parents, or parents-in-law, you are likely to spend a number of years as a caregiver.

"In terms of society's norms, the responsibility to care for parents tends to fall on the women," said Marina Bastawrous, the author of the study, who discovered that 40 percent of female caregivers experience high-level stress. Women, she noted, are more likely than men to quit their jobs in order to care for their parents. When my parents started needing more care than I could handle along with my demanding job, I cut my hours back to 30 a week. Eventually I quit altogether. More information on the toll that caregiving takes is available from the Family Caregiver Alliance.

Sadly, according to the Canadian study, despite — or perhaps because of — all their hard work, “adult daughters suffer more than adult sons from poor relationships with ailing and aging parents who need their care.” If we care for our parents because we want to be thanked, or because we want to be closer to them, or because we have a romantic vision of saintly elders, we are likely to be disappointed. A bookstore assistant, noticing the book I was buying on caregiving, said to me, “God bless you, dear — I remember those days. Nothing you do is ever right.”

To be sure, nothing is ever enough. Nothing will restore our parents’ youth. Nothing will keep them from eventually dying. Nothing will keep us from our own certain decline. And yet we continue to care and to hope. That is what love does. Not sentimental, stress-free, feel-good love, but tough love that does what needs doing.

My daughter’s mother-in-law has no daughters, but she has an excellent husband and three good sons who love her very much and are already doing what they can for her. She also has three fine daughters-in-law, one of whom has been taking her to her doctors’ appointments all week. Chemo begins Monday. We are all praying for their strength and her healing. Please pray with us.

Top 10 Posts of the Past 30 Days

In case you missed them the first time, the newest posts that got our readers talking.

Katelyn Beaty

(10) Her.meneutics' Summer Reading List // Comments: 5
What our regular bloggers are taking to the pool.

(9) The Secret (Moral) Life of Babies, by Elrena Evans // Comments: 10
Does the fact that infants seem to have an innate morality suggest divine intervention?

(8) No Right to Rest for Weary Anglicans, by Christine A. Scheller // Comments: 17
Why churches like St. James in Newport Beach still need support from worshipers who have left the battle.

(7) I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 6
Despite all its syncretistic symbols, the show's finale depicted one aspect of Christian theology superbly.

(6) Adultery: My Genes Made Me Do It, by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 10
Research like the kind in For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage runs the risk of reducing people to brain chemistry and DNA.

(5) Little Girls and Single Ladies, by Elrena Evans // Comments: 7
The backlash to the video of 8-year-olds gyrating to Beyonce suggests there's still hope for our culture.

(4) Toying with Adultery? by Marlena Graves, guest blogger // Comments: 11
'Runaway mom' Tiffany Tehan's story reminds us that no one is immune from the temptation of infidelity.

(3) A Bikinied Muslim Miss USA, by Mandy McMichael, guest blogger // Comments: 8
The backlash to Rima Fakih's win suggests mainstream America still wants their national beauties to be Christian.

(2) Christian Female Musicians, Missing in Action, by Laura Leonard // Comments: 52
What accounts for the surprising dearth of women in today's CCM scene?

(1) Modesty: A Female-Only Virtue? by Katelyn Beaty // Comments: 40
Scripture suggests that modesty means more than keeping the right parts covered.

Offering Grace to Infertile Couples

The revised edition of William Cutrer and Sandra Glahn's When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden is an encouraging, if limited, resource.

Ellen Painter Dollar

“You can always adopt.” “Are you sure you want kids? You can borrow mine this weekend.” “I know you’re going to have a child. I can just sense it from the Lord.”

These are just a few of the comments that many infertile couples hear when they share their pain with others. Authors Sandra Glahn and William Cutrer, M.D., include a list of such remarks in their revised edition of When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden: Encouragement for Couples Facing Infertility (Kregel Publications 2010).

Couples dealing with infertility often face inadequate responses to their pain. Scholarly arguments about the moral dimensions of reproductive technology are often dry, and the complex, emotional stories of actual people often absent. Fertility clinicians focus on how their services will end patients’ pain by helping them conceive healthy babies. Perhaps offering resources for emotional healing and reflection is not the clinician’s job, but it ought to be somebody’s. Glahn and Cutrer attempt to fill the gap by covering the marital, emotional, theological, and moral questions surrounding infertility.

