The Best Christian Halloween Party

In case you hadn’t noticed the inflatable purple spiders dotting the lawns of suburban neighborhoods or been tempted by those Venti-sized bags of mini Snickers, this Sunday is Halloween. What kind of story will your church tell itself about the holiday?

Shortly after I came to faith in Christ, during my teens, I attended a haunted house sponsored by a parachurch organization. Busloads of youth group kids and their non-Christian friends came to the well-publicized event. The affair offered an in-your-face spiritual confrontation, presenting teens with sensationalized images of gore and death so they would choose life with Jesus. I didn’t disagree with the message being proclaimed, but even my teen self rebelled against the exploitative nature of the event. I felt it turned the horrific realities of death and evil into de-fanged caricatures of themselves.

Fast forward a few years. As a parent, I wanted to help my children navigate a season broadcasting spiritual messages I couldn’t embrace. As many Protestant churches have, our church offered a Harvest Fest alternative party, complete with carnival games, costumes (positive characters only, Bible character preferred), and evangelistic tracts, along with an impressive haul of candy and trinkets. One of the kids called it the “Not Halloween” party.

Hell houses and Not Halloween parties. Is this the best we can do this time of the year?

I began to ask this question in earnest after reading Jon Sweeney’s The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of a Catholic Tradition. Sweeney grew up in a conservative evangelical household. As an adult, he found himself wrestling with questions about the mystery and the historicity of his faith. Though at the time he wrote the book he had not crossed the Tiber, he found his questions affirmed in some of the writings and practices of the Catholic Church. Sweeney discovered unlikely companions by connecting with the lives of some of the flesh-and-blood members of the church over the past 2,000 years, men and women known as saints.

The book debunks some Protestant myths about Catholic belief, and affirms some others. But its key message is that we have a “cloud of witnesses” surrounding us as we run the race marked for us by God (Heb. 12:1). This cloud is not a two-dimensional background wallpaper but an eternal, living, multi-dimensioned community. And we are part of it.

I did not agree with all of Sweeney’s conclusions. But he got me thinking about how evangelicals have often ridden the pendulum swing like Tarzan as far away from the topic of saints because of what we are not — Catholic — instead of who we are. God calls his children saints.

October 31, also known as All Hallows’ Eve, is the warm-up act for All Saints' Day on November 1. Evangelicals without a liturgical background may not know much about All Saints' Day (to learn more, read these CT articles). If ever there was a generation of people sorely in need of spiritual role models, we are it. No matter how we choose to observe Halloween, those of us attending non-liturgical churches can take a modest step toward telling ourselves a different kind of story this Sunday. Pastors might include the story of a saint in their sermons. Parents could make a point to share the story of a saint or two.

Of course we can engage with these stories throughout the year, but there is great value in intentionally joining with other believers worldwide and throughout the centuries in a “Memorial Day” of sorts that belongs uniquely to us. We belong to a fellowship that includes the sometimes-stumbling biblical matriarch Sarah; the fiery intensity of Stephen, the first Christian martyr; the contemplative longings of John of the Cross; the missionary zeal of Amy Carmichael; and countless others known only to God.

More, All Saints' Day is not about remembering just the saints with brand recognition. It's designed to thank God for the gift of a praying great-grandma in our family tree, a friend who sacrificially provided for his family by working two jobs before he died of cancer at age 42, and an anonymous old woman who quietly fed the poor in Jesus’ name when she thought no one was watching.

As we remember, The Book of Common Prayer offers a 79-word way to respond:

Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Your Son, Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow Your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

As we remember, we affirm that we are bound together with all the saints in Christ. All Saints' Day is the one Halloween party the church alone can throw.

Why Should the Devil Get Halloween?

The woman next to me said that at the end of the haunted version, a horse with a headless rider charges out of the woods. My eyes widened. I leaned across my daughter to tell my husband, “We have to come back without the kids.”

My husband — a perfectly brave man — rolled his eyes, not sharing my enthusiasm for haunted houses or hayrides. When my daughter asked, “Mama, why do you like being scared so much?” he laughed. And waited for my answer.

“I don’t like being scared,” I told them. “I like being spooked. Big difference.”

And there is. I’m not a fan of the heart-sink that happens when my 3-year-old darts across the street. I don’t like the raccoon that pops out from behind our garbage cans at night. Goodness, it took three tries and practically being pushed by the guy behind me for me to jump off the high dive. This summer.

But my love of the creepy and ooky-spooky is altogether different. It’s a love I’ve had for as long as I can remember. When I was 6 and my cousins tried to torment me with ghost stories about their creeky house in Louisville, far from not being able to sleep, I wanted to explore it.

My penchant for all things creepy fuels my love of Halloween as well. It’s why I congratulate neighbors on their fog machines and eerie playlists and animatronic monsters. It’s also why I’ve expanded the treat-or-treat rules that I grew up with: While my mother allowed us to dress only as cute and nice things, my kids are allowed to dress as pretend scary things. Vampires, ghost-brides, and swamp creatures have all gotten nods from me. (Costumes that mock others, that objectify their bodies, or that represent actual killers will never.)

I might be embarrassed to admit all this if it weren’t for one thing: Whatever it is that draws me to the creepy is what initially drew me to God, and still does.

Whatever compelled me to explore my cousins’ attic, pressing my hands on every wall, hoping a secret door would give way, was the same impulse that compelled me to look for signs of the God I kept hearing about. It was, at age 7, the terrifying yet comforting realization that God on high heard me, way down below, that made me believe in him.

And it was God’s mystery, his invisibility, his at-once immanence and transcendence that made me long to know him more, to search, to discover.

Liturgical churches “proclaim the mystery of our faith,” as “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” Indeed. Yet there is more to that mystery.

In his great beckoning and rescue of us, God not only sent his Son to die a gruesome death; he not only raised Jesus from the dead, terrifying those who saw him risen. He not only will send his Son again, in what seems will be a mysterious and frightening time; but God sends his Holy Spirit to live within us. To grant us peace and comfort, at times. At others, to fuel us to fight battles, to seek justice, to dole out mercy.

We Christians profess a belief in an almighty, invisible God, in his risen, flesh-and-blood Son, and in a Holy Ghost, who works in us, not to mention a world full of battling angels and demons and futures that include eternal bliss or eternal fire.

What we believe as Christians is nothing short of, well, creepy — as something that causes us to shiver in fear or revulsion yet pique our curiosity. When we take time to think of the price that’s been paid for the grace and love God offers us, we should all shiver, in both fear and revulsion for what our Jesus endured. The grace and love we cherish, that draw us irresistibly to God, are born right out of blood and terror.

Of course, the creepiness of a worldly Halloween holiday is meant to draw us to the dark. I get that. It’s why I don’t think Halloween should be a high holy day, and why I understand my friends who choose to opt out or tame it way down.

However, I’d love to leave room to celebrate Halloween as a day when Christians can at once embrace the call to live without fear and to consider the mysteries, even the creepiness, of our faith. Of things we don’t understand and yet are so drawn to. Recognizing these mysteries as part of the wonder and glory of how God chooses to reveal himself to us as light on the most dark and stormy nights.

Actually, It Takes Much More Than a Village

I picked up Time with trepidation. I’m nearly six months pregnant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Annie Murphy Paul had to tell me in her cover story, “How the first nine months shape the rest of your life.” I already had a list of rules to follow: don’t eat cold cuts, don’t drink alcohol, take a prenatal vitamin every day, don’t drink too much caffeine, don’t eat soft cheese, don’t take medicine if you get sick, don’t lie flat on your back, stay active but don’t overexert, don’t gain too much weight, and get plenty of rest. I worried that reading Paul’s findings would only compound my sense that I could and should always do more to protect the life of this child within.

But the article surprised me. It didn’t mention rules for pregnant women. Rather, it placed women and their unborn children in the context of a larger community. For example, Paul offers evidence that links air quality not only to the health of a fetus but also to the health of that fetus as a growing child and an adult. Evidence suggests that “exposure to traffic-related air pollution during pregnancy” can be linked “to a host of adverse birth outcomes, including premature delivery, low birth weight and heart malformations” as well as “damage” to DNA that “has been linked to increased cancer risk.”

