What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?

Not much, if Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla's wedding announcement in The New York Times "Vows" section means anything.

Gina Dalfonzo, guest blogger

The “Vows” section of The New York Times typically features romantic, heartfelt, and sweet wedding stories. At first glance, the story of Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla appears to fit the bill: beautiful bride, handsome groom, lots of hugging. The adorable little children gathered around made the scene look “part Brady Bunch,” wrote Times reporter Devan Sipher.

And then he added, “. . . and part The Scarlet Letter.” Love had come, wrote Sipher, “at the wrong time” for Partilla and Riddell, who were already married to other people when they met, with five kids between the two couples. Partilla and Riddell met, actually, at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's Episcopal Day School in Manhattan, where their children attended:

. . . [I]t was hard to ignore their easy rapport. They got each other’s jokes and finished each other’s sentences. They shared a similar rhythm in the way they talked and moved. The very things one hopes to find in another person, but not when you’re married to someone else. Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”

Whether “someone” threw Partilla in her path or not, Riddell finally decided that she could have him after all, as the two left their families for each other. Partilla’s take on the situation: “I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could.”

So far, the story is sad but not earth-shattering; such betrayals happen all the time. What has readers riled up is its appearance in Vows, a longstanding feature meant to celebrate marriage.

Considering the “terrible” things that Partilla and Riddell had to do to get to their wedding day, this particular piece reads more like a denigration of marriage. True, there are the obligatory references to “distraught children and devastated spouses,” but hey, it worked out in the end. They were “brave” for being so honest, or so they tell us. They’re going to have “a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it,” said Riddell. Love conquers all, right?

Most Vows readers didn’t see it that way. As one commenter quipped, “Tell me again what the reason is for vows?” Several others speculated cynically on what would happen when the initial glow wore off and the couple’s second marriage settled into the same sort of domestic routine as their first marriages.

That’s the part that really caught my attention. As the author of a Christianity Today op-ed titled “God Loves a Good Romance,” I’m on record as being all in favor of warm and mushy feelings in romantic relationships. But stories like this — even if some journalists actually think they are worth celebrating — remind us that feelings are only part of the equation. If they’re going to survive and help build the relationship instead of tearing it down, we have to master them, not let them master us.

The commitment that married couples make to God and to each other means that they need to keep a guard on their hearts. Romantic feelings for someone outside their marriage should have made these two people back away from each other, not seek each other out.

In fact, Partilla recalls that when he expressed his feelings to Riddell, she jumped up and ran out of the restaurant where they were meeting. Five minutes later, she came back. If only she’d gone with her first instinct, two families might have been saved.

If the promises they had made to their original spouses meant anything to them, Partilla’s and Riddell’s feelings for each other would have been a danger signal leading them to work harder on their marriages. Instead, they chose the path that was easiest for them — which meant the path of heartbreak for the families who loved them.

I’m a fan of romance, but many of my favorite romantic stories, both in real life and in fiction, are about married couples, the ones who are still close and still romantic after many years because they chose to stick together and work on being close. It may take a lot of effort to get there — and it may look uninspiring to The New York Times — but the payoff is both unmistakable and beautiful.

As for Partilla and Riddell, now they get to try to build a marriage after demonstrating that neither one of them can be trusted. Good luck with that.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog. She wrote "The Good Christian Girl: A Fable" and "God Loves a Good Romance" for CT online, and "Why Sex Ruins TV Romances" and "Don't Think Pink" for Her.meneutics.

Carla Barnhill, America's Next Advice Columnist?

The mommy blogger and former Christian Parenting Today editor is one of the top four finalists to become Good Morning America's new "advice guru."

Interview by Mark Moring

Two months ago, Carla Barnhill was just a multitasking mom from Minnesota who did freelance writing and editing on the side. After working at several Christianity Today sister publications in suburban Chicago — editing Campus Life for several years before helming Christian Parenting Today magazine — Barnhill returned to Minneapolis to raise a family, continue writing and editing, and teach a writing class as a Bethel University adjunct professor.

Today, Barnhill is on the brink of becoming a celebrity of sorts, as one of the final four candidates for the new “advice guru” for ABC’s Good Morning America (GMA). More than 15,000 applied for the gig, and Barnhill has impressed the GMA producers enough to make it to the final round. While viewers have been voting online (Barnhill and Cooper Boone are far ahead of the other two finalists), the final decision, to come in the next couple weeks, rests with GMA.

Barnhill was interviewed live on GMA last week by hosts George Stephanopoulos and Elizabeth Vargas. While the appearance went well, Barnhill emphasizes that the “advice guru” gig is a writing job. That’s what attracted her in the first place: “It’s a journalism job. It’s writing about people and their lives, in a way to help them out. That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s what I love to do most.” (See her latest advice on fear-filled parenting here.) CT senior associate editor Mark Moring spoke with Barnhill about the competition — and broke the glass ceiling as Her.meneutics’ first male contributor.

What are your strengths for being an advice guru?

The writing part. That’s what I’ve been doing for 15 years. I’m a pretty intuitive person. I have a good sense of people, of what makes relationships work. Every problem is really a relationship problem, when you get down to it. I’m good at helping people get to the root of their relationship challenges.

You told GMA that most people know what they should do, but that they just need a nudge.

I think most people are good and want their relationships to work. But we don’t always know what to do. We let other things get in the way, or we let ourselves get talked into something that we don’t want to do. Sometimes you’ve just got to weed through the muck with people and help them see, “This is the right thing to do. It’s not going to be easy, but here’s how you can do it in a way that will work.”

What’s the toughest question you’ve received?

I got one that they never posted online, but used it as part of their decision-making process. It was from a woman whose two adult children had died in the past year, and her parents hadn’t been involved in the grieving process. They showed up at the funeral but hadn’t checked in with her, and she was feeling abandoned. The weight of her grief hit me. Here’s someone in the worst place a person can be, and she’s trusting me to speak into her life in a way that’s meaningful. That was a hard one.

If Facebook is any indication, your husband, Jimmy, has been a big encouragement through this process.

He really has been. The first question I got was, “My son has just been diagnosed with ADHD,” so I turned to my special-education teacher husband and said, “Here’s what I’m going to say. What do you think?” He’s been great to bounce ideas off of. And he was so excited for me when I came to New York the past couple of days. He’s like, “However long you need to be gone, we’ll make it work. Don’t worry about a thing.” He’s been cheering me on, getting his friends involved, telling me how proud he is of me . . . [voice trails off.] I’m getting all choked up here. He really has been great.

How does your faith inform your advice-giving?

I believe in grace, forgiveness, compassion, goodness, second chances — all those things that are the hallmarks of our faith. For me, it’s consistent to want those things for other people too, whether they’re people of faith or not. Everybody can agree that living as a person of grace and compassion and forgiveness — and loving our neighbor as ourselves — is always a better option, whether it comes from a place of faith or not.

Have you had to tiptoe around your faith during this process?

It’s all there on my resume. My very first application said I was the editor of Christian Parenting Today, that I write books for the Christian market, that I went to seminary. I haven’t hidden anything. In terms of the audience, because I’ve been writing for Christians for such a long time, it’s been harder to work outside of that worldview in my answers: How do I write in such a way that doesn’t compromise my faith, while recognizing that not everybody shares the same worldview?

At the GMA website, several of the stories include comments from readers who are concerned about your religious beliefs, going so far as to accuse you of being narrow-minded, fundamentalist, intolerant, and so on. What do you make of those reactions?

When all that extremist stuff came up, I was talking to my producer at GMA and said that my concern is that it’s going to raise a red flag that I’m going to be perceived as a divisive person. I was worried that the GMA folks might think that, but she was like, “Don’t worry about it. We have all faiths represented here, we have a lot of people who are very overt about their faith. Don’t give it another thought.” What that said to me was that this idea that a secular media company that doesn’t want any Christians, that’s just not the case. It’s not a concern to them at all.

If you don’t win, how big of a disappointment will that be after coming this far?

It will be disappointing mostly because it’s been so consuming for the last few months. It’ll be more of a letdown than a disappointment. It’ll be like, “Okay, now what do I do?” But the thing that I’ve reminded myself all along is that nothing that truly matters to me is on the line. I have work that I love, great people in my life, a wonderful family, and dear friends, and none of that is going away. The life that I’m coming from is a good one, and if nothing changes, that’s okay.

February 4 update: Good Morning America announced this morning that Liz Pryor, a single mother of three from California, will be their new “advice guru.” Upon hearing the news, Carla Barnhill posted this on her Facebook page: “This has been an amazing, life-altering experience for me and I don't regret a second of it. You, my friends, have been so good to me and I am so, so grateful for you. Thank you for your endless encouragement, your votes, your comments, and your love. Now, let's see what we can conquer next!”

The Untold Story of Donor-Conceived Children

The next reproductive-technology issue coming to a church near you.