Cutrer teaches at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and was for many years an ob-gyn practicing fertility medicine, and Glahn, a professor of Christian education at Dallas Theological Seminary, was one of his patients. Their straightforward language and reliance on personal experience, along with questions for readers at the end of each chapter, make this book an accessible read.

The book opens with its strongest material: several chapters on emotional and marital health in the midst of infertility and treatment. One chapter, for example, discusses the different ways that men and women express their emotions (in short, women like to talk it out and men don’t), and provides concrete suggestions, such as setting a 20-minute limit for discussions about infertility.

The chapters covering sexual intimacy, romance, anger, grief, and insensitive comments are equally good. I appreciated the frankness the authors use in addressing sexual concerns (the same frankness found in their classic book Sexual Intimacy in Marriage). The chapter on anger opens with a scathing letter an infertile woman wrote to God. “Nothing you schemed was quite as treacherous as the human heart,” she writes. In other words, when the innate longing for children goes unsatisfied, “All that is left is a great gaping hole that will never be filled.” Glahn was taken aback by the letter, but Cutrer said, “I saw it as an honest expression of pain, which God welcomes. He’s big enough to handle it.” The chapter on insensitive things others might say includes an excellent section on “What Infertility Patients Want from Others” (simply “be there,” have patience, be direct, and so on).

The next sections, on the theology of suffering (“Why me?” “Is our infertility God’s will?”) and the ethics of assisted reproduction, are less strong. The authors assure couples that their infertility is not a punishment, but also say that infertility can be part of God’s plan, and that God can give people babies if he so wills. Perhaps God’s choosing to withhold a baby is not a punishment per se, but I imagine it could feel like one, especially given the ample evidence that people who have no business being parents often have babies. The authors also say insisting that God answer our “whys?” is idolatrous, but then spend a whole chapter speculating about why God allows infertility.

Some people find comfort in this theology, which assumes that all suffering, even if it is not caused by God, is allowed by God and therefore part of his redemptive plan; indeed, the authors include quotes from several people who were comforted by the idea that God allowed their infertility, or even the death of a newborn, for a reason. Having a very different theology of suffering, I was more angered and confused than comforted by these chapters. They might be problematic for any reader who does not share the authors’ theology.

In the chapters on the ethics of IVF, donor gametes, and surrogacy, the authors reduce moral deliberation to procedural thoroughness, giving the impression that couples need only to think through technical issues, such as cost, the chance of multiple pregnancies, how to avoid "leftover" frozen embryos, and the legal status of children conceived with third-party help. When the authors do address bigger ethical questions, they do so unevenly. For example, the chapter on donor insemination addresses whether it is morally problematic to separate sex and procreation, but the authors don’t mention that question in the previous chapter on IVF, which requires the same separation. The authors also repeatedly encourage readers to consider moral questions “prayerfully.” Of course prayers are important, but so are knowledge and context to inform those prayers. The authors needed to be either much more comprehensive on moral questions, or less so (perhaps including only one chapter summarizing significant questions and providing resources for further study and reflection).**

Despite these problems, the new edition of When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden has much of value for infertile couples. I most appreciated the authors’ encouragement that couples can find resolution and acceptance even if they don’t become parents through birth or adoption. Glahn reveals that, while she and her husband remain childless, they no longer experience constant despair and longing. The hope provided by her story, and the practical emotional advice provided by both authors, should encourage readers to feel they are not alone, or helpless, in their suffering.

**To learn more about the ethical questions at stake with assisted reproduction consider the following books. I have a longer list of resources on my blog.

Meilaender, Gilbert. Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1996 — This is a short, readable classic text on a Protestant response to major bioethical questions, including both beginning- and end-of-life decisions.

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Life-giving Love in an Age of Technology. November 2009 — A statement by the American Catholic bishops arguing against the use of any reproductive or genetic technology. Even if readers don’t agree with all of the bishops’ conclusions, this document provides an accessible introduction to moral questions related to sexuality, marriage and procreation.