In other words, when as we all contribute to polluted air now, we also contribute to health problems for the next generation. Similarly, pregnant mothers who endure intense stress (and here we aren’t talking about having a bad day but the stress caused by warfare or starvation), “give birth to children with a higher risk of schizophrenia.” The article, based on Paul’s book on the topic, suggests links between fetal health and heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. Paul writes, “Scientists are exploring the possibility that intrauterine conditions influence not only our physical health but also our intelligence, temperament, even our sanity.”

At first blush, two potential problems arise. First, the aforementioned “blame the mother” problem. But Paul herself, in a post for The New York Times’s Motherlode blog, clarified that most of the factors contributing to negative health outcomes are “collective in nature (food safety, environmental pollution, safety in disaster situations, and so on) and require collective solutions — not more responsibility and blame piled on individual pregnant women for situations they can’t possibly rectify on their own.”

Second is the problem of biological predestination. Does fetal-origins research suggest that our physical and emotional health is predetermined by the environmental conditions during our gestation? In a New York Times book review, Jerome Groopman quotes Paul on this point: “Prenatal experience doesn’t force the individuals down a particular path. At most, it points us in a general direction, and we can take another route if we choose. Imagine water flowing downstream: prenatal influences might dig a canal, so to speak, making it easier for the water to flow one way rather than another.”

Paul contends that this research should not be used to provoke maternal guilt or a sense of fatality about health outcomes. But it could be used to prompt reflection on the interconnectedness of life and the responsibility we bear one for another. These findings, at their core, are about relationships, between mother and child, between body, mind and spirit, between self and other, and between human and environment.

For Christians, these findings illuminate how God has designed reality. They demonstrate the bodily nature of our humanity. Judeo-Christian theology holds that we are not disembodied spirits or minds, but rather an interconnected whole. The physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of our being are inextricably linked.

Furthermore, while our lives are not predetermined, they are also not the products of autonomous individual decisions. Rather, our lives are bound to one another—to our families, communities, and natural environment. According to Genesis 3, sin has disrupted the harmonious relationships between God, human, and the environment. Yet the work of Jesus Christ has and will undo those ruptures and make his creation whole again (Col. 1:17).

At its core, Annie Murphy Paul’s book, and her article for Time, are not about individual women making better choices on behalf of their unborn children. Rather, they are about all of us making choices to bless and restore, to participate in the work of the Spirit of Jesus to make all things new.

Why Sex Ruins TV Romances

If you’re a fan of USA’s Psych, as I am, chances are you went berserk when Shawn and Juliet finally kissed in the summer finale. Fans shrieked and squealed; message boards were overrun with ecstatic crowds; my best friend sent me multiple e-mails in all caps. It was big.

Yet for all the excitement, something felt a little . . . off.

It had to do with the fact that during the episode, Juliet had already slept with a new boyfriend and now was planning to go on a trip with him. It was in the foyer of this man’s home, while he was in another room, that she kissed Shawn.

For some viewers, maybe these circumstances would have added an extra thrill to the proceedings. For many of us, it put a damper on them.

I’m not just dumping on Jules here, because Shawn has been in bed with other women throughout the show. It’s not as if these sexual encounters have been overemphasized or graphic. But they happened — and that matters.

I don’t just mean it matters in a moral and spiritual sense, though it does. It also matters to the story. In fact, I believe American culture’s widespread acceptance of premarital sex is wrecking many of our most popular love stories.

Consider some of your favorite shows, and you may recognize the pattern. Some modern unwritten rule decrees that couples mustn’t marry until the end, or nearly the end, of a TV series, because it would ruin the all-important sexual tension. Yet this doesn’t preclude sex. They are allowed and even expected to have plenty of that, with each other and with others.

And that can warp a love story. Instead of being able to get emotionally invested in a couple’s growing attraction and root for them, we are stymied over and over again as one or the other ends up hopping into bed with someone else. Or we watch them share a bed for so long that actually making a lifelong commitment seems like an afterthought.

The makers of these shows still try to adopt the lingo and feel of traditional romance, sometimes with ludicrous results. I remember my faint incredulity when, late in Gilmore Girls’ run, one of the characters claimed that Luke had “waited” for Lorelai for many years. The speech was meant to be significant and moving, but all I could think was, Waited? In what universe does cohabitating with, marrying, and divorcing other women constitute waiting?

Even if the central couple finally ends up at the altar, the audience is often sick of the whole business by the time they get there. We are losing the idea of what “waiting” for the right person really means — of exercising patience, hope, and self-control while moving toward a strong, lasting relationship. Just about the only place on TV to find a romance like that anymore is Turner Classic Movies.

And the more you watch those old-fashioned stories on TCM, where quiet longing or playful bickering takes the place of bed-hopping, the sadder and shoddier the modern stories start to look. In a romantic comedy like The Shop around the Corner, remade decades later as the tedious You’ve Got Mail, one glance or remark or love letter conveys more genuine passion than a sex scene on HBO (and has the added advantage of being less squirm-inducing).

Even when there’s a promiscuous lead character in a classic film, as in An Affair to Remember or, perhaps my favorite romantic film of all, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, promiscuity is not without consequences. Sometimes it has grave consequences. And when the character really comes to love another person, an important part of that process is seeing the error of his or her ways and desiring to change his or her way of life. By the end of Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s Alicia, who started out sullen, self-centered, and sexually reckless, has learned to feel and to inspire genuine, selfless love. And that leads to a final breathless, glorious scene with Cary Grant that I’ve been known to rewind and rewatch three or four times in a sitting.

I rarely feel like doing that with scenes from current TV shows.

Perhaps some of the current trend can be put down to the fact that the very nature of love stories has changed. Nowadays, instead of being found in one self-contained unit like a book, a play, or a movie, most of the love stories that our culture enjoys and discusses are spun out over several years, because that’s how TV series work. Television writers, given a beginning but lacking any sort of clear middle or end, have to search for ways to keep the drama going and audience interest high.

But, contrary to the wisdom of Hollywood, forming and breaking and re-forming sexual bonds doesn’t seem the best way to do that. Honestly, how many Friends fans do you know who weren’t ready for Ross and Rachel to just go away by the end?

Promiscuity in TV shows seems no more conducive to real, heartfelt, long-term romance than it is in real life. Every time I find myself wanting a TV couple to get together, I simultaneously find myself dreading the inevitable emotional and sexual roller coaster that will ensue. Apparently it wasn’t enough that the culture of casual sex has done so much to deprive us of good real-life role models; it had to take away all the good love stories, too.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of Breakpoint and Dickensblog. She wrote "The Good Christian Girl: A Fable" and "God Loves a Good Romance" for CT online.

Women Take Election Spotlight

Is the number of women in politics growing? It’s the type of question news talk-show hosts are asking now, thanks to competitive election races in states such as Delaware, Nevada, and California, where women are serious contenders in elections taking place next Tuesday.

Republican candidate Sharron Angle isn’t pulling her punches in Nevada, currently running in a tight race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle told Reid to “man up” in a recent debate, pushing him on issues such as health care and unemployment. Reid called Angle “extreme” in response, wisely steering clear of any gender-related advice. Vice President Joe Biden didn’t fare so well later in the week, lumping together two very different — and, according to him, “extreme” — female candidates as “these women.”

The other woman was Christine O’Donnell, Republican Senate candidate in Delaware. Reminiscent of Sarah Palin, who endorsed her, O’Donnell is the type of woman who has many fellow conservatives racing to disassociate themselves. O’Donnell hits a lot of strong points and is an outspoken Christian. But she also has made flamboyant statements — about witchcraft, masturbation, teaching evolution in schools, and the separation of church and state — that have raised eyebrows and set off “airhead” alerts across media. O’Donnell, like Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), also has been noted for wearing pearls and peep-toed shoes and the color of her toenails. It seems that an emphasis on fashion accompanies female candidates who don’t fit the mold of the traditional political candidate.

Hair became a talking point in California’s Senate race, which happens to be between two women: incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer and Republican candidate Carly Fiorina. Fiorina was caught on microphone criticizing Boxer's hair. The incident was blown up into a “cat fight,” which seems out of proportion to the level of impropriety involved, and more a result of how unusual it still is for two strong female candidates to compete. Beyond hair, the two women hold deep differences of opinion, particularly on off-shore oil drilling and Proposition 8. (Boxer supported the ruling overturning California voters’ decision to ban gay marriage, while Fiorina disagreed.)