Christine A. Scheller

The featured article on the new website AnonymousUs.org is about a bad breakup. A middle-aged woman discovers that her boyfriend is accused of incest. What does she do? She has herself artificially inseminated by an anonymous sperm donor, but then regrets the decision and has an abortion, which she equally regrets. As her biological clock continues ticking, she ponders another artificial insemination. Welcome to the wonders of “reproductive choice.”

The AnonymousUs Project is the brainchild of Alana Stewart, a 24-year-old musician whose mother conceived her using a sperm donor. Stewart is now trying to find her biological father, and she's set out to give those involved in assisted reproductive technologies the opportunity to tell their stories uncensored. An estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born every year in the U.S. through the use of sperm donation. While the fertility industry makes $3.3 billion annually, little is known about the experiences of these children. Stewart's website says, “Though anonymity in reproduction hides the truth, anonymity in story-telling will help reveal it.”

According to Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values and editor of FamilyScholars.org, half of young adults who are conceived by sperm donation are "disturbed about the circumstances of their conception." "Overall, compared to those who are raised by their biological parents, they are more likely to struggle with mental illness or substance abuse or depression," Marquardt told NPR last summer.

Yet not every story on AnonymousUs is as dysfunctional as the one above. Other narratives thoughtfully explore the complex realities that reproductive technologies make possible. For example, one storyteller writes,

As an adoptee, it makes me sad to read about the grief many adoptees and sperm donor children are feeling. The saddest part about it is that I think a lot of it is self induced. I know that growing up, there were times that I felt like my parents didn't understand me and that my ‘real’ parents would have. But, the truth is, every kid feels misunderstood growing up. The difference is, adoptees/donees have a fantasy world that they can retreat to where everything would be easier if they were with their ‘real’ parents.”

One mother admits on AnonymousUs, “I mostly used the term ‘donor sperm’ for convenience, but I think a more accurate way to describe this is to call it ‘conceiving a child with a man who donates sperm.’ Saying ‘donor sperm’ depersonalizes it and makes it easier to digest because it is about conceiving a child with an ‘it’ and not a person. The reality is that people conceive children, not objects. No regrets."

Stewart is uniquely qualified to speak on this subject. Her older sister was adopted, she was conceived from her mother’s egg and an anonymous donor’s sperm, and her younger brother is the biological child of her mother and stepfather. She felt loved and supported by her mother growing up, but says, “It taught me a lot about how important biology is in really being cared for properly.” She explains, “My father sold me away for $75. How is that supposed to make me feel about myself? The toxic shame that we are giving our kids on purpose is hurting us so much.”

The response to the site has been huge, says Stewart, because it allows people to express themselves without hurting their parents. She says, “Our parents are a little insecure about some of the decisions they made. It just opens up a whole can of worms when you speak out.” Sadly, being an outspoken activist has seriously damaged Stewart’s relationship with her mother, but she adds, “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it was really important.”

Stewart felt so strongly about encouraging “Open ID” egg donation, wherein the resulting children know their biological mothers, that she became a donor herself. Two children have been conceived from her eggs. When I asked how she feels about them, Stewart admitted, “I’m really nervous about it. . . . I’ve been to workshops. Mothers who use surrogates and egg donors seem to be more insecure about their motherhood. They seem to need their children to affirm them as the rightful mother. And, I’m worried because typically they’re older; I’m worried that my biological children are going to be taking care of their mothers in geriatric care when they’re young.” She believes her children were conceived for single women without partners.“I’m sad for my kids,” she told me, “but the only thing that may redeem that is being Open ID; if they need to come find me, I’ll be there for them.”

Marquardt, co-investigator for the 2010 report “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor," recently wrote that the complicated stories on AnonymousUs “echo and affirm” her research: “They tell us that bodies matter. That to be deliberately denied knowledge of where you come from is painful and bewildering, at any age. That the human longing to know where you fit in the human family extends also to donor conceived persons. That the fertility industry is rife with contradictions, praising donations and altruism when in fact cold cash fuels each transaction.”

If you think this reproductive technology issue is not a concern for Christians, you are wrong. Marquardt told me, “Of 485 donor conceived persons we recruited through a web-based panel of one million plus U.S. households, 32 percent say they are Catholic and 32 percent say they are Protestant. Persons conceived this way are in the pews.” She posed some provocative questions for blog readers' consideration:

What are churches saying about the donor-conceived experience?

How are we ministering to donor-conceived children?

How might the churches' discussion of reproductive technologies need to be challenged by the experience of these persons conceived this way who so often tell us that knowing the identity of, and having a relationship with, their biological fathers matters to them?

So, what do you think?

Surprised by Beauty at the March for Life

The people who caught my eye — the ones the mainstream media overlooked — at this year's march.

Karen Swallow Prior, guest blogger

T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” alluding to the way life and death are inextricably connected, as when “lilacs” are bred “out of the dead land.”

This is the way the March for Life — held every January in Washington since the Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade — feels to me. I’ve attended a half dozen or more times, always arriving with great anticipation and great dread. Overwhelming every other impression — the crowds, the gridlock, the many signs — is the eternal cold. And this year’s temperatures were among the lowest for the March. Why didn’t the Supreme Court have at least enough decency to issue its mortal ruling in June? But perhaps the dead of winter is more fitting, after all.

A crowed estimated by organizers to number between 250,000 and 400,000 flowed over Constitution Avenue on January 24, spilling out across the city. Before processing, as always, participants received marching orders in an hours-long rally where elected officials meted and were meted rewards for their faithfulness to the cause. Here is where, typically, the cameras, reporters, and newscasters expend their energies and headlines. By the time marchers gather at the Supreme Court, the route’s end (and, of course, its ultimate beginning), the majority of photos have been taken, the sound bites recorded, and the stories filed. This part of the story — the culmination of the March and the people who populate it — rarely makes headlines.

But it’s the non-headliners who are the lifeblood of a movement in its 38th year. Here are a few I encountered:

· The 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising of pro-democracy students and intellectuals led to untold deaths of Chinese citizens at the hands of the government. Chai Ling was one of the student leaders who survived the massacre. Smuggled out of China in a box to the U.S., where she received an Ivy League education, married, and had children, Chai became a Christian 13 months ago. Her convictions have turned to the pro-life cause, and she came to the March to help spread the word about her efforts to end female abortion and infanticide in China. Look for an upcoming post devoted to Chai Ling.

· Phil (no last name given) leads a group called Secular Pro-Life. He is a young, pro-life vegan who cut his activism teeth in the anti-globalization movement. He worked for a pro-life organization for a few years, keeping his atheist views to himself, but has since “come out” as an atheist while maintaining his pro-life convictions. He says he has been warmly received at the March, where he carries a sign identifying himself as a pro-life atheist. Phil’s group teamed up this year with the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, a group that’s attended the March for some decades now.

· In the midst of a throng of young people — from most vantage points, the crowd appeared to be overwhelmingly college-aged or younger — I was startled to see two women who looked barely 18 garbed in nun’s habits. Their bright faces and rosy cheeks seemed owing to something other than the frigid Washington air. According to a recent report, young women choosing such a vocational life are on the rise, and their appearance should not have surprised me.

· Speaking of Catholics, it's their lead in this movement that we evangelicals have followed — sometimes more, sometimes less — all these years. No one keeps records of the numbers representing the many denominations and affiliations at the March, but many years, the prevalence of rosaries, cassocks, habits, bus signs, and diocesan banners (not to mention the Youth Rally and Mass for Life that brought in a record 27,000 people the morning of the March) overshadows any visible presence of the admittedly more nondescript evangelicals.

· Naomi Barber King, sister-in-law of Martin Luther King Jr., was recognized for her pro-life efforts on the morning of the March at the NPRC’s Service for the Pre-Born and their Mothers and Fathers. Mrs. King has long been an eloquent and strong voice against abortion, particularly within the African American community, which suffers a greatly disproportionate number of abortions in the U. S.

· Mrs. King’s daughter, Alveda King, attended the service to witness her mother being honored. At the close of the elder King’s remarks, mother and daughter embraced, and the mother gave thanks to God for rescuing her daughter from the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma of abortion. The suffering and regret Alveda experienced through two abortions are the core of her outspoken opposition to abortion, a story widely ignored by the same media who rightfully keep her uncle’s lasting legacy alive.

· It is, finally, those like Alveda King who offered the most powerful witness against abortion at the March — those who have experienced abortion and come to regret it. These women (and men) punctuated the end of the March by standing in front of the Court holding signs reading “I regret my abortion” and “I regret lost fatherhood.”

Fittingly, the March for Life began with the politicians and ended with the voices of those whose lives had been most profoundly touched by the dictum of the law. In between was not one univocal mass into which the media somehow compress all opposition to abortion, but rather black and white, young and old, men and women, believer and skeptic, hope and despair, death and life.

My cerebral tendencies struggle against the seemingly futile motions of marching and holding signs in the fight against such an ideological, social, and political issue. But then I ponder the mystery of the Incarnation and remember that mere physicality is never merely mere. And if, as the classical understanding would have it, the essence of beauty is harmony, or unity in variety, then the March for Life embodies just that kind of beauty. And where there is beauty, truth and goodness cannot be far away.