Mundy, Liza. Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Our World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007—This book provides a comprehensive, journalistic, and readable discussion of available reproductive technologies and the people who use them.

The Hutterites: Beyond Bonnets and Buggies

A review of I Am Hutterite, Mary Ann Kirkby's memoir of growing up in a radical Anabaptist community.

Michelle Van Loon, guest blogger

Most evangelicals know a bit about horse-and-buggy driving, technology-shunning Amish and conservative Mennonite communities. But unless we've grown up in the Dakotas or on the Canadian prairie, we likely don't know much about their Anabaptist cousins, the Hutterites. The Hutterites have the same spiritual heritage (the radical wing of the 16th-century Reformation), but are distinguished from other Anabaptist groups by their distinctive communal lifestyle. Community members share a common purse and do not own individual property, and community leaders make all the financial decisions.

Canadian author Mary Ann Kirkby's memoir, I Am Hutterite (Thomas Nelson, 2010), is her account of life in the Fairholme Hutterite colony in Manitoba, Canada — and how her life changed after her parents uprooted the family when she was 10 to join the "English" (non-Hutterite) world. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into a world typically closed to outsiders.

Kirkby’s childhood impressions of the nurture and familial warmth of the community were at odds with the power politics and dysfunction that her parents were experiencing at the hands of the community’s leaders. When Kirkby’s parents uprooted their seven children in 1969 without warning (but as much advance, adult preparation as they could muster under the watchful gaze of the tight-knit community), the entire family had to learn a new way of living. They left the colony with nothing, as Hutterite communities share a common purse. This translated into lots of awkward growing pains for the poverty-stricken family:

Mother had never made school lunches before. Now she had to make five of them every night while I tried to explain to her what the English kids were eating. We were complete sandwich novices. On the colony we ate full-course meals daily, and only on special occasions, such as weddings or funerals, were ham sandwiches served as a night snack . . . the only luncheon meat we could afford was bologna that was weeks past its 'best before' date and mottled with mold. Mother trimmed the green edges from the meat with a knife and tucked an uneven piece between two slices of stale white bread.

Kirkby describes her painful experiences as a teen desperate to fit into the English world while clinging to the cloistered Hutterite community she loved. When she is entered into the Miss Winkler Queen beauty pageant by her boss at her after-school job, she surprises the entire (heavily Mennonite) town by winning. Though Kirkby no longer dresses or lives as a Hutterite, she still identifies with them. Yet she has simultaneously achieved her goal of assimilating into non-Hutterite culture. The tension between her two worlds comes in a particularly poignant moment following her pageant win:

On the way to the photographer’s studio with my runners-up, I saw my parents leaning against a storefront, dumbfounded. “You’re supposed to say congratulations,” I coached. “Nitt foll in den Brunn einhin. Don’t fall into the well,” Father warned. . . . Pride was considered the ultimate flaw in Hutterite culture, and we were taught to diligently guard against it. In my moment of triumph, Father was worried I might get my hose too high in the air and wouldn’t see where I was going.

As a counterpoint to Kirkby’s attempts to merge her cloistered past with her English present, the final chapters of the book highlight her parents’ attempts to forgive Hutterite community leaders who had abused their power. Though it is not explicitly stated in the book, both her parents and her paternal grandfather apparently were born again, and eventually found the freedom and the blessing of integrating past and present that they longed for the day they left the colony.

I Am Hutterite is compelling reading not just for those interested in religious subcultures, but for anyone who finds themselves living between two different cultures. Our faith community of origin shapes the way we perceive both God and others, and often forms the contours for understanding who is “in” and “out” of the community. Though Kirkby’s family moved only a few miles from their Hutterite home, they suddenly found themselves outsiders in both Hutterite and English worlds. The pain of exclusion is palpable throughout the book.

It is a pain all of us would do well to understand because it is all around us. It is found in varying decibel levels among those belonging to immigrant communities, those who have relocated from one suburb to another, and those who have left a tightly knit church to wander the ecclesiological landscape. We do well to tune into the pain of exclusion, because the truth is, each one of us who follows Christ finds ourselves living far from home.