But at least nobody was called a “whore” — a term thrown around in reference to Meg Whitman, Republican candidate for governor in California, in a taped conversation between her Democratic competitor and his staff. Shockingly, the National Organization of Women’s California branch defended the word choice rather than the woman.

Media lightning rod Sarah Palin looms over this year’s elections, supporting Angle in Nevada along with other preferred candidates, both male and female, across the country. Some have wondered if Palin’s media presence in this year’s race has brought more attention to women in politics. Yet the trend is not really new: In the past decade alone, women held two of the most powerful positions in the world, with Condoleezza Rice and then Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Interestingly enough, despite the number of high-profile Republican women running this year, the upcoming midterm election will mean a net loss of women in Congress with many Democratic women currently in office — several in senior positions — considered vulnerable.

Whether or not women-in-politics is a growing trend, I like that more female candidates are capturing our attention, and I hope having women in political positions is leading more female citizens to go out and vote. To me, it’s not about more women breaking into the good-old-boy realm of politics (though there is some of that going on) as much as pulling politics out of the backseat of our celebrity-obsessed society. I don’t know why it seems like conservative women are more comfortable these days being both outspoken women and outspoken candidates. Palin made enemies for her personality alone, pushing her Alaskan mommy-ness on the American public. But she does seem to be paving the way for female candidates who can disregard old anxieties about androgynous politics.

If more women are going to get into politics — which I believe it’s a good thing — then I’m all for embracing their femininity. God created men and women differently, and, as I can personally attest, women hold political stances just as firmly as men, regardless of whether they also paint their toenails (O’Donnell) or drive a truck (Fiorina).

Voter turnout in the U.S. usually tops out at about 60 percent. I hope more people — especially more women — pay attention to the elections this year. If taking time to look up a candidate’s record starts with Googling a hairstyle or a Cosmopolitan spread (e.g., Senator Scott Brown, because men are also capable of surprising us), that’s just fine with me.

Mildred Jefferson: 'A Physician, a Citizen, and a Woman'

There are few who can discuss abortion from as many perspectives as those held by Mildred Jefferson — the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a lifelong pro-life activist, who passed away on October 15 at age 84.

She could talk about it as a doctor. She could talk about it as a woman. And, she could talk about it as a black woman.

Born to a Methodist minister in east Texas, Jefferson earned degrees from Texas College and Tufts University before graduating from Harvard in 1951. A surgical internship at Boston City Hospital eventually led to another trailblazing accomplishment: becoming the first female doctor at the former Boston University Medical Center.

Jefferson's involvement in the pro-life movement was prompted in the 1970s by a resolution passed by the American Medical Association allowing members to perform abortions if the procedure was legal in their states. She helped to found the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and served as its president for three years, along with serving in several other pro-life groups.

Darla St. Martin of the NRLC told New York Times reporter Dennis Hevesi that no one spoke for the pro-life movement better than Jefferson: “She probably was the greatest orator of our movement. In fact, take away the probably.”

Hevesi also recollects Jefferson’s 1981 testimony before Congress in favor of a bill that would have turned abortion into legal murder:

Dr. Jefferson, a surgeon, was speaking in support of a bill, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, that sought to declare that human life “shall be deemed to exist from conception.” Had it passed, it would have allowed states to prosecute abortion as murder. “With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family,” Dr. Jefferson continued to testify, “the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn.”

Jefferson was pro-life because — not in spite of — her occupation. She believed that performing abortions violated the Hippocratic Oath, reported the Pittsburgh Press in 1977.

Dr. Jefferson believes physicians have turned away from the Hippocratic tradition they’ve honored for 2,000 years. “I’m not willing to accept that role. People who arrange and provide abortions don’t realize the wreckage they leave behind, the depression.”

The first black woman to be graduated from Harvard Medical School considers legal abortion most harmful to poor black women. “Blacks suffer more from abortion because what looks like help is actually striking against them. Blacks are fewer. They will disappear sooner,” said Dr. Mildred Jefferson. . . .

Jefferson spoke from all of her perspectives to fight abortion. Boston Globe reporter Kathleen Burge picked up on a quote from a 2003 profile in the magazine American Feminist — one that sums up the legacy of a woman who called the pro-life movement "second only to the abolitionist movement in the profound change it has brought about in American thinking":

“I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live."

Outsourcing Baby-Making in India

It’s a typical story in our global economy: Citizens of wealthy nations hire Indians to provide goods and services that cost less than the same goods or services domestically produced. But in the case of “reproductive tourism,” the Indian laborers are surrogate mothers who literally labor on behalf of foreign couples. They are paid to 'host' babies who are later carried home to the U.S., Britain, Israel, Australia, and other developed nations.

One expert recently referred to reproductive tourism as a “global growth sector,” with India leading the trend. (Reproductive tourism is not limited to India. British women regularly travel to U.S. fertility clinics to access a larger pool of donated eggs, and Indian-style surrogacy programs are springing up in Guatemala.) Fertility clinics in India market their services by offering foreign clients travel services so they can sightsee while in India for an IVF cycle or retrieving their baby. The clinics also recruit surrogates, usually poor Indian mothers; help clients obtain donor eggs and sperm; perform in vitro fertilization (IVF); house, feed, and provide medical care to surrogates during their pregnancies; and deliver babies.

Advocates for this business claim that everyone wins. Childless couples get the babies they long for, and surrogates receive income for better housing and education for their own children. But it’s not that simple. Indian surrogates must live in special housing while they are pregnant. They are well-fed and taken care of, but what does it say about whose families are more valuable when Indian mothers are away from their own children for months while they gestate babies for wealthier foreigners? According to a recent Slate article, many of the women cannot read their surrogacy contracts. Those from higher castes are paid more than those from lower castes, and surrogates are paid only if they deliver a living child.

Two scenes from the HBO documentary Google Baby illustrate the injustice and heartbreak in the fertility tourism boom. In one scene, an Indian woman who recently gave birth to a baby for a foreign couple sits by her husband as he talks about the difference their surrogate payment has made, allowing them to buy a house and other comforts. He says he expects his wife will serve as a surrogate again. He says that, although women’s brains are generally inferior to men’s, his wife made a good decision. The wife, who admitted in an earlier scene that handing the baby over right after birth was very painful, listens in silence.

In another scene, an Indian woman is on the operating table, giving birth via C-section. She says she can feel the doctor cutting, and it becomes clear that her anesthesia is not working. The anesthesiologist puts something into her IV line and soon, she is lying still, sedated. One doctor standing by her head pushes hard on her belly over and over, as if he is kneading a stubborn loaf of bread. Another doctor pulls the baby out. Immediately after delivering the baby, the doctor answers a phone call while a staff person wraps the baby and takes her away. The baby’s intended parents will not arrive in India to pick her up for several days, so in the meantime, the staffer will care for the infant.

The surrogate lies on a stretcher, her eyes dazed and vacant as her husband holds her hand and strokes her hair. A baby was just born, an event that usually brings people together. But all of the parties involved are essentially alone, disconnected from each other and from the central event of the baby’s birth: The doctor takes a phone call, the surrogate woozily recovers from sedation, the intended parents make travel plans, and the baby is whisked away.

In researching reproductive ethics, I come across those who scoff at the possibility of “designer babies” in which children are manufactured to meet cultural expectations. Many insist that such fears are overblown, because the public would never accept such violations of human dignity. Certainly most fertility patients set out to build a loving family, not exploit poor women or manufacture a child to their specifications.

But as reproductive technology grows in scope and capability, it raises significant moral questions that deserve our attention (as I wrote about IVF two weeks ago). Fertility tourism might be one area of reproductive ethics where conservative Christians, who traditionally focus on the sanctity of human life, and liberal Christians, who traditionally focus on human rights, particularly for women, can speak out together for justice and compassion. We don't have to project some dystopian future to witness instances in which human dignity — the dignity of Indian mothers serving as surrogates and the babies they deliver — is violated by clinics, entrepreneurs, and aspiring parents who are turning procreation into a fee-for-service market.

Her.meneutics' Favorite Picture Books

Splashed across the front page of The New York Times last week was a sobering report on the demise of picture books, a long-standing staple of children's literature. According to the NYT, more parents are giving their children text-heavy books instead in preparation for rigorous standardized testing. As one bookstore manager said, “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.”