Christians Launch Anti-Slavery Efforts for Super Bowl XLV

This year's game is located in one of the nation's seedbeds of human trafficking.

Katelyn Beaty

Cowboys stadium. Troy Polamalu. Black Eyed Peas. Ben Roethlisberger. Sex trafficking of minors. Christina Aguilera. Doritos’ controversy-tinged “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. Those irritating Go Daddy commercials.

Which of these things is not like the others? Believe it or not, they all describe the close-at-hand Super Bowl XLV, where cheese heads and yellow-towel touters will cheer on their respective teams, Dallas hotels and airports will receive an estimated 100,000 visitors, with a projected economic impact of $611.7 million on the area, and pimps and traffickers will set up makeshift brothels in hotels and blocks of houses, selling the bodies of vulnerable children and teens. And while major sporting events are well known as seedbeds of sexual exploitation, this year’s game might be worse: Texas senator Leticia Van de Putte recently reported that over 20 percent of all trafficking victims into the U.S. come through Texas. And in 2008, reports the Fort Worth Star Telegram, 38 percent of all calls to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hot line were from Texas.

In response, several Christian anti-trafficking ministries are working alongside government officials to curb trafficking at next Sunday’s game. Traffick911, a Fort Worth-based nonprofit founded by Deena Graves, has launched the “I’m Not Buying It” ad campaign, featuring singer Natalie Grant and former New England Patriot Devin Wyman, with the tag line, “What would you do if it was your daughter?” The group is petitioning the Super Bowl Host Committee to endorse the campaign and run a 30-second ad during the game, and has received over 65,000 signatures.

Graves told Baptist Press that Super Bowls are notorious as trafficking zones because "you have a large number of male tourists traveling without families. Second, there are large amounts of money at these events. For example, the Super Bowl host committee estimates there will be 40,000 people coming into our area who do not even have tickets to the Super Bowl. They're coming just for the party atmosphere. It's kind of that mindset of 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' "

Love 146, a Christian anti-trafficking group based in Connecticut, is working alongside Dallas-based Irving Bible Church to spread the “It’s Not My Fault” awareness campaign and provide other local churches with educational resources and personal prayer guides. (Read this post from Love 146 co-founder Lamont Hiebert for the campaign name’s origins.) This past Sunday the group led a prayer walk around the Cowboys Stadium, and has planned an “Anti-Pimp My Ride” flash mob for Super Bowl Sunday, encouraging participants to deck out their cars with magnets and congregate in high-traffic areas.

The State of Texas, for its part, has been proactive in making sure their Super Bowl does not mirror the 2009 game in Tampa, Florida, where the State Department of Children and Families found at least 24 children being forced into sex slavery. Late last year, Texas State Attorney Greg Abbott vowed to commission dozens of staff members in the weeks leading up to the game to find and arrest traffickers. Abbott, who has called the game “one of the biggest human-trafficking events in the United States,” has included representatives from Traffick911 and Shared Hope International, an anti-trafficking research group led by former congresswoman Linda Smith, in its preparation efforts.

One Christian group is working more covertly in the business sector. Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS), a socially responsible investment firm that works with 1,000 Catholic institutions, is pressuring Dallas hotels to train staff to recognize signs of trafficking, cooperate with police, and officially adopt “The Code for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism.” Sadly, reports Catholic News Service, only one hotel chain in which CBIS holds stock - Carlson, which owns Radisson hotels - has agreed. “Human traffickers often hide in plain sight. Their crimes frequently go unpunished and their victims remain unaided because many consumers and companies don't know what to look for,” says Julie Tanner, CBIS assistant director. "Businesses of all kinds need to be aware that human trafficking poses serious risks to a company’s reputation and bottom line.”

Even while the Super Bowl Host Committee has not responded to Traffick911's petition, Graves told The Dallas Morning News, "We believe, without a doubt, that God gave us the Super Bowl this year to raise awareness of what's happening with these kids."

'Skins' Prompts Call for Child Porn Investigation

This time, the Parents Television Council is probably right about the British export that spotlights teens (and teen actors) engaging in a sexual free-for-all.

Karen Swallow Prior, guest blogger

Do you know what your teenagers are watching? If it’s 10 on a Monday night, you might want to check that it’s not what the Parents Television Council (PTC) has called “the most dangerous program that has ever been foisted on your children.” In response to PTC, Salon observed, with characteristic snark, that such warnings are the best PR a TV show can get. They may have a point: the pilot episode of Skins, airing this week on MTV, got the highest rating for a new scripted series ever, garnering 3.3 million viewers, which Entertainment Weekly calls a “strong start.” Most of those watching (2.7 million) were within the “coveted 12-34 demographic” group.

But I doubt the kids are paying much attention to the PTC. The show’s big splash was due to at least two other factors. First, Skins is based on a successful British version, which has even fewer moral boundaries than the American show. Second, it was greatly hyped through social media well before its debut, creating an online community of young fans before it even aired; within days of the premiere, it had nearly 10,000 Twitter followers.

Newsweek describes Skins as a “controversial new series” that “portrays teens as experimental and sex-obsessed, lying to their parents and sneaking out at night. In other words, it shows them as they really are.” Well, I was once a teen, so I find it hard to disagree with this characterization, but that doesn’t make the show okay.

Don’t get me wrong. My pop-culture sensibilities are far from sensitive. (I'm even a member of that secret cult of Christian women who surreptitiously watch Sex and The City – or at least the edited versions that have gone into syndication.) The problem with Skins isn’t just the elements that border on the pornographic or those that normalize rampant recreational drug use, same-sex relations, and various sexual experimentations. Nor is the problem solely that the show’s “depiction of such activities is on a scale never before seen on TV,” as the PTC puts it.

The problem is that, despite a rating of TV-MA, these activities are depicted as those of teenagers — aka minors, aka children.

Consider shows that might include all of these objectionable elements but in a world centered on and populated by adults — by which I don’t simply mean 18-and-over, but actual adults.

But now consider that Skins is a show about the sex lives of minors, and yet also conceived, produced, directed, financed, and marketed by adults. Isn’t it more than a little creepy to think about the kind of grown-ups who sit down and write scripts for and give stage directions to a bunch of actors pretending to be children having sex? (It’s important to note that some of the actors are, in fact, children.) If you’re having trouble imagining that, here’s an excerpt from one story on the show that depicts just such a scene:

In a downstairs recording studio in New York's West Village, Bryan Elsley [age 49], a co-creator of the British teenage comedy-drama "Skins," was guiding James Newman, a star of the MTV remake of the show, through a typical line of dialogue.

Conjuring up his confidence, Newman, a handsome, baby-faced 18-year-old who plays Tony, the cocky ringleader of a high school clique, said to an unseen co-star, "Normal girls like it."

Elsley offered his thoughts on the line reading.

"If you could be slightly scandalized," he said, "but also amused."

In an interview afterward, a more demure Newman declined to specify what indiscreet act he was trying to talk another (undoubtedly female) character into during that scene.

"You'll see," he said with a grin.

Now imagine having teens in your household and having the likes of Mr. Elsley as your next-door neighbor.

The usual Hollywood excuse — “It’s just acting” — falls short, because It fails to address what’s being acted out. That’s the excuse that a mother of one of the show’s cast members told herself as she read the script’s requirements that had her 17-year-old son naked in scene after scene, kissing person after person.

The truth of the matter is that, in the course of such “acting,” the actor really does get naked and really does kiss people, or whatever.

Yet it’s not only the actors who are implicated in the sexual behavior required to create the show. Skins’ 10-minute promotional trailer introducing the cast of characters, through camera work that slowly scans the nubile bodies of the players, tranforms the camera lens — and the eyes of any adult watching — into the gaze of a pedophile.

Now that’s a problem.

Apparently MTV execs have come to recognize this as a problem, too. The New York Times reports that the channel is asking the show’s producers to take it down a few notches. And The Wall Street Journal says the show, in fact, “may be pushing the limits of child pornography laws.” As NYT reporter Brian Stelter points out:

Child pornography is defined by the United States as any visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. In some cases, “a picture of a naked child may constitute illegal child pornography if it is sufficiently sexually suggestive,” according to the Justice Department’s legal guidance.

In response, the PTC has asked the chairman of the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and the Department of Justice, to investigate whether the show violates child pornography laws.

The heightened controversy might end up with the show’s producers laughing all the way to the bank. But they might just be better off having millstones hung around their necks.

Why I Don't Keep a Mommy Blog

In a world that’s as impersonal and voyeuristic as ours, I want the things I do at home to be just for the people I see and touch daily.