Michelle Van Loon is the author of two books on the parables of Jesus, and blogs at TheParableLife.blogspot.com. She has written for Her.meneutics about why boys are failing in U.S. classrooms.

Her.meneutics' Summer Reading List

What our regular bloggers are taking to the pool.

Katelyn Beaty

You know summer has arrived when libraries launch mega reading programs, kids breeze through dozens of books to win Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas, and just about every magazine and news site — including CT's "Theology in the News" writer, Collin Hansen — compiles a must-read summer reading list. The women's blog is no exception, though we thought it more interesting to see what our bloggers plan to read this summer, and hear what you plan to read as well. Two books made more than one list: Unsqueezed, Margot Starbuck's follow-up to last year's The Girl in the Orange Dress, and sex-and-spirituality writer Donna Freitas's new young-adult fiction book, This Gorgeous Game. And one of our own bloggers — Amy Julia Becker, for Penelope Ayers: A Memoir — made blogger Ellen Painter Dollar's list.

What books do you plan to read? Share them in the comments section, and enjoy the wealth of options below.

Amy Julia Becker

• Unsqueezed: Springing Free from Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, Highlights, and Stilettos, by Margot Starbuck
• The Blind Contessa's New Machine, by Carey Wallace
• Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Disability in the United States, by James W. Trent
• Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, by Thomas Long
• Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

Elrena Evans

• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer (I keep hearing things about it and I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet. Plus, it was on the shelf when I was last at the library.)

• The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work," by Kathleen Norris (This has been on my to-read list for a while; perhaps I spend too much time on laundry, liturgy, and "women's work" to want to read about it when I'm not doing it.)
• Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, by Ellen Ruppel Shell (For a look into some of the realities behind "inexpensive" goods and merchandise.)
• Mini Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella (The irony is not lost on me. It's not due out until September, but I can always hope an advanced copy will fall in my lap, right?)
• Touch the Art: Brush Mona Lisa's Hair, by Julie Appel (At least a couple hundred times. It's my 14-month-old's current favorite book, and I highly recommend the entire Touch the Art series for anyone with toddlers or preschoolers.)

Laura Leonard

• Women, Food, and God, by Geneen Roth
• This Gorgeous Game, by Donna Freitas

• The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, by Trenton Lee Stewart (The next installment in my annual beach reading through this fantastic children's series.)
• The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, by David Kirkpatrick
• The Complete Julian of Norwich, by Julian of Norwich

Ellen Painter Dollar

• Every Last One, by Anna Quindlen
• The Cradle, by Patrick Somerville
• Beautiful Boy:A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction, by David Sheff
• Why Faith Matters:God and the New Atheism, by David J. Wolpe
• Penelope Ayers: A Memoir, by our own Amy Julia Becker (My book group selected this for our summer reading since AJB will be moving about 45 minutes away from me this summer; we've always wanted to have an author come to our meeting!)

Katelyn Beaty

• This Gorgeous Game, by Donna Freitas (Almost done with this young-adult novel about a teenage girl's unwanted attention from a Catholic priest; look for a forthcoming review on Her.meneutics.)
• The Confessions, by Augustine of Hippo (A long-overdue must-read given its status as the most foundational spiritual autobiography in the West.)
• Enlightened Sexism, by Susan J. Douglas (Tipped off by Lauren Winner's short review at Books & Culture's redesigned website.)
• The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, by Lesslie Newbigin (Another classic, left over from last year's summer reading list.)
• Breaking Free, by Beth Moore (Since so many friends highly recommend it.)