We at Her.meneutics don't believe picture books are going away anytime soon. Our blog roll includes many writers who are parents and have found a handful of picture books to be an essential part of her family's bedtime ritual. One blogger, Elrena Evans, even has completed Ph.D. work in children's literature. As for myself, I grew up with a mom who was a children's librarian and who still insists on reading picture books to her grown-up children. We took the NYT report as a chance to reiterate our appreciation for how picture books ignite our and our children's early imaginations and quicken our awe at God's big world. Here are some of our favorites. Share yours in the comments section below.

The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein

I’ve deeply appreciated this book since the first time I read it, around first grade. I am pulled into Silverstein’s delightful story and illustrations about a tree who over and over again, joyfully and without reservation, gives of herself to provide for a boy. It is a story about love and self-sacrifice. Since childhood, I’ve wondered how the tree could be so utterly selfless. ~Marlena Graves

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg

Our family engaged this book with our children in the 1980s and '90s. Each page is a beautifully illustrated black and white drawing, a "mystery" with a title and first line. The rest of the story gets crafted by the parents' and children's imagination. Mark, my husband, used the book with our daughters more than I did, because he was the master storyteller. They would pick a page, and he would spin a tale. It's a marvelous way to bring storytelling back into our and our children's imaginations. ~Lisa Graham McMinn

Love You Forever, by Robert Munsch

This book was a family favorite when my children were young. It’s about the commitment of parents and children to care for one another throughout the stages of life. When my son Gabriel died, his brother placed our worn copy in his coffin. This year I found another copy that Gabriel gave me as a gift in 2004. Inside he wrote a note saying how much it meant to him that I had read to him and his brother when they were young. He also promised to take care of me when I am old like the son in the book takes care of his mother when she is too old to care for him. My son couldn't keep that promise, but I deeply cherish the thought that he wanted to, and it speaks to the power of picture books that this one's message resonated with him and his brother into adulthood. ~Christine A. Scheller

Time of Wonder, by Robert McCloskey

While I enthusiastically recommend McCloskey's better-known books — Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, and Make Way for Ducklings — I urge readers not to overlook his lesser-known 1957 Caldecott winner. Dreamy watercolor illustrations and second-person narration envelop the reader in a meditative space perfectly suited to the book's subject: the end of a family's summer vacation at the seashore in Maine. The book explores the beauty, power, and mystery of nature with a subtle yet reverent awareness of a Creator. In a time when children have too much stuff and little time outdoors, Time of Wonder's pace and focus is refreshingly slow, thoughtful, and does what the best literature does — expands the reader's love for life outside its pages. ~Rachel Marie Stone

What Was I Scared Of? by Dr. Seuss

Children have many things to fear. Theodor Giesel understood that, as this gem, about a Seussian creature who runs into a spooky "pair of pale green pants, with nobody inside them!" demonstrates. The narrator can't escape the legless pants, whether he's riding a bike in Grin-itch or fishing on Roover River. But he finally sees that the pants are as scared of him as he is of the pants and befriends them — as silly as that sounds. I vividly remember my mom's spooky inflection as she got to the lines about the pants, as well as my palpable relief when the narrator realizes he has nothing to fear. ~Katelyn Beaty

The Keeping Quilt, by Patricia Polacco

This tells the story of a turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish immigrant family by following the journey of a quilt crafted from bits and pieces of worn clothing they brought from the old country. Subsequent generations use the quilt for everything from chuppah (wedding canopy) to a baby blanket. The lively illustrations and Polacco's shimmering words are a beautiful reminder that traditions shape every family's past, present, and future. ~Michelle Van Loon

Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gag

My recommendation is actually the first-ever picture book! Amazon calls it "a wonderful tale of vanity versus humility," which it is, though I think it's more about greed and wanting more than you need. But it has magical folk-art woodcut-style illustrations. Picture books are so much more than the story. When the text is well-written, they provide an encounter with poetry. And when the illustrator is a consummate artist, picture books offer an encounter with art. ~Hannah Faith Notess

Splat the Cat, by Rob Scotton

I love picture books that are fun to read out loud so I can employ dramatic flourishes or get caught up in rhythms and rhymes. A current favorite is Splat the Cat, about an anxious cat’s first day of school. Whenever I read his teacher’s name, “Mrs. Wimpydimple,” my kids are overcome with giggles. Nothing helps me leave behind the day’s stress and be present to my kids more than this picture book. ~Ellen Painter Dollar

The Berenstain Bears series, by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Brother and Sister Bear (and sometimes Papa, too) always had growing-up lessons to learn. These books are especially dear to me because as a kid, my dad would take my sister and me to breakfast and then to a locally owned bookstore to pick out a book on Saturday mornings. Thanks to this tradition, the Berenstain Bears now take up an entire shelf of my bookcase. ~Elissa Cooper

Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch, by Eileen Spinelli
What a miserable existence. Mr. Hatch lives alone. He has no friends. He works at a shoelace factory. His only indulgence, if you can believe it, is the occasional prune. But then something miraculous happens. He receives an unexpected, splendid gift, and his life is forever changed. I have fought back tears — usually without success — every time I have read this redemptive story. ~Jennifer Grant

Freed by Bill Clinton, Saved by Jesus

Three Christians in the past year have drawn attention to North Korea’s repressive regime by crossing the river that divides the Communist nation from China. But unlike activists Robert Park and Aijalon Gomes, who wanted to get arrested, Euna Lee was just trying to do her job: reporting for Current TV on the plight of North Korean defectors. On March 17, 2009, she and fellow journalist Laura Ling were dragged by soldiers across the frozen Tumen River, then separated, interrogated, and imprisoned for five months.

In month four, Lee, a South Korean Christian, began walking and praying seven hours every day. And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down: After mounting pressure from human-rights groups and the intervention of Bill Clinton, the women were sent home on August 4. Days later, Lee was worshiping alongside husband Michael and daughter Hana at The Rock Church in San Diego.

In The World Is Bigger Now (Broadway), Lee recounts her efforts to retain hope and trust in God amid a 12-year prison sentence and threats of never seeing her family again.

You start the book by describing being dragged across the Tumen River by North Korean soldiers. You write, “As a Christian I always believed God would protect me. But where was he now? Why wasn’t he helping us?” As you look back on your hardships in prison, where was God?
When we were violently dragged by the North Korean soldiers from the Chinese side, I screamed for help, and I hoped that God would send somebody to rescue me from the situation. When I realized that no one was coming, I was desperate, and I felt so defeated.
I prayed every day crying out for help, but at the same time I was trying to figure things out by myself — what I could do, what I could not do. But whenever I told God, “Okay, it’s in your hands, I trust you,” all the burdens lifted from my shoulders. And there was a period of time that I got letters from my husband and friends and brothers and sisters from church, and all the letters told me that my husband and my daughter were okay. It felt like God telling me, “Don’t worry about them. They’re in my hands.”

Even though there were times I was impatient with God’s answer and was mad at him — I yelled at him and [called him] a liar — he sustained me. I journaled almost every day, and I made a wish list of things I wanted to do when I got home. One day recently, my husband and I realized we had done a lot of the activities on the list without planning. We were talking at our dining table, and we said, “God is so good. He is good.”

How did your faith inform your journalism work and your decision to go to North Korea on assignment with CurrentTV?
I believe God gives people different talent and wants to use them. As an editor, I was always looking for a bigger purpose [for] why God would put me in this position. When I learned about the North Korean defectors' situation from the documentary Seoul Train, I knew I had to something to help those people. And then when I was given the opportunity to tell their story, I was excited. I felt I finally found something that God wanted me to do.

When you and Laura returned to the U.S., some onlookers criticized your work, saying it only further endangered defectors. How do you respond to those criticisms?
It was hard, but we went to the heart of the story that we believed needed to be told. Not many people have a context for understanding the defectors’ situation. There are many people, thousands, men and women, who cross the Tumen River, who risk their lives every year to escape North Korea. And we were at a natural place where they cross.

When I came home, I was surprised that people put not only our story in the public eye, but also the North Korean defectors’ situation as well. One South Korean columnist wrote about our situation, and he said we should not hide from what happened but salvage something out of it. I wrote the book to keep the defectors’ situation in the public eye as long as I could.