Rachel Marie Stone, guest blogger

Both my husband’s grandma and mine were short women named Charlotte who played piano and sang. They lived and died on opposite coasts, mine in New York, his in California. His was plump, old-fashioned, devout, taught toddler Sunday school, and ran a cattle ranch. Mine was skinny, stylish, progressive, atheist, a New York City editorial assistant, and a terrible housekeeper. I share my Charlotte’s love for cocktails, crosswords, writing, and Woody Guthrie, and many of her political views and pet peeves. I share the other Charlotte’s faith, love of children, and a sliver of her domestic ability. I love hearing how she slaughtered chickens, raised vegetables, preserved fruits, milked cows, hand-cranked ice cream, and sewed her clothes. California Charlotte’s journals record dry facts about ranch life. New York Charlotte’s files are full of typewritten poems clipped to rejection slips from The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. For my Charlotte, baking anything would call her feminist credentials into question; for his Charlotte, aspiring to write for any eyes but her own would have been treason against her housewifely calling.

That public-private divide is no longer as sharp as it was in the Charlottes’ lifetime. On Salon this week, in “Why I Can't Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs," Emily Matchar admires the presentation of domesticity on popular “Mormon mommy blogs,” such as Nat the Fat Rat, C. Jane Enjoy It, and Rockstar Diaries, for “help[ing] women like me envision a life in which marriage and motherhood could potentially be something other than a miserable, soul-destroying trap.” The bloggers celebrate their homes, their husbands, and their babies. They are domestic goddesses inclined to DIY-projects and pie-baking and never without red lipstick and adorable vintage accessories — or the digital camera to capture it all in cool, hipster-influenced style. Their readers — many of them, like Matchar, “late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminists” — find comfort in their vision of old-fashioned yet hip domestic happiness. As for the bloggers themselves, they have managed to bridge the gap separating the lives of those two Charlottes: many of their blogs are full of sponsors; many offer the chance to purchase a bit of their DIY-cool through their Etsy or Big Cartel shops, having created their own bankable brands of domesticity.

Even if some mommy blogs have gone commercial, their attraction is easy to understand. For years I’ve been hooked on Soulemama (and its creator’s books), drawing inspiration from Amanda Blake Soule’s winsome words and appealing images. But even though I, too, am a stay at home mommy who’s been called a “domestic goddess,” keeping a blog is not for me. Oh, my kids sport sweaters and socks hand-knitted from vintage patterns; in the summer, I wear sundresses that I’ve sewed myself; my kids don’t have matching ones only because they are boys. I make my own bread and yogurt. I’ve preserved fruit and made jam. I bake cinnamon rolls from scratch, and I’m known to have made more than a few stuffed animals. While I’ll usually photograph the hand-knit baby sweater or teddy bear before giving it away, and while I love few things more than writing, the thought of blogging my every domestic move fills me with dread. And not just because I can’t help comparing my own doings with those of, say, Nat the Fat Rat or Angry Chicken and feeling envious and inadequate. I don’t blog about my domestic life because doing so would run counter to the reasons I live as I do.

Why do I do so much knitting and sewing and baking? Partly influenced by the mommy blogs I’ve mentioned, I gravitated toward the “New Domesticity” that Matchar references. Surrounded by endless cheap consumer goods made in factories a world away, many of us have come to find real satisfaction in creating, making, doing for ourselves. But before I ever heard the word domesticity (new or old) I loved to make stuff — cross-stitch, doll clothes, cookies. This urge to do something with our hands besides press buttons — to dig in the dirt, chop vegetables, spin yarn, and cut fabric — comes from the original Creator, the Artist and Designer of All. We are made to love beauty and order, and to find playful delight in the work that we are called to.

For most of human history, that has involved what we might call the "domestic arts." Certainly you don’t need to be Martha Stewart to be a loving homemaker. Yet I think most people, given the chance, find pleasure and joy in exercising their creativity in the simple work of clothing and feeding themselves and those they love. I do. I’m grateful to have the time and energy to feed my family and clothe my children in a way that’s a bit less pre-packaged and a bit more homemade. For me, domestic creativity celebrates the urge to “make and do” that God gave me while loving my family — and others — through my hands.

While I love writing about lots of other things on this earth and beyond, and while I enjoy peeping at the crafty doings of other moms, I don’t blog about my domestic pursuits because in a world that’s at once as impersonal and voyeuristic as ours, I want the things I do at home to be just for the people I see and touch daily. I don’t want my home life to have a comments button, or ads in the sidebars.

I think the Charlottes would understand. I know He who sees what’s done in secret does.

Rachel Stone has written for Her.meneutics on fathers, eating disorders, miscarriage, and flash mobs, and for Christianity Today on Germany, and has also contributed to Flourish, catapult/*cino, and Creation Care magazine. She lives in Greenport, New York, with her husband, two sons, extended family, and assorted cats.

Miss America and the Bikini Question

Do modern-day pageants ask young evangelical women to compromise their values an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny too much?

Katelyn Beaty
To one-piece or two-piece? That was the question for many Miss America hopefuls in 1997, when, for the first time in 50 years, the pageant allowed two-piece swimsuits. Pageant organizers say the swimsuit part of the competition, dubbed the feminist-friendlier “Lifestyle and Fitness” section in 2001, is about showing contestants’ fitness, poise, and posture. Others have charged it’s about boosting TV ratings, which have been sluggish in recent years. In 1995, Miss America let viewers vote on whether to drop the swimsuit section. Eighty percent said to keep it, while 42 of the 50 contestants said “they did not have a problem with waltzing around in public in swimwear.” (One dissenting contestant, meanwhile, called it a “veiled strip show.”)

It’s hard to believe that just over a decade ago, two-piece pageant swimsuits were taboo for Miss America. In this year’s competition, all but one contestant wore a black bikini and high heels. (Apparently pageant officials give contestants few swimsuits to choose from.) The young woman who donned a one-piece swimsuit was not 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, Miss America 2011, former Miss Nebraska, and a devout Christian. No, the brave one-piecer was 19-year-old Miss Idaho Kylie Kofoed, a Mormon and music major at Brigham Young University.

Why compare Scanlan’s and Kofoed’s swimsuit decision? Certainly not to question the sincerity of Scanlan’s faith. Mandy McMichael, a Duke PhD candidate whose dissertation explores the role of religion in American beauty pageants, attended Saturday's pageant in Las Vegas. She told me, “Because Nebraska has never had a Miss America before I wasn't paying too much attention to her initially. But, on Saturday night, when she was crowned, there was no denying that she was a Christian. It was obvious from her pointing upward and the almost reverent way that she rejoiced in her victory.” The pageant program and Scanlan’s blog say she will attend Patrick Henry College, which was founded for homeschooling families and prepares students to "shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding." Scanlan will study government in hopes of entering politics (as have many other pageant winners). Further, Scanlan has made “positive body image and self-acceptance” as they relate to eating disorders her pageant platform. Scanlan recently wrote, “When I found pageantry, I realized that God had prepared me for this competition by creating me to love diversity, and here was the place I could use the talents He had given me.”

The Scanlan-Kofoed swimsuit comparison is less about Scanlan’s own faith and more about Christianity and physical beauty — and how the two might clash in the world of modern pageants. I want to ask, what would make a Christian Miss America stand out against her pageant peers? Why would a young Mormon woman, but not an evangelical one, dare to buck the ubiquity of bikinis and bronze-tanned skin in favor of something more modest? Can Christian pageant contestants gain the worthy cultural and political influence that usually comes with a pageant crown without losing their souls?

The answer to this last one might be trickier than Scanlan thinks (Carrie Prejean jokes are forbidden at this point). McMichael admitted that Scanlan’s faith was not apparent through much of the pageant: “… I didn't see the religious connection immediately. That is, it wasn't necessarily obvious from her on-stage competition. She donned a bikini, performed a non-religious talent, and danced as enthusiastically as the other contestants.” It’s no secret that contestants go to great lengths to conform their looks to popular notions of female beauty and sexiness: Scanlan herself wore a blonde wig. Further, billboards and Internet banner ads and music videos bombard us with images of women (and even, increasingly, little girls) as half-naked, hypersexual, and available for anyone’s visual taking. In our sexualized visual culture, I’m not sure we can see bikinied women strutting on stage in high heels as anything but hypersexual. Thankfully, Miss America does put more scoring weight on contestants’ talent and interview (35 and 25 percent, respectively) than on their swimsuits (15 percent). But if the swimsuit portion really is about fitness, why don’t contestants compete in athletic attire, as they do in Miss Teen America?

In 2007, Katie Millar, then a neuroscience major at Brigham Young, became a top 10 contestant in the Miss America pageant. Wearing a one-piece swimsuit and a sleeved evening dress with a high back and high neckline, Millar stood out. She admitted she had never worn makeup before entering the Miss Utah pageant. After the pageant, she told KUTV, “When I did make the top ten . . . the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘I get to wear my one piece swimsuit on national TV and hopefully a girl will see that she doesn’t have to show a lot of skin to get attention or do well in society today.’ ”

I hope the same. I also hope Scanlan flourishes at Patrick Henry in 2012 and achieves her goal of “break[ing] down the stereotype of crooked and dishonest politicians, operating instead under character and integrity.” But most of all, I hope more evangelical women entering the tricky world of beauty pageants will dare to be conspicuous for Christ — even if that means forgoing those black bikinis or evening gowns with plunging necklines. Faced with the pressure to conform to Miss America’s standards of beauty, they might realize that trying to be a modern-day Esther means sacrificing too much self-worth and real beauty for a little bit of power.