LaVonne Neff

• Le Malentendu ("The Misunderstanding"), by Irène Némirovsky
• Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas & Found Happiness, by Dominique Browning
• Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, by David Kirby
• More detective novels by Michael Connelly. I’m going to try Lee Child as well.
• All seven Harry Potter books, again. I do this in years when new movies come out.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey

• Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, by Rhoda Janzen
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland
• Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas
• Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Super Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Julia Duin

The Magnificent Obsession, by Anne Graham Lotz

Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Greg Mortenson

A God Who Hates, by Wafa Sultan

An Eyewitness Remembers the Century of the Holy Spirit, by Vinson Synan

Redefining Children's Ministry in the 21st Century, by Becky Fischer

Alicia Cohn

• Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, by Mosab Hassan Yousef (Just started it. Reads like fiction.)
• Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, by Michael Chabon (Odd choice? I'm a Chabon fan.)
• Unsqueezed: Springing Free from Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, Highlights and Stilettos, by Margot Starbuck (Loved The Girl in the Orange Dress, which I interviewed Starbuck about for the blog.)
• A Clash of Kings, by George R. R. Martin (Committing to the complete A Song of Ice and Fire series is too ambitious.)
• Lucia, Lucia, by Adriana Trigiani (I recently read my first Trigiani book, Big Stone Gap.)

Ruth Moon

• Letters to a Diminished Church, by Dorothy Sayers

The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Collected Poems of Philip Larkin

Hell's Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson

Christine A. Scheller

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker

South of Broad, by Pat Conroy

To Change the World, by James Davison Hunter

The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel

Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, by Dallas Willard

Little Girls and Single Ladies

The backlash to the video of 8-year-olds gyrating to Beyonce suggests there's still hope for our culture.

Elrena Evans

It’s been a few weeks since the viral video debut of a dance routine featuring girls as young as 8 gyrating to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” The furor has mostly died down, but I find myself still thinking about it — even though I deliberately chose not to watch the video (still on YouTube for curious readers).

The reaction to the video was almost exclusively negative, with bloggers calling out the girls’ parents (what were they thinking?) and lamenting the oversexualization of children. One writer said watching the video left him “feeling the need to sit through a 13-hour marathon of The Lawrence Welk Show to cleanse [my] soul.”

When confronted by the media storm, the girls’ parents defended their daughters’ dance, saying it was being “taken completely out of context.” The routine was intended for the audience at the World of Dance competition, the parents insisted; “the girls weren't meant to be viewed by millions of people.”

But they were. And most people had something to say. A few souls defended the dance (and the girls’ parents), saying the real problem was the viewers: “when Babble.com publishes ridiculous commentary like the girls look ‘ready for the boom boom room instead of romper room,’ they become the ones who suddenly sexualize the video,” the Examiner claimed. Were it not for such sexualized commentary, the video “may have otherwise come and gone fairly harmlessly through viewers' Web-surfing rear-view.”

Gyrating 8-year-olds in red and black bra tops and hot pants would never slip through my “Web-surfing rear-view,” attached commentary or not. And for that, I’ve found myself thinking, I’m grateful. As comment after comment joined the collective cry of “What were their parents thinking?” I felt, along with Salon’s Broadsheet, that there’s hope for humanity yet.

If our culture can recognize this video as (dare I use a moral term) wrong, I’m going to sit up and take notice. Because this is the same culture, I’d argue, that gave birth to the dance routine in the first place. I’m not going to call out the parents — it’s already been done — and besides, the parents don’t particularly interest me. It’s easy to point fingers and ask what on earth they were thinking, but the fact of the matter is, they didn’t do this alone. None of the parents, to the best of my research, are dance instructors. I highly doubt they sewed the girls’ costumes themselves. That means that the cultural environment for this dance was already in place — dance teachers willing to teach the moves to 8-year-olds, costume companies selling flashy bras and chokers in little-girl sizes. In a culture completely inundated with sexuality, and that sexuality trending younger and younger, frankly, part of me is surprised that this video evoked the strong reaction that it did.

As I trawled the Internet reading about this story — in what eventually started to feel more and more like watching the clichéd train wreck — I was particularly interested by some of the “related media” popping up alongside the dancing girls. ABC’s Good Morning America had three related articles, “The Truth (and Cruelty) About Sexting,” “Pole Dancing: Not Just for Strippers Anymore,” and “Smaller Condoms Marketed for Tweens.” And we wonder what their parents were thinking? Companies are manufacturing and marketing prophylactics for tweens — it’s not that much of a jump to get to 8-year-olds suggestively shaking their pre-pubescent bodies. This is our cultural environment.