In the book you describe your interactions with Christian pastor Chun Ki-won, who helps defectors resettle once they escape North Korea. What do you think of the work of South Korean Christians who help defectors? Might they end up doing more harm than good?
There are many people who are helping the defectors. In China, just by interacting with North Korean defectors you can be sent to jail, and some of them are facing time in prison in China. I believe they all are coming from good intentions. Sometimes even the best of intentions can be misconstrued.

How has your church community responded to your experience?
As you read in my book, I am an introverted person. At the end of July in North Korea, I finished “Jericho” in my room for seven hours straight, and I was so happy that I promised God to share my experience when I got home. When I came home, I called my pastor [Tim Chaddick] and told him I wanted to give my testimony. . . . That was my first public speech, in front of 700 people. I was nervous, but my husband was on my left side, and my pastor was on my right. It was a really good experience. It really wasn’t much about my experience in North Korea, but it was more like what I learned how my experience with God in that hard time.

In the time since you and Ling returned to the U.S., how have your life and outlook changed?
I have had the most memorable year since I came home. I told my husband that I have no regrets for the year I have had with my family. I was the type of person who put priority in my career, but through this ordeal, my family became my priority. Even everyday, mundane things like combing Hana’s hair or cooking together — those moments are so special.

Her.meneutics followed Euna and Laura's situation in North Korea as it unfolded last summer.

Abortion Case: Womb vs. Egg

A British Columbia couple creates an embryo using in vitro fertilization (IVF). They contractually hire a surrogate mother to carry the child. Then they discover, through prenatal screening, that the baby has Down syndrome. The couple asks the surrogate mother to terminate the pregnancy. The surrogate disagrees with their decision. According to their agreement, the surrogate can continue the pregnancy, but she will become responsible for raising the child. Then, the surrogate mother, citing problems it would create for her own two children if she kept the baby, goes ahead with the termination.

I know about this story because I receive an e-mail every day from Google about news related to the key words “Down syndrome.” Our daughter Penny, who is four, has Down syndrome. Any given day offers me heartwarming stories about the accomplishments of a young adult with Down syndrome. Most days bring up some questions about genetic testing and prenatal screening. And every so often a story appears, like this one, that raises a host of ethical and legal questions.

Had the couple and surrogate mom gone to court, the scenario would have pushed the limits of abortion law. Whose baby was it? According to the Canadian and U.S. court systems, the legal right to an abortion is not dependent on biological parenthood but on the privacy rights of the woman carrying the baby. As a result, a father of a child has no legal right to prevent (or insist upon) abortion. Similarly, the surrogate mother retains the right of choice, even though the parents who created the baby had entered into a contractual agreement with her.

Such an agreement has never been tested in Canada before, but legal scholars assume that family law — by which biological parents have responsibility for their biological offspring — would trump contract law. The legal system hopefully would have recognized the difference between a human life and a "widget" (a commercial product that can be regulated by contract law). In other words, had the surrogate carried the baby to term, the biological parents might have ended up supporting the child financially in spite of the contract.

Because this case involved a surrogate mother, legal questions arose. Yet this story magnifies the ethical issues surrounding IVF and prenatal screening more generally. As Ellen Painter Dollar pointed out last week, when Robert G. Edwards won the Nobel Prize for his role in developing IVF, the ethical concerns surrounding the practice were largely overlooked by the mainstream press. Questions surrounding the way we think about human life were dismissed, not because they have been answered in a satisfactory manner but because four million babies have been born using IVF. The emotions of IVF have trumped the ethics.

Similarly, the ethical questions raised by prenatal screening are often dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends prenatal screening for Down syndrome (the most common genetic abnormality) for all pregnant women, regardless of age. Many doctors and genetic counselors insist that screening for Down syndrome and other genetic abnormalities is a neutral practice designed to offer information. Yet the diagnosis of Down syndrome, even in the absence of obvious anatomical problems, often leads to a conversation about abortion. In 85-90% of the cases where a woman receives a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, the result is the same as the case described above. The baby has been deemed defective. The pregnancy is terminated. (I have written at length elsewhere about my decision, as a mother of a child with Down syndrome, not to pursue prenatal screening for my current pregnancy, and about my concerns regarding the assumption that a child with Down syndrome places an undue burden on families and society.)

For many Americans, IVF and prenatal testing seem like private concerns and individual ethical decisions. Yet the surrogacy case described above highlights the fact that every human life is a part of the human family. The child already has a web of relationships, both biological and social in nature. Even some pro-choice advocates acknowledge the termination of pregnancy as a necessary evil. Abortion severs one of the most fundamental human relationships, that of mother to child. But it also severs a broader set of relationships in denying the child entrance into the social landscape.

There may be ethical reasons to use IVF and prenatal screening, but the simple act of using reproductive technology contributes to the commodification of human life. I doubt that any of the individuals in this story saw that embryo as a “widget.” I suspect there was anguish and fear and guilt and sorrow involved in making the decision to terminate. They may have even thought they were doing what was best for the child. Yet our use of IVF and prenatal screening has consequences beyond the emotional angst of the individuals involved. Rather, the impact is collective in nature. In choosing to terminate that pregnancy because of Down syndrome, the family made a judgment on the value of all children with Down syndrome. Furthermore, they made a statement about human life — that it can be reduced to a set of genetic markers, classified according to a hierarchy of normalcy, and discarded when deemed defective. And all three parents, as well as their community, lost the opportunity to welcome another member of the human family into the world.

Top 10 Posts of the Summer

(10) Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom, by Ellen Painter Dollar // Comments: 33
Is it better to attend church burnt out and stressed, or occasionally stay home but miss corporate worship?

(9) Sexy Evangelism, by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 31
Why our narrative about sex, dating, and marriage is a gospel priority.

(8) How Many Kids Should We Have? by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 30
To answer the question, Christian couples need more than a few select Bible verses.

(7) Not Everyone Is Praying for Christopher Hitchens Today, by Karen Spears Zacharias, guest blogger // Comments: 38
I worry that Christians have jumped on praying for the atheist just to reaffirm their own faith.

(6) Little Girls and Single Ladies, by Elrena Evans // Comments: 13
The backlash to the video of 8-year-olds gyrating to Beyonce suggests there's still hope for our culture.

(5) Why I Can't Boycott Mel Gibson, by Anna Broadway, guest blogger // Comments: 48
And it's not because he is "too talented," as Salon wrote last week.

(4) Ooh La La over Lady Gaga, by Jennifer Grant, guest blogger // Comments: 32
Why I showed my son a music video from one of pop culture’s hottest artists.

(3) A New Message at the Strip Club-Church Showdown, by Margot Starbuck, guest blogger // Comments: 24
What happened when two Christian women entered the Fox Hole strip club in Warsaw, Ohio.

(2) An Open Letter to Anne Rice, by Karen Spears Zacharias, guest blogger // Comments: 56
What I see when I look at the church.

(1) Avoiding Old Flames on Facebook, by Jenell Williams Paris, guest blogger // Comments: 50
That it's only a virtual friendship is all the more reason to stay away from it.

Why There's No Narnia in Our Home

Banned Books Week got off to a rousing start this year with the publication of a letter from Wesley Scroggins, Missouri State University professor of management, in The Springfield News-Leader. The letter, “Filthy books demeaning to Republic education,” listed books on Scroggins’s hit list, including Speak, Slaughterhouse Five, and Twenty Boy Summer, all of which are on the syllabus at the local public high school or recommended reading in the school library. Scroggins enumerated some of the books' offensive material, imploring parents and taxpayers to ask if this was how they wanted to spend their money and educate their children.

If nothing else, Scroggins’s letter shows that we’re still pretty divided on the subject of banned books, especially about what is and is not appropriate material for children.

Last year, in her Her.meneutics post about Banned Books Week, Ruth Moon concluded, “If we are going to get up in arms (rightly, I would argue) about banning things that are offensive to others, we at times have to be willing to take criticism and swallow offense ourselves. If all truth really is God’s truth, well, the truth can set us free, if we let it.” I spent some time thinking about truth and its role in literature — specifically children’s literature — last week, as I examined some of my own book-banning practices.

I shocked myself by becoming a book-banner the week I learned I was pregnant with my first child. At the time, I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in children’s literature, and some of the books subsequently adorning my shelves I didn’t think suitable for my coming child. I wanted to have an open-shelf policy in our household of a thousand or so books, so any children’s book I didn't want a young child to read, I simply put in a box. Just for now.