A Woman, Not a 'Gestational Carrier'

How the global infertility industry reduces women to profitable body parts.

Jennifer Lahl, guest blogger

Editor's Note: This is the second Her.meneutics post responding to Melanie Thernstrom's New York Times Magazine article on twiblings. Ellen Painter Dollar covered it last week.

As millions around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, issued a press release announcing the birth of their baby boy, born on Christmas Day. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, a healthy baby, was born through modern, assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using an anonymous egg donor and a "gestational carrier" (a term that is getting some criticism), Elton and David fulfilled one of their greatest wishes: to be parents. They have now joined the ranks of the growing list of celebrities having babies via ART.

This got me thinking about another list I read a few years ago: the "Ten Best Chores to Outsource." Expecting to see housecleaning, gardening and landscaping, pool cleaning, laundry, I was shocked and saddened by the number one "best chore to outsource": pregnancy. From the Time piece:

Outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers. But entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services — from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa — to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child.

Entrepreneurs like Rudy Rupak, CEO of medical tourism agency Planet Hospital, are just another example of those who are hopping on the ART modern-family bandwagon. Rupak's brokering business even offers what his company calls the “India Bundle,” an "affordable" package deal that gives would-be parents an egg donor, four surrogates for four embryo transfers, room and board for the surrogate during the pregnancy, and transportation services when the parents arrive in India to pick up the baby. Costs escalate from there depending on services rendered. Gay couples wanting to do egg-sharing so that each can offer sperm to fertilize the eggs (so that each has a biological child) drives up the price. All the various preimplantation genetic diagnostic tests also drive costs upward. In sum, this setup is a consumer model of baby-making.

Twins cost more, of course, which brings me to the latest craziness: twiblings. Parents Michael and Melanie Thernstrom recently chronicled their entire infertility story, which is not atypical, in The New York Times Magazine. After what Melanie describes as many failed relationships, she finally met Mr. Right, but maternal age hindered her ability to get pregnant, so they were off to the fertility doctor for five failed in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles. Always wanting twins (perhaps forgetting about risks to maternal and infant health with multiple births), they decided to hire not one but two surrogates, enlisted the help of an egg donor, and “gave birth” to a boy and a girl five days apart. Since the babies were from the same egg donor and they used Michael's sperm, the children are siblings. Since they were created in the lab at the same time, they are fraternal twins. But given that they were carried in separate surrogate wombs, they have been dubbed twiblings.

Pregnancy has been reduced to a "bits and pieces" brokered industry: sperm from a handsome Scandinavian stud, eggs from a beautiful Ivy League graduate, a womb-for-rent from a poor woman in India trying to provide food and education for her children, and brokers in the middle setting up the legal transactions to build a better baby the 21st-century way.

Meanwhile, cases like those of an Australian couple who aborted their twin boys because they wanted a girl, and Olivia Pratten's battle for the right to have access to her biological father's identity (she was born in Canada some 20-plus years ago via anonymous egg donation), make their way through the courts. Just this morning, Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban announced the birth of their second child together, brought to term by a carefully selected "gestational carrier." These are uncharted global waters we are swimming in, and sadly, the international laws are at best ad hoc and at worst woefully unregulated. What is more disheartening to me is the lack of a faithful witness from Western Christians (with the exception of Catholic teaching) in response to infertility. From the twiblings piece, a director of a Los Angeles agency for those in search of a surrogate stated that many of their gestational carriers were "mainly white, working-class women, often evangelical Christians — the kind of girls you went to high school with.”

The basics are well established within Christian orthodoxy: Children are a blessing and a gift, not a right. They should be begotten, not made. ART is the manufacturing of children, often by design and often using third parties, and a violation of the doctrine of the two flesh becoming one. In the Garden, husband and wife were a complete family. This was declared very good, even without children being part of the story at that point. While infertility is a sad and difficult occurrence for those who want children, it has been made even more difficult because of a lack of clear Protestant thinking on the matter. Infertility is not a death sentence. Children are not products to be made. Our reproductive bodies are not to be blithely parceled and sold to someone else. And pregnancy is not a chore to be outsourced.

It's time for some more serious corrective thinking lest the reproductive madness get even more out of control, and we be morally complicit in furthering the exploitation of some lives for the making of another.


Jennifer Lahl is the founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, and writer-director of the documentary Eggsploitation.

Why I Don’t Want to Be a Chinese Mother

I don't want to be an American mother, for that matter.

Amy Julia Becker

Amy Chua’s essay for The Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” sprinted across media outlets and the blogosphere, prompting responses at Motherlode, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Slate, among many others.

The essay spawned an interview on the Diane Rehm Show, not to mention nearly 5,500 reader comments on The Wall Street Journal’s website and over 100,000 comments on Facebook. Many of the comments — from Caucasian and Asian American readers alike — express criticism or dismay. Why the uproar?

Chua makes extreme statements about her parenting style throughout the essay (an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). She begins with a list of things her two daughters were “never allowed to do,” including “have a playdate,” “watch TV or play computer games,” and “get any grade less than an A.” She describes calling her daughter “garbage . . . when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me.” Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, explains, “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.”

Chua’s statements and the anecdotes from her parenting experience come across as harsh and extreme. She couches her approach in the language of love and belief in her children’s abilities. But she includes stories such as losing her voice from shouting at her 7-year-old daughter until she can play a piano piece correctly.

Chua’s approach comes across as demeaning and unhelpful at best. In a follow-up interview for The Wall Street Journal, Chua tempers some of her statements. She discusses the value of a parenting environment that includes both love and structure. She admits that she backed off from the more extreme version of “Chinese parenting” as her kids got older. She expresses her gratitude for her close relationship with her daughters now. But, at the end of the day, she remarks, “If I had to do it all over, I would do basically the same thing, with some adjustments.”

A separate article from The New York Times offers an example of a more typically “Western” parenting approach. As Hilary Stout reports in “Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum,” “the scientists, psychologists, educators and others who are part of the play movement say that most of the social and intellectual skills one needs to succeed in life and work are first developed through childhood play.” She describes parents trying to relinquish control over their children’s schedules, allowing free play instead of simply signing them up for sports teams and lessons every day after school. Parents in this article have increased their “tolerance for chaos,” and have “learned to live with disarray,” in an attempt to provide their children skill sets in problem-solving, negotiation, team-building, and creative thinking.

It’s easy to read these two pieces and posit “Eastern” values against “Western” ones, or to list anecdotes proving the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of either one of these divergent parenting styles. Yet the styles bear comparison for their similarities, too, and, ultimately, for the ways in which they will disappoint parent and child alike.

Chua writes about raising “stereotypically successful kids” through strict discipline, limited social interaction, and regimented academic and musical practice. Stout describes play as a means to develop “the social and intellectual skills one needs to succeed in life and work.” In other words, both approaches focus upon the idea of success. But what does it mean for an individual to succeed? Should success be measured by academic achievement, sociability, job prospects, or something else? And should parents be held responsible for the success of their children, whatever that “success” may be?

From a Christian perspective, parenting ought to point children to the character of God as both the one who cares about the way in which we live and the one who graciously receives us when we fall short of that standard. The “Chinese” model of parenting reflects some Christian ideals in that the parent (at least the mother — Chua’s essay doesn’t describe a clear role for the father) is deeply engaged in her children’s lives and the parent articulates and enforces clear expectations for a good life.

Various biblical writers admonish believers to discipline their children. The writer of Proverbs, for instance, says, “A fool spurns his father’s discipline, but whoever heeds correction shows prudence” (see Prov. 10:17, 12:1, 13:1, 22:6 for other examples). The New Testament epistles pick up the theme: “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Col. 3:20). Christian parents ought to discipline their children, and yet this discipline is not done to ensure success, or even obedience. Rather, discipline ought to point to the character of God as one who wants to teach us how to live a good life.

By Christian standards, the “playful American” model of parenting also offers some benefits. Encouraging creativity can serve as a reflection of God’s character as creator. Allowing children freedom — even the simple freedom to make a fort instead of going to soccer practice — can mirror God’s desire for us to know freedom, especially when this freedom comes in the context of a loving and supportive environment. Similarly, encouraging children to play together mirrors the relational aspect of God’s being.

Both of these parenting styles have something to offer to the degree that they reflect who we are as human beings — creatures who need instruction in the context of love and acceptance, individuals who need discipline in order to achieve our telos, our God-given purpose, and individuals who need grace when we just don’t meet the expectations placed upon us by others. But both Eastern and Western parenting styles fail if they uphold “success” as their goal. The gospel of Jesus Christ reminds us, parents and children alike, that our worth comes not from getting straight As, not from general happiness, not from imagination or creativity — but simply from the value bestowed upon us as children of God.

Blessed Are Those with Alzheimer's

Discovering God’s image in a nursing home called “The Beatitudes.”