Culture, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. And like it or not, I’m a part of it. Even though I can claim that my attitudes, values, goals, and practices share little or nothing in common with the milieu that birthed the “Single Ladies” video (the only time I’d heard the song, prior to the controversy, was as sung by Carlos Whittaker’s son) I still live in 2010, in this country. I’m part of the culture.

In his book and corresponding website on culture making, Christianity Today editor at large Andy Crouch writes about the intersection of culture and Christianity:

Christians are becoming dissatisfied with the postures they adopted toward culture in the twentieth century: condemning it, critiquing it, copying it, or just consuming it. More and more, we want to be people who cultivate: people who tend and keep what is good. And we want to be people who create: adding new cultural goods that move the horizons of the possible in places as wide as the world and as small as a home.

If this viral video can serve as a sort of wake-up call, let’s heed it. Don’t just call out the girls’ parents, don’t blame “the culture” and then walk away. We are called to be salt and light, and from where I sit, the world is looking pretty tasteless and dark. Let’s get out there and do something about it.

Jason Boyett’s 'O Me of Little Faith'

The Pocket Guide writer uses doubt for a specific purpose: to deepen faith in God.

Sarah Raymond Cunningham, guest blogger

 

O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling (Zondervan) is the story of Jason Boyett and — probably — of just about everyone who has pursued faith in the midst of uncertainty.

 

Boyett, a writer, speaker, and marketing professional, has dotted the Christian literary landscape with his Pocket Guide series, which are like CliffsNotes for big topics like “the afterlife” and “sainthood.” Boyett’s work has also appeared in Salon, Paste, and Relevant Magazine among others.

 

Unlike Boyett’s previous work, which provides informational overviews, O Me of Little Faith is a foray into Boyett’s personal life. The story begins with Jason voluntarily taking off his “happy Christian mask” and admitting that he sometimes wonders “if maybe, just maybe we’ve made the whole [faith in God] thing up.” Jason hopes this confession will help doubting readers identify with him and join him in allowing their doubts to fuel their search for God rather than to abandon faith.

 

He includes refreshingly human stories, stripped of excessive spiritual gloss, about his five-foot, 70-pound framed high-school self struggling to hoist a bench press bar in the weight room. He uses the metaphor of a stack of turtles for the presuppositions on which faith rests. There are even some accounts of him trying to but never actually speaking in tongues.

 

All of the real-life anecdotes give Boyett a little more credibility, nurturing a familiarity with readers, so that he can delve into religious terms that don’t easily slide off the tongue. He does a good job offering intellectual ideas in bite-size summaries, dropping weighty terms like “ontological argument” and “anthropic argument” before getting back to down-to-earth layman’s metaphors like reverse brick laying (dismantling the wall we build between God and ourselves).

 

Throughout the book, Boyett offers an understanding ear for those who doubt, affirming that hiding questions disservices the seeker. He also offers hope for the rocky moments of faith, noting that doubts don’t have to paralyze spiritual growth, but that doubt is an intrinsic part of having faith. The two coexist; they work together.

 

O Me of Little Faith does not feed readers relativism or a celebration of doubt for doubt’s sake. Boyett insists that we use doubt for a purpose: to seek deeper faith. In fact, he doesn’t let his readers bask in doubt at all. He insists they try the kind of definitive action that has worked in his own life. Go and serve, he advocates. Adopt Jesus’ teachings. Do it even if sometimes—as you follow—you get ahead of your ability to believe in the value of every last thing you’re doing. Faith isn’t just intellectual assent to a set of propositions, Boyett insists. It is also something we do (James 2).

 

Sarah Raymond Cunningham is a wife, mother, and the author of the memoir Picking Dandelions: a Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds (Zondervan, 2010). She blogs at SarahCunningham.org.

 

Boyett's blog recently moved to Beliefnet. O Me of Little Faith: True Confessions of a Spiritual Weakling is available from ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom

The Perils of Christian Chick Lit

Why Dads Matter

Before the Next After-Sex Pill

Q+A: Selling Girls on Craigslist

Glee: Stereotype Me!

Ooh La La over Lady Gaga

What a Father Remembers

Growing Gardens to the Glory of God

Sexy Evangelism