Those books remain boxed. After my daughter was born, the boxed collection started to grow, with books I found too scary (The Story of Babar), too intense (The Greedy Python), or too theologically shaky (One World, Many Religions). I wasn’t putting them away forever. Just for now.

I still keep a close eye on what comes into our home, but for the most part I’m letting my children take the lead, and answering questions as they arise. (“Mommy, what’s suicide?” my daughter asked the other day. Calvin and Hobbes made a premature return to the library.) I still censor some material (Christianity Today is routinely banned; the irony is not lost on me), we’ve had a few “when you’re older” discussions, and we’ve worked through some serious topics with hugs and sometimes tears. For now, it seems to be working, and I hope I’m laying a foundation of trust that will allow my children to continue to come talk to me about what they read as they grow up.

Earlier this year, my 5-year-old daughter asked me to read her a chapter of Betsy-Tacy, a book that somehow, in my voracious childhood reading, I hadn’t read. We read a few chapters together and my interest waned, the completely drama-free adventures of Betsy and Tacy too plotless for my taste. But it seemed a perfect book for my daughter, and for weeks she walked around with her nose between the pages.

Then one night she asked me to read her another chapter from the book, a chapter called “Easter Eggs.” I browsed through it while she got ready for bed. Tacy’s baby sister Bee gets sick. Tacy’s mom is sad. Tacy’s baby sister dies. My daughter was brushing her teeth as I read the description of the baby’s funeral, horrified:

After a while Tacy said, “It smelled like Easter in the church. Bee looked awfully pretty. She had candles all around her.” “Did she?” asked Betsy. “But my mamma felt awfully bad,” said Tacy. Betsy said nothing. “Of course,” said Tacy, “you know that Bee has only gone to Heaven.” “Oh, of course,” said Betsy. But Tacy’s lip was shaking.

My book-banning self sprang into high gear, and I ran out of my daughter’s room with book in hand. By the time she was done brushing her teeth, the book was gone. But I knew I couldn’t keep it from her for forever. I lost sleep over it, I prayed about it, I talked with my husband. Finally, I told my daughter that I wanted to talk to her about Betsy-Tacy.

“It’s pretty sad, Mommy,” my daughter offered. She’d already ready the chapter. She already knew that Tacy’s baby sister dies.

“Sometimes babies die,” my daughter continued. “Sometimes they die after they’re born, and sometimes they’re born when they’re too little to live. That’s why I’m glad we get to see them again in Heaven.”

Perhaps it’s time to get Babar back out of the box.

Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and a Young Man's Death

In 1998 while working as a reporter in Oregon, I wrote about the rising trend toward younger, more violent criminal offenders. "We've been warned that we are going to be dealing with a whole generation of kids without a conscience," said Maj. Larry Rowan, the county jailer. "The basic stuff we were all born with, that makes you feel bad when you do wrong — they don't have it."

I thought of that comment after hearing about the suicide of 18-year-old Tyler Clementi. The Rutgers University freshman jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, and friend Molly Wei, 18, reportedly secretly filmed Clementi engaging in a sexual encounter with another male.

Ravi then allegedly posted a link to his Twitter account, providing a live feed from the hidden web-cam. Twitter accounts can and often are linked directly to Facebook pages, granting access to friends and gawkers near and far.

Shortly before his death, Clementi posted a message to his own Facebook account for all the world to see: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

Wei and Ravi are now facing charges of invasion of privacy. There are some, myself included, who wish the two were facing manslaughter charges. Although the third-degree offenses could earn them five years in prison, the media campaign to exonerate the guilty is already under way.

Wei and Ravi's lawyers claim that this was no hate crime. Ravi, his friends say, is an open-minded fellow. Wei's lawyers say she is the one who has been treated wrongly. This, they say, is nothing more than a bad prank gone awry. Boredom turned to horrordom.

I'm not buying it. Wei and Ravi aren't 13-year-old punks clawing for bragging rights in the junior-high lunch room. They are students at one of the nation's most notable schools. A basic four-year education at Rutgers runs upward of $100,000 or more. It has been reported that Ravi had a near perfect SAT score.

Any kid capable of writing an essay that grants them entrance into Rutgers knows the difference between a prank and invasion of privacy. But then, maybe Maj. Rowan had it right to begin with. Maybe Wei and Ravi lack that basic stuff you and I were born with, the thing that makes you feel bad when you do wrong: a conscience.

A generation or two ago, Hopi Indians refused to have their pictures taken. They believed that a person who could capture their image could take their soul hostage as well. Maybe there is more truth than superstition to the Hopi way. Perhaps the reason Clementi felt he had to end his life is because Ravi and Wei had already taken his soul. A sacred part of our humanity has been breached and our young are cannibalizing one another as a result.

Contributing to this flagrant disregard for the sacredness of another person's soul is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck, as he is known, is the mastermind behind the social networking site Facebook.

Zuck made headlines a couple of weeks ago when he donated $100 million to the public schools in Newark, New Jersey. His camp denies it, but Zuck's donation, grand as it was, is a preemptive strike — an attempt to downplay the negative portrayal of Zuck in the new film biopic The Social Network, a fictional account based largely in truth, court documents, interviews, and such.

I saw the movie and it has cost me several hours of restless sleep ever since. I'm conflicted. There are many things that I enjoy about Facebook. It grants me access to a wider audience, allows me to keep in touch with my friends across the nation on a more regular basis, and helps me feel like I'm part of a community of people who care.

On the other hand, it is intrusive and deceptive and growing even more so, as this Rutgers incident shows. The lie is found in this false sense of intimacy it provides. Facebook was the community that Tyler Clementi turned in those desperate last moments of his life.

He didn't call a friend in the neediest hours of his short life.

He Facebooked them.

Zuckerberg has been forthright about what he considers to be the mission of Facebook: "to make the world more open." What value, if any, such false openness or outright intrusion of privacy has for the citizens of the world is yet to be evaluated. But the value of all that openness for Zuck can be counted in dollars, billions of them, as advertisers circle round us Facebook users like turkey buzzards feasting on road kill.

Zuckerberg defines himself as an atheist and, whether it is his youth or his arrogance, he attaches little, if any value, to protecting the privacy of others.

In a widely circulated IM exchange he had while still a student at Harvard, Zuckerberg reveals his disdain for those who blindly trust him:

ZUCK: if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

ZUCK: just ask

ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?

ZUCK: people just submitted it

ZUCK: i don’t know why

ZUCK: they “trust me”

ZUCK: dumb ----s.

Money and an orange jumpsuit are the only things that separate Zuck, Ravi, and Wei from those young violent offenders I first wrote about back in 1998.

What good is a more open world that allows, perhaps even encourages, us to act out in more inhumane ways?

Karen Spears Zacharias is an author, essayist, commentator, and popular speaker. She has written for Her.meneutics about Anne Rice and Christopher Hitchens, and can be reached via Twitter @karenzach. This post originally appeared at Patheos.

Domestic Abuse: Coming to a Church Near You

“How long am I to remain in this relationship?” This is the haunting question 65-year-old Glenda Crosley asks in the documentary Sin by Silence, about the abusive husband she killed in 1986. She has been in prison for as long as she was married — 24 years — and wonders when her ordeal will be over.

In the film, shot almost entirely inside the California Institution for Women, Crosley says the first time her husband, Sam, “truly got physical” was when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. He shoved her into a wall. Eventually she came to believe that the violence wouldn’t end until one of them was dead. According to The Bakersfield Californian, at the time of Sam’s murder, the couple was separated and having an argument in a parking lot. When Sam walked away from her car to the trunk of his, she believed he was going to get the tire iron he had threatened her with the week before. She rammed him once, drove away, then turned her car and hit him again. He died at the scene.

Elizabeth Leonard is the author of Convicted Survivors and a professor at Vanguard University, a Christian college in Costa Mesa, California. She says in the film that women who leave abusive relationships are often subject to “separation assault” and are 75 percent more likely to be murdered than before they left. So the answer to the question: Why didn’t she just leave? is not a simple one. In the same 2009 Bakersfield Californian article, Crosley’s daughter Stacy is quoted as saying she remembers her mother trying to leave several times and each of them ending with her father’s rage. She even blames herself for her father’s death because one of the times her mother returned was because a judge wouldn’t release her from a group home unless her parents were living together.