Amy Julia Becker

Americans are living longer and longer. For many individuals, this comes as good news, and yet for the larger culture, it brings social change, significant increases in health-care costs, and a higher prevalence of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 5.3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s, but the disease impacts an even greater swath of the population. Nearly 11 million unpaid caregivers (many of them women) often work around the clock to try to understand and deal with the impact of dementia on family members.

Recently Pam Belleck reported on a novel approach to Alzheimer’s care in the New York Times. Her article “Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate,” focused on a nursing home in Phoenix, Arizona. This nursing home has served elderly men and women with dementia for decades, and in recent years the staff implemented a series of measures to care for their patients more effectively. At first glance, their approach appears indulgent, even potentially harmful. As Belleck writes, patients “are allowed practically anything that brings comfort, even an alcoholic ‘nip at night.’” They eat whenever they want and whatever they want—chocolate, bacon, and so forth. The state of Arizona resisted, and even tried to regulate, many of The Beatitudes unconventional methods. But over time, this small facility, with only 30 patients, has become a model for individual caregivers and institutions alike.

The New York Times’ article did not mention the origins of The Beatitudes and their ethos, but the name alone suggests the Christian roots of the institution. “The Beatitudes,” of course, refers to Matthew 5, the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he proclaims God’s blessing upon “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” and “the meek” (among others). According to The Beatitudes’ website, the facility began in the 1960’s as the response of a church congregation to the need for a welcoming retirement community. In fact, “the young church congregation decided to build the Campus before they built the church sanctuary because the need was so great for comfortable, caring, and affordable retirement living to meet the needs of seniors with modest economic means.” The Mission Statement of The Beatitudes refers to a “heritage of Christian hospitality” and “a model of wellness that promotes soundness of mind, spirit, and body.”

Their approach goes far beyond indulging the desires of patients.

In her article, Belleck notes a series of measures to promote health and well-being: “using food, art, music and exercise to generate positive emotions,” “eliminating anything potentially considered restraining, from deep-seated wheelchairs that hinder standing up to bedrails,” and “keeping residents out of diapers if possible.” As a result of these and other caregiving strategies, patients at The Beatitudes demonstrate virtually none of the “agitated, delusional behavior common with Alzheimer’s.” The staff recognizes patients as individuals with bodies, minds, and spirits who need affirmation, emotional support, and relationships.

Negative language surrounds Alzheimer’s disease (and many diseases). We talk about how individuals “suffer”, about how the person has been “lost” to the disease. While this language certainly describes some of what it means to have Alzheimer’s, it can also deter caregivers from understanding patients with dementia as individuals who not only need care but also retain their individuality and their ability to offer something to those around them. A Christian model of care assumes that every human being—no matter how ill, or addled, or young, or old—has been created in the image of God. Bearing God’s image implies that each individual has a wholeness to their being (albeit a wholeness marked by the negative impact of sin), a wholeness of mind, body, and spirit. Bearing God’s image also implies that every individual is created for relationship—with God and with others. Every individual maintains an ability to give and to receive.

The Beatitudes is a Christian nursing home, and it provides an effective model of care in large part because it retains a Christian understanding of personhood. The staff approach their patients as full human beings. As Peggy Mullan, the President of the facility, remarks, “although weathered, although tested by dementia, people are beautiful and have certain strengths.” The Beatitudes offers an example of what can happen when an institution translates an abstract principle—seeing every individual as a person with beauty and strength—into concrete policies and activities.

Jesus called the meek, the poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, blessed. The Beatitudes demonstrates the reality of his words as it translates those words into action with a handful of elderly men and women with dementia. Moreover, millions of Americans suffer as a result of Alzheimer’s disease. That suffering can be modified, or even transformed, through a Christian understanding of human personhood through this model of incarnational love, the word made flesh.

Troubled by the Twiblings?

Melanie Thernstrom's NYT Magazine article about her unconventional method of having children left me unsettled — but not for the reasons you think.

Ellen Painter Dollar

What do you call two siblings, with the same genetic parents, gestated by two different women, born five days apart, raised by a father with whom they share genes, and a mother with whom they do not?

Twiblings, who were featured in last week’s New York Times Magazine, in a story written by their mother, Melanie Thernstrom, about “how four women (and one man) conspired to make two babies.” Melanie was 41 when she met her husband, Michael. She went through six unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization before heeding a doctor’s advice that, if her goal was to have a healthy baby rather than experience pregnancy, she should find a surrogate and an egg donor.

When Michael suggested that they implant embryos (created with his sperm and eggs from a donor) simultaneously into two surrogates, thus completing their family in one fell swoop, Melanie called the idea “crazy.” But after finding an egg donor (whom Melanie dubbed “the Fairy Goddonor”) and two gestational surrogates, Melanie and Michael did just that. The result was the twiblings, a boy and a girl.

In the article, Melanie and Michael come across as thoughtful people who adore their babies. The surrogates and “Fairy Goddonor” appear to be genuinely gratified by their part in creating a new family. Barring catastrophe, the twiblings will grow up in a solid family, with the ongoing ministrations of their surrogates (both of whom have provided breast milk via nursing and pumping) merely adding to their sense of being abundantly loved.

But the twiblings’ story leaves me unsettled — though not for the same reasons that many other readers expressed concern.

I’m not, for example, wondering why Melanie and Michael didn’t “just adopt.” As I wrote at Her.meneutics last year, the common characterization of adoption as a simple, selfless act (in contrast with the self-absorbed, expensive use of reproductive technology) is misplaced. Current adoption practices and reproductive technology both raise sticky questions about children as commodities, wealth and poverty, and what makes a family. (John Seabrook did an excellent job of distilling these questions in his New Yorker article about adopting a little girl from Haiti.) In a follow-up post to the magazine story, Thernstrom discussed why they did not pursue adoption, in part because of medical problems that affect her acceptability as an adoptive parent.

I’m also untroubled by the family’s lack of resemblance to the stereotypical family consisting of mother, father, and 2.06 biological children. We know from reading history (and the Bible) that infertility and the conception of children with someone other than one’s spouse, accidentally or on purpose, are not new phenomena. Family life has always been a complicated, messy affair, and God has always managed to work through and be in relationship with the imperfect people who result. The twiblings do not represent an insurmountable threat to some idealized way of life.

My concern is that readers will judge Michael and Melanie based on preconceived notions, and then move on, failing to consider the larger ethical questions raised by stories like this one. Some readers will find the story distasteful, dismissing it as an example of traditional morals going down the tubes. Some will find it heartwarming, and embrace it as an example of technology allowing familial love to flourish in revolutionary ways. But as reproductive technology increases in scope and capability, and as stories like this become more common, we need to look beyond them to examine how individuals’ childbearing choices both reflect and influence cultural norms and values.

For example, in one cringeworthy passage (fortunately, there were not many), Melanie obsesses over the surrogates’ daily choices during pregnancy:

Were Melissa and Fie remembering to take their fish oil? It was great that Melissa felt so energetic, but must she take her kids camping while her husband was away one long weekend when she was six months pregnant? And why did she order pizza from Pizza Hut? This is Portland — how about I drop off some organic kale?

Melanie was not exhibiting a trait unique to mothers who use reproductive technology. Reproductive technology merely lays bare the child-as-project mentality that permeates American parenting today. Technology allows parents-to-be to handpick gamete donors with desirable traits, time their childbearing to accommodate career aspirations, or select gender. Those who have babies the old-fashioned way can’t control our children’s origins so precisely, but we try hard to control everything else — pregnancy and birth, our children’s diet, environment, education, and even play time — to ensure that they will become healthy and productive. As Christians, we proclaim to value people not because they are healthy, wealthy, and wise, but just because they are. The modern emphasis on parental control and responsibility leaves little room for grace.

In another example, Melanie dismisses the idea that surrogacy is akin to prostitution. Indeed, the mutually satisfying relationship she and Michael have built with the surrogates makes this analogy distasteful and unfair. But as surrogacy becomes more common in our consumer society, some aspiring parents will inevitably choose a path requiring less investment (financial and emotional) than the one Michael and Melanie took. This is already happening, as couples pay low-income women from developing countries to bear babies on their behalf.

As reproductive technology takes hold, we need to decide if lines need to be drawn, and where. We can’t do that if our conversations are limited to gut reactions to provocative stories that are quickly absorbed by the news cycle. I hope that as we hear more stories like this one, we will not shrug them off as purely private decisions (because like it or not, childbearing decisions, while deeply personal, have major societal impact), nor vilify those who have made complex decisions to use technologies whose long-term implications are far from clear.

The Virgins-Only Dating Website

Is WeWaited.com really a perfect haven for Christians struggling in a sex-obsessed culture?

Amy Julia Becker

Fewer and fewer Americans are getting married. Those who do are, on average, waiting longer to wed than have previous generations. But according to Time's "Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution," women and men still want to meet and build relationships with each other, so marriage remains an ideal. Because of this, reports Stephanie Rosenblum in The New York Times, online dating sites of a remarkable variety have proliferated in recent years. Some are based purely on physical appearance, others focus on hobbies and interests, while others highlight education or the type of computer you use.