“We are offenders, but we’re victims,” says Brenda Clubine in another Sin by Silence scene. Clubine is founder of Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA), the support group at the heart of the film. Brenda’s tireless work helped change California law in 1992 to allow expert testimony on Battered Women’s Syndrome into court rooms and again in 2002 to allow women whose convictions predated the 1992 ruling the same right on appeal. Clubine tells viewers, “This group is not about staying in the victim role.” It starts there, helping women to recognize the process that led them to murder their spouses, but then its goals move to education about and eradication of domestic violence.

Klaus says, “From that first day, these women completely changed my life. . . . What society has labeled as murderers, I see as mothers, as grandmothers, or even myself. Domestic violence has no boundaries and it can happen to anyone, and it can happen to the point where you have to defend yourself.” The 32-year-old filmmaker adds, “Spiritually, this film has been the glue for my beliefs. Once my friend opened up to me about her relationship and once I met these women, I could no longer see the world with rose-colored glasses. . . . Domestic violence is something that we’ve overlooked for far too long. We have women in our churches who are in pain and need help.”

Klaus hopes that other women’s groups will do as the women of Newport Church in Newport Beach have done. The women not only gave generously to finance Sin By Silence, they also provide significant support and resources for CWAA women when they are released from prison.

Throughout October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Sin by Silence can be seen at Constellation.tv in virtual screenings that are hosted by key project participants. Among them is Brenda Clubine. Her heartbreaking and hope filled story provides this film with an ending so surprising that you will have to see it for yourself to believe it. I urge you to do so. But don’t stop there. How about turning your next church women’s social into an opportunity to respond to domestic violence?

A Concerning Nobel Prize

Earlier this week, British biologist Robert G. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology. Edwards and his late research partner, Patrick Steptoe, pioneered the process by which the first so-called “test tube” baby was born in 1978. Since that time, it is estimated that four million babies worldwide have been born via IVF technology.

Much of the news coverage of Edwards’s prize, tends to dismiss moral and ethical concerns as passé. In an NPR interview with bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, host Robert Siegel began by asking, “[H]ave four million births through IVF trumped all the moral and ethical questions that were posed by the procedure?” It’s an odd question, like asking whether Americans’ continued reliance on fossil fuels trumps the moral questions raised by global warming. To his credit, Kahn responded by naming ethical concerns that remain, such as how scientists should handle millions of leftover frozen embryos.

Other news stories, however, fail to address ongoing ethical questions at all, portraying Edwards as a brave pioneer who fought back against uptight alarmists. A New York Times article, for example, states that the following:

Advances in human reproductive technology arouse people’s deepest concerns and often go through a cycle, first of outrage and charges of playing God, then of acceptance. In vitro fertilization proved no exception. ‘We know that I.V.F. was a great leap because Edwards and Steptoe were immediately attacked by an unlikely trinity — the press, the pope, and prominent Nobel laureates,’ said the biochemist Joseph Goldstein in presenting the Lasker Award to Dr. Edwards in 2001.

The same article goes on to say that, “The objections [to IVF] gradually died away—except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church—as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family.”

However, Roman Catholics are not the only ones concerned about the ethics of reproductive technology, and parental joy does not negate complex moral issues. If anything, the questions raised by IVF have grown rather than diminished, as the technology has become more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Edwards himself famously crystallized one major concern in a 1999 newspaper interview, in which he said, “Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.”

Edwards was referring to a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is IVF with the added step of screening embryos for particular genetic mutations, usually those causing genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs, although it can also be used for sex selection, adult-onset diseases such as breast cancer, and even certain physical traits. In naming the “quality” of children as a reasonable concern, Edwards, intentionally or not, was advocating for a reproductive process that treats babies as products, manufactured to parental and cultural expectations, and subjected to quality control. When genetic disorders are transformed from an unexpected turn of fate into a parental “sin”—when disabled children are entirely their parents’ fault—there is great potential for children with disabilities to lose the increased access, inclusion, and support they have gained in recent decades.

The potential eugenic use of IVF and PGD is only one area of concern.

Other moral issues raised by IVF and related technologies include:
• the manipulation and disposal of human embryos;
• whether parenthood is a right, vocation, or choice;
• the effect of reproductive technology on orphans and adoption;
• how the use of PGD for sex selection reinforces oppressive gender roles;
• the increase in “reproductive tourism,” whereby citizens of wealthy nations travel to places like India for less expensive fertility treatment, including hiring poor women to serve as surrogates; and
• how our increasingly perfectionist parenting culture, in which parents are expected to do everything and more to ensure their children’s ultimate success, might influence the use of reproductive technology, and vice versa.

Most aspiring parents who use IVF, with or without PGD, do not want “designer” babies. My husband and I used IVF with PGD to try to conceive a baby who would not inherit my disabling genetic bone disorder. We didn’t care about our child’s “quality,” but we did hope to have a child who would be spared the pain and disability of frequent broken bones. Our PGD cycle failed and we now have three naturally conceived children, one of whom inherited the disorder, all of whom are gifts. We know from experience that the longing of parents for healthy babies is not merely understandable; it is utterly human.

But the ethical concerns raised by IVF are far from passé. Reproductive technology has progressed faster than our capacity to consider the ethical questions it raises. Even as we celebrate Robert Edwards’s scientific accomplishments, let’s give the moral implications of IVF the attention they deserve.

When Doubt Comes to Church

In a presidential address at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s annual conference in 1972, evangelical luminary John Stott admitted that he found himself "wondering how the apostle [Paul] would react if he were to visit Western Christendom today. I think he would deplore . . . the contemporary lack of a Christian mind” (from Your Mind Matters). Quoting Anglican theologian Harry Blamires, Stott continued: “The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century church.”

New Humanist magazine recently co-hosted a debate at London's Royal Society for the Arts, Manufacture and Commerce on the question, “Where is the God debate going?” Panelists included novelist Marilynne Robinson, philosopher Roger Scruton, and historian Jonathan Rée. According to The Guardian's Mark Vernon, the debate mostly turned into a critique of the New Atheism, with some questioners in the audience proposing reasons for why “people of faith never question their beliefs (unlike scientists).”

Vernon hints that while the New Atheism may be slipping out of fashion, the God debate is not. Indeed, religious questions are still on the public’s agenda. But it’s not just atheists and agnostics who are lobbing objections at Christianity and theism in general, and bemoan a perceived anti-intellectualism among people of faith. Some within the church are grappling with the problem of evil, religious pluralism, and the origins debate, to name a few issues, wondering if their faith is intellectually robust enough to face into these topics honestly.

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail from a college student expressing his intellectual struggles with Christianity. He gave me permission to share this excerpt:

I have realized that the arguments I have been fighting all these years — against ethical relativism, against Darwinism, against atheism, against Pentecostalism, against nihilism, against the gay-rights advocates, against amillenialists, against Lutherans and Catholics, against you-name-it — were not fights against those things at all. I had been spoon-fed caricatures my whole life. Triumphantly defeating the caricatures was easy. But sooner or later, I learned that I would have to encounter real competing arguments instead of watered-down versions. You can’t live in your rosy, private schooled, small . . . church world forever, where every challenge (or perceived challenge, whether innocent or not) to Christianity has a nice, clean, naively compelling answer.

I had been spoon-fed caricatures my whole life. The student captured well the triumphalist, anti-intellectual strain present in some quarters of the church. Of course not all objections to the faith are intellectual in nature. But I can’t help wondering if some of us are unwittingly contributing to the ship-wrecking of faith because we fear to directly and honestly addressing seemingly forceful objections. Do we fear that God and his people cannot handle rational scrutiny? That if we honestly and seriously confront the objections leveled against God and the church, both will be found wanting?

I happen to think the answer is no. In college I majored in history and minored in religion and philosophy. I had my own struggles with doubt. Yet I can’t count the number of times I was given pat answers, presented with straw man arguments, or told, “See, you shouldn’t study philosophy — it only serves to lead you astray.” It is this sort of environment that prompted Christian philosopher Clifford Williams to write, “It is difficult to imagine thinking Christians remaining long in such a condition" (see his The Life of the Mind: A Christian Perspective, 2002).

My husband, a philosopher, and I have become convinced that part of the problem is that we have paid little attention to vices of the intellect: being closed to the ideas of others, an unwillingness to exchange ideas, a poor sense of one’s own fallibility, a disposition to yield to the excitement and rashness of the overly enthusiastic members of a community, an unwillingness to conceive and examine alternatives to popular ideas, a tendency to wilt in the face of opposition, and impatience with thorough, genuine inquiry.

And we are further convinced that it is both necessary and healthy to question our faith within the church community in order to truly own it. As Tim Keller writes in his 2008 book, The Reason for God, “A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. . . . A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. . . . ” It’s hard to question within community if we are unsure we have the freedom to do so or aren’t confident we will receive loving and thoughtful responses.

It’s true: We cannot coerce people into loving Jesus and following him. But we can do our part to lovingly remove the intellectual obstacles that those like the New Humanist and New Atheists are highlighting by building up our antibodies and rooting out a fear of critical inquiry in our circles.

Why Parenting May Be Your 'Highest' Calling

I’ve been following the comments on Amy Julia Becker’s latest Her.meneutics post with some interest. When the time came for my husband and I to make and act on a decision regarding the schooling of our eldest (a decision-making process that began long before said child was even conceived), I made a mental list of friends and acquaintances who were going to criticize our decision, no matter what choices we made. If we public school, these people will criticize; if we private school, those people will criticize; if we homeschool, still others will criticize. I didn’t make the list in order to sway our decision one way or the other, simply to be ready for the inevitable backlash we would — did — face.

Reading the comments on Amy Julia’s post, I’m saddened at some of the replies. Why is it that so many people, perhaps especially parents, feel the need to justify their own decisions by criticizing the decisions of others? At the risk of sounding like all I want is to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya," why can’t we all decide to support each other, acknowledging that every family is different and that God has different plans for our lives? Imagine if we could spend half the time we currently invest in criticizing other Christian families asking, instead, how we might best support them in the choices they have made, as their brothers and sisters in Christ?

It’s interesting that this conversation should take place at a time when psychologists are considering a shift to famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Long a fixture in the training of educators and workforce managers, Maslow’s pyramid argues that humans’ basic needs (food, water, air, sleep) must be met before they can begin to seek other, “higher” fulfillments. It makes sense: bereft of basic needs, people can’t concentrate on bigger goals. I saw this pyramid again and again when in college, minoring in education, used to stress that a child who feels hungry, tired, and unsafe is really not going to care about learning algebra, and with good reason.

Now, though, a team of four researchers headed by Arizona State University social psychology professor Douglas T. Kenrick is challenging the top tier of Maslow’s pyramid. They write in a paper recently published in Perspectives on Psychological Science that Maslow’s ultimate goal, the pinnacle of human achievement, is not “self-actualization” or the accomplishment of such higher-order functions as creativity, problem-solving, and morality. It is — wait for it — parenting.

It goes without saying that the switch has stirred up some reaction.

Kenrick isn’t completely discounting motivations to do things like create art or engage in complicated problem-solving, formerly top-of-the-pyramid, “self-actualization” achievements. As Lisa Belkin writes, quoting Kenrick, in The New York Times:

If the only purpose of art, music and literature is self-fulfillment, how does that abet the survival of the species? After all, [Kenrick] argues, “the time you spend playing the guitar or creating poetry or contemplating the meaning of life could be otherwise spent finding food.” Kenrick isn’t saying the pursuit of art and such has no evolutionary purpose; he just sees it as subordinate to the main act. “Look at it this way,” he says. “If you are a good poet or a good musician, there is a reproductive payoff: women are attracted to men with these abilities. What a man is saying when he is playing his guitar up there is ‘look at my good genes.’ ”

I’m not ready to completely rethink my children’s education on the basis of one study, but it is interesting to consider how a reshaping of Maslow’s pyramid might affect those choices. If the ultimate goal of human existence is not art, creativity, or problem-solving, but rather the continuation of the species through parenting (which, I might add, involves quite a bit of art, creativity, and problem-solving), how might that impact the choices we make when it comes to how we educate our offspring?

Then again, the Westminster Catechism poses this same question of our highest attainment as created beings, and provides an answer:

Question: What is the chief and highest end of man?

Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

The Unfunny Side of Modern Feminism

Is feminism funny or humorless? That was the question asked and evaluated at a Slate event I attended in New York City two weeks ago called Double X Presents: The Smoking Bra: Women and Comedy. I thought the question was worth exploring because, like so many contentious topics, feminism doesn’t often inspire laughter. The problem is, I was looking in the wrong place for an answer.

I would describe the comedy event in detail, but doing so would violate Philippians 4:8, which instructs us to think on things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Much of what I saw and heard was anything but that.

Double X editor Jessica Grose opened by introducing a “pioneering” female comedian whose claim to fame was passing gas on stage. Next, Second City alumnus Jenny Hagel, showed a film in which she plays an uptight gender studies professor who tries to convince a thief that she is a feminist, whether the thief likes the label or not. When reason doesn’t work, Hagel turns to rap. Some of her nimble descriptions are compelling, like when she says a feminist is someone who knows that if a guy buys her pie, she doesn’t owe him sex. Others are trite, like when she suggests a feminist is excessively curious about her own genitalia. Megan Kellie then showed a video of crass street interviews asking the question: Why do men think their private parts are funny and women don’t?

After these bits, I thought to myself that if feminism is maligned, it’s not because it’s humorless but because it can be so trivial. I’m not alone in this assessment.

In the March 2010 issue of More magazine, Naomi Wolf contended that feminism went astray when it became self-absorbed and unserious:

First Wave feminists, such as the suffragettes, were hardworking and frustrated, but their letters do not show them unusually dissatisfied in their personal lives. Their movement was about justice, equal opportunity and the larger ways to contribute to society. They were dissatisfied with the world. But Second Wave feminism descends from a much more individualistic intellectual mother, and that has actually wreaked some havoc on our well-being. . . .

The "intellectual mother" she describes is French existentialism as expressed by Simone de Beauvoir and redistributed through Betty Friedan. Wolf says, “Feminists in the developing world have lessons to teach us, because their movement did not begin with French existentialism. Their version of equality is not usually that of a self-asserting, solitary individual; rather, it is rooted in a world view in which the individual’s needs and expectations are just one of a set of larger needs — those of family, of community, even of spirit — that should be, ideally, in harmony.”

Now that is a feminism I can identify with, and perhaps find humor in. (Paging Anita Renfroe.) When it’s all about body parts, I’m unimpressed. And that’s mostly what I got, even from the pros.

Allison Silverman is a former executive producer of The Colbert Report and a comedy writing veteran of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Daily Show. She displayed an image of Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 performance “Interior Scroll,” in which a nude Schneemann pulled a scroll out of her vagina and read it to her audience. Viewed in conjunction with the original audio, it was funny because Schneemann’s delivery exactly matched the absurdity of the act — though I'm not sure how I would have reacted to the live performance 35 years ago, especially if in mixed company. Silverman’s point was that feminism and comedy are not antithetical. Schneemann’s performance, however wasn’t the feminist triumph Silverman suggests. In Arts Journal, John Perreault notes some feminists disparaged Schneemann for “pandering to the male gaze.” Good point.

Jimmy Kimmel Live writer Morgan Murphy's act was as vulgar as the rest, but it was also the most electric both because of her skill and her originality. It asked the question: If I’m a strong woman whose comedy sometimes reads as masculine, must I define myself as a feminist? She said she is confused about the answer.

During the panel discussion afterwards, Silverman and Murphy countered their peers who told Jezebel earlier this year that late-night television writing rooms are bastions of sexism. Silverman was careful not to dismiss their experiences, but said her own didn’t match them. Both women seemed to understand just how fortunate they are to be making a living at their craft. Complaining, even about legitimate sexism, would have communicated a certain lack of perspective.

And perspective is at the core of why much of the comedy at this event didn’t resonate with me. In their new book, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us, Robert Putnam and David Campbell say feminism has swept evangelical church pews (if not our pulpits) as thoroughly as it has everywhere else, but the same isn’t true of our attitudes toward the sexual revolution. While I love a good joke and I’m grateful for the relative equality I enjoy, both modern feminism and modern comedy are too often enmeshed in the idea that I have a right to do with my body whatever I want. But I don’t. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 tells me that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. I am to honor God with it, not degrade it, indulge it, or display it immodestly for any reason, including a laugh. Perhaps this means I have a sanctified sense of humor.