Wading into these crowded waters is WeWaited.com, a dating site exclusively for virgins. Only 30 percent of applicants to the site are admitted, and they gain access through a fee and a survey designed to assess their trustworthiness. The site's founders admit that some virgins are left out due to the rigorous screening process, while some who lie about their sexual activity make it in. But, according to its homepage, WeWaited.com mostly achieves its goal: "to use virginity as a significant compatibility tool to bring people together."

If movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and covers of Cosmopolitan weren't enough, sociological data back up the fact that virginity before marriage is rare in the West. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 95 percent of Americans engage in premarital sex. So WeWaited.com offers a safe space for the small segment of the population who want to stay virgins until marriage. It enables partners who value their own virginity to pair up, and it affirms the desire to remain chaste before marriage.

The founders of the site, a husband and wife team who exchanged their "vows and their virginities" on their wedding day, believe virginity is something that goes beyond physical intercourse. They see it as physical, emotional, and spiritual, and believe waiting to exchange their "whole selves" until their wedding was a blessing.

WeWaited.com (formerly called YouandMeArePure.com) is not explicitly Christian, but its view of sex as something involving the whole person aligns with the Christian view. As Wheaton provost Stanton L. Jones writes in the January issue of Christianity Today, sex has meaning, and that meaning is derived from God's intentions for sex, not from our intentions or desires. For Christians, sex is not a merely physical act, but one with implications for gender relationships, embodiment, procreation, personal fulfillment, and God's glory. "God made sexual intercourse to create and sustain a permanent, one-flesh union in a male-female married couple," Jones writes.

So on many levels, providing a space for virgins to meet one another is a good thing. It affirms a biblical perspective on the purpose of marriage as well as the significance and goodness of sex within marriage. And in spite of cultural norms and sociological data that suggest virginity is impossible, WeWaited.com provides proof that it is possible and desirable, if challenging, to remain a virgin into adulthood.

Despite its strengths, the site, and the idea of Christian virgins seeking only fellow virgins as partners, poses problems. First, by narrowing the pool of potential partners to virgins, Christians run the risk of making virginity — rather than a commitment to the gospel — the litmus test of a relationship. God cares about virginity. But, as Paul wrote, "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers" (2 Cor. 6:14). A shared love for Jesus matters even more than a pure sexual past when it comes to Christian relationships. Second, although Christians uphold an ethos that supports sexual relations exclusively within marriage, virginity should not become an idol. To eliminate the vast majority of the population — including a good majority of Christians — as potential marriage partners may well emphasize sexual purity at the expense of God's power to forgive and redeem.

The Bible advocates sexual purity. Further, though, a number of passages demonstrate how Christians should respond to sexual activity outside of marriage. Jesus, for instance, refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery (John 8). He chooses a Samaritan woman who is living with a man who is "not her husband" as one of the first evangelists (John 4). The text assumes that the women's sexual activity will be different in the future because of their encounter with Jesus, and with God's grace, God's willing and undeserved forgiveness for their sin. "Go and leave your life of sin," Jesus says.

Similarly, Paul often addresses congregations of new believers who engaged in sexual sin before their conversion. He instructs them with a message of forgiveness for the past and encouragement for new life in Christ in the future. And as Peter writes, "you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do — living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. . ." (1 Pet. 4:3). Contemporary Americans, including many Christians, have sex before marriage. In so doing, they bring harm to themselves and to others. But God's grace has always been able to redeem sins of the past.

Christians should be concerned with sexual purity. And it is a relief for Christians to find a safe space that does not assume premarital promiscuity as the norm. Moreover, God's ideal for marriage includes both partners entering a covenant as virgins who give of themselves — body, mind, and spirit — only to each other. WeWaited.com implies that virginity is crucial to compatibility. But the highest concern for Christians in dating, and ultimately marriage, is a relationship based on the love and grace of Jesus Christ, the one who forgives all sin, the one who calls us to forgive one another, the one who can make all things, and all people, new.

'Passport through Darkness' Gives Victims Voice

Make Way Partners president Kimberly Smith's book is a must-read for today, Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

Tomi Grover, guest blogger

Stifling heat vapors appear on the horizon. Laughing hyenas cackle too close for comfort in the bush. Take a step closer toward a dusty canvas tent. Meet Kimberly L. Smith and travel into her desert world as she pulls back the flap door of her “tent of meeting” (Ex. 33:7). In Passport through Darkness: A True Story of Danger and Second Chances (David Cook, 2011), Smith gives you a front-row seat to God’s work amid monstrous evil in Sudan, Peru, the Congo, and Romania — and inside Smith’s own heart. With courage and transparency, she recounts how God helped her face her fears and live through challenges in her work as president of Make Way Partners (MWP), a Christian anti-trafficking agency based in Birmingham, Alabama.

Kimberly and husband Milton first learned of human trafficking in 2002 while serving as missionaries in the Iberian Peninsula. They found children being trafficked through an orphanage, and spent the next two years learning all they could about what’s called the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, one that brings an estimated 17,500 people annually into the U.S. alone. The Smiths gathered information from books and governmental reports but also, most importantly, from spending time with victims of trafficking and those most vulnerable in the streets, sewers, deserts, and jungles. Now Smith is working to build the only private and indigenous anti-trafficking network in Africa and Eastern Europe.

Passport through Darkness recounts the stories of forgotten victims, most of whom have been maimed, raped, and tortured, some of whom are now dead. Many have suffered because of their faith in Christ. With painstakingly loving detail, Smith shares so that others will hear their desperate cries. Among these are three Sudanese: Teresa, Tonj, and Tamar.

During Smith’s first journey in Sudan, Teresa, age 6, was brought to her “severely dehydrated, weak from malnutrition, and infection oozed from her right eye.” The village where Teresa and her mother had been staying was looted and burned to the ground by the Janjaweed, the Sudan-backed Arab militia that roam Darfur. With no medicine to give Teresa, Smith told her, “I promise you when I get home, I will tell every person I know . . . I will come back to you with help.” By the time she returned, Teresa was dead.

Tonj, a Christian Sudanese man in his 40s, struggled to represent his family with dignity as he told how Janjaweed soldiers “ripped him from his family’s arms,” beat him, and insisted that he confess Allah as God. The soldiers left him bleeding from wounds hacked by machetes, then went after his family. The soldiers raped his wife and tied her and the children up with ropes, dragging them behind militia horses. The last that Smith heard, Tonj had enlisted in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.

Tamar, a child of 13, described to Smith how she was taken by soldiers at age 7 and repeatedly gang raped. During their interview, Tamar wasn’t afraid to show Smith exactly where soldiers had cut her: “I cannot feel anything down there anymore. Sometimes I just pee. . . because I cannot feel when I need to go,” she explained. Tamar said she is not allowed to live with her family because of she is “marked” by the multiple rapes and the subsequent fistula. Smith promised Tamar that day to “tell everyone who will listen.”

After visiting Sudan, Smith grasped the magnitude of God’s work, knowing she had to tell others what was happening. She took a full year to share these and other stories at churches in the U.S., hoping they would respond. She grieved when they didn’t. She writes, “It seemed that, aside from working to save helpless children myself, the most important thing I could do with my life was to help other people also know God’s heart — particularly for orphans — and find their personal steps to the music of his heart.”

Despite her experience in some churches, by God’s grace and divine appointment, Smith saw him provide in and through a variety of people and means. Important local partnerships allowed ordinary indigenous leaders to be part of the solution, a key to their long-term investment strategy in the children. Make Way Partners now offers short-term mission trips for anyone to go and assist local partners with a variety of needs.

Smith admits, “I’ve made costly mistakes, but they haven’t stopped God. In fact, he has used them to deepen all aspects of me, from my faith to my marriage to how I approach ministry.” With faith, she says, “My daily prayer is that God uses both my wounds and transgressions to encourage others to risk losing everything to discover the life God dreams of for them, for you.” She encourages readers to find their own “passport out of the darkness of life’s — and our own — making.” In Passport through Darkness, get ready to find where “God’s pleasure and your purpose meet.”

Tomi Lee “T.L.” Grover is an educator with TraffickStop, an anti-trafficking initiative born from her eight years of work with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Is Your Church Open to Autism?

Churches that make space for autistic children on Sunday mornings will be disrupted — by joy.

Emily Colson, guest blogger

It’s everywhere, bursting from our schools and neighborhoods and playgrounds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in every 110 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. But with numbers like this, shouldn’t our churches, of all places, be bursting with autism too? Certainly our pews are packed with families basking in the love and support of the church. Right?

Not exactly.

The truth is that most families with autistic children can’t make it to the door of the church. So our churches don’t always see the need. I know, because for many years we were one of these invisible families. Church, like the rest of life, just didn’t work. There were barriers, unspoken requirements, like sitting still and staying quiet and paying attention. But there isn’t a pause button for autism. Max didn’t seem to fit. For five years we stayed home on Sunday mornings. Actually, we stayed home most every other day too, me and my beautiful son, isolated like we were lepers.

Finally, when Max turned 13, I could bear it no longer. I brought him back for the one thing he always loved about church when he was a toddler: when it was over. So, that’s exactly when we showed up. We called it “backwards church.” People were pouring out of the sanctuary and we walked in! It was the coffee hour, which at our church feels more like a backyard barbecue — friends talking and laughing, children playing Nerf football. Max fit right in. But something else was going on: God was about to grab his spiritual tool belt.

Within minutes Max started helping some of the men who were stacking chairs in the sanctuary. Before we left, one of the men approached Max. He put his hand on Max’s shoulder and asked if he would like to be an official member of the “Grunt Crew,” the team of men who clean and stack the chairs after each service. Max straightened his back and gasped with a rush of air so cool and cleansing that it felt like menthol. One small invitation, that one touch, changed our lives and the life of our church. For six years now Max has been a member of the Grunt Crew. He’s even become a greeter, which for Max includes leaping and dancing when the worship music begins. Max still doesn’t sit through the service, but his joy in serving is contagious. And he is a vital part of our church. It’s as if being with Max, this boy without armor or pretense, who knows the privilege of church, lets us all feel a bit of victory too.

I’m not going to suggest that others follow our model of backwards church. God doesn’t have a stamped-out assembly line plan for anyone. But when desperate needs are in sight, God is not the kind of guy to wait around for his nonprofit status to come through or to complete his disability training. God wants us to be his hands, to reach out to the weak and disabled, right now.

Alexa feels those hands when she attends her own church in Andover, Massachusetts, and is met by her “Team.” Several women volunteer and take turns serving Alexa on Sunday mornings so that her parents can attend worship. With support Alexa sits through part of the service, sometimes even joins a classroom. But typically you can find Alexa sitting with one of these women, reading a book together or playing a game. Alexa doesn’t have much spoken language, but something happens there in the stillness of an empty classroom. Alexa begins to sing, her voice strong and sky-blue clear.

This isn’t childcare. The women who serve Alexa say that in the blush of her smile, the touch of their hands, even in the faint scent of pancakes lingering on Alexa’s breath, they see God.

Those hands have reached a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Every Thursday Barbara, the mother of a teenage boy with autism, sinks into the deep leather couches, letting the stress she has hidden so carefully seep from her body. She is safe with these women in her caregiver Bible study, able to lay out her crumbling heart for all to see. But as these women talk and study and pray together, all her struggles fade in the shadow of the everyday miracles that shine through her son.

And hands are reaching out from the pulpit of an inner-city church in Philadelphia. The pastor there told me once that he has autistic children in his congregation, the noisy ones, the kind who have lost their volume control. “Does it disturb the service?” I asked politely, curiously. “Not at all,” he answered without a change of expression. “I tell the congregation that they will only hear the noise at first. But then, it will become like any other noise — a dishwasher, an air conditioner — they will get used to it. And after a few Sundays, autism is simply background noise.”

Many believe autism has reached epidemic proportions. We may need to build bigger schools to hold them all, but we don’t need bigger churches. When God reaches for his spiritual tool belt, he builds love and compassion in us. And when we let God grow our hearts, there’s room enough for everyone.

Emily Colson, daughter of Chuck Colson, is the author of Dancing with Max: A Mother and Son Who Broke Free, which Her.meneutics blogger Amy Julia Becker recently reviewed.

What Celebrity Miscarriages Teach Us

If famous folk can open up to the world about their pregnancy loss, why can't we in the church?

Elise Erikson Barrett, guest blogger

Suddenly, it seems as if miscarriage is everywhere. Famous folks from Barbara Bush to Mariah Carey have recently disclosed previous pregnancy losses. Lily Allen suffered her second miscarriage in November, and Lisa Ling shared her own grief following a miscarriage on a recent episode of The View. Kelsey Grammer and his fiancée, Kayte Walsh, released a statement in October confirming the loss of their unborn child six weeks earlier. Giuliana Rancic and husband Bill opened up about their miscarriage this fall. A topic that historically has seemed taboo has somehow become hot tabloid fodder. OMG.

Lack of privacy is a given for the celebs among us, for we live in a culture that is breathlessly absorbed by the minutiae of famous lives. And whether you’re a hard-core subscriber to US Weekly and People or someone like me, slyly dawdling in the grocery checkout line so I can catch the tabloid headlines out of the corner of my eye, you can’t miss the obsession with celebrity baby-bump-watching. As gossip mag Life & Style's editor in chief Dan Wakeford has observed, "They've always been popular with readers, stories on babies . . . It used to be celebrity weddings, but not anymore. It's all about babies." Celebrity pregnancies are confirmed on Twitter and talk shows, and reporters try to outdo one another in cutesy cleverness, using tired witticisms about “buns in the oven” and coyly talking about “baby daddies.” Celebs are inevitably “thrilled” and “so happy” to announce that they are “preggo.” And really, what else are they going to say?

What’s been interesting is to see the ways in which these bereft celebrities — and their suddenly, awkwardly serious biographers — narrate their experiences of pregnancy loss. The language in which they are expected to be fluent, the perky, provocative vocabulary of fashion and premieres and love affairs, is not weighty enough to carry their grief. So they use quiet words. They release carefully worded statements using short, plain sentences. In the event that they are able to protect their loss as a secret, many of them wait, sometimes years, sometimes until they are securely pregnant again, to mention the miscarriage. They wait, as so many do, until what Ling so accurately described as the sense of “failure” can be overshadowed by news of a more recent “triumph.”

One dubious benefit of the celebrity fishbowl: You are always assured an audience. We Christians, however, have typically failed to make space in our worshiping communities for women and men to give voice to their anguish at losing wanted pregnancies. Our liturgies offer patterning for many kinds of losses — funeral services (and their attendant traditions of providing food or wakes or visitations) lead us through the mystery of death; illnesses are lifted up during prayer-concern time or listed in the bulletin or passed along an informal but highly effective prayer line. But there are few well-worn paths to follow as we walk through the complicated pain of losing pregnancies. And mercy, but the words we often have to use to describe our loss are ugly. I was abruptly reminded of this while giving a short talk at our own church, describing the experience of my first miscarriage. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck as I said words like spotting, cramping, and clots to my audience of familiar and friendly church folk. I almost ran from the lectern like a miserable, terrified rabbit when I caught the eye of a gentleman in his 70s as I described going into a bathroom and seeing blood on my underwear.

How ironic. We claim to be saved by Christ’s blood, but are embarrassed to talk about our own blood, at least when connected to female reproductive parts. We claim, especially in this season, that God miraculously impregnated a teenaged girl, yet are ashamed to reflect on the terrifying, precarious, messy realities of pregnancy. We claim that our redemption entered history through the waters of a womb, but are unable to find words to talk about the mysterious losses that take place in those same waters. For a bunch of people who are perfectly happy to carol about wallowing in fountains of blood, we are remarkably squeamish.

Celebs like Ling and Rancic have said that they are choosing to publicize their experiences of pregnancy loss for a purpose: to help combat the secrecy and shame surrounding miscarriage. They are not the first to do so (think Courteney Cox or Tori Amos), but they are the most recent in a movement toward open acknowledgment of both the widespread nature (as many as one in four pregnancies miscarries) and the intensity of the loss. Ling has started her own website called the Secret Society of Women, hoping to create a community online where women can find both support and an avenue for sharing painful or difficult experiences, miscarriage among them. Perhaps the courage of these women who are living through loss in the limelight can remind us Christians that we, too, can be courageous. Perhaps it can remind us that we, of all people, should be able to share loss with one another — even loss that presents as a bloody, shameful failure. Perhaps our communities of faith can remember that it is our privilege to become, not secret societies of women, but places where women and men alike become part of a Body — the Body of Christ, out of whose bloody shame was born redemption for this world.

Elise Erikson Barrett, a United Methodist pastor, is the author of What Was Lost: A Christian Journey through Miscarriage, which Her.meneutics reviewed last year. Shauna Niequist wrote about her miscarriage in an excerpted Her.meneutics post last year.

Honeymoon with Mom and Dad

How I spent the holidays with my live-in parents.

Karen Swallow Prior, guest blogger

Seven weeks and twice as many apple pies later, life has remained surprising normal — albeit a little sweeter — since my mother and father arrived from across the country to make their final home with my husband and me. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the sluggish home sales that accompanied it hit home for us through the agonizingly long time it took to sell my parents’ previous home. But the sale occurred, finally, just in time to get them here for the holidays.

For much of our marriage, my husband and I have lived far from any family, and, without children, our holiday celebrations have grown increasingly spare over the years. Putting up a tree, decorating, and holiday cooking seem like an awful lot of trouble for the two of us, especially when grading final papers and exams always takes me up to the day or two before Christmas. Lacking many traditions of our own, I was excited about having my parents here for the holidays, the first of what I expect will be many more. I wondered what new traditions we might begin in this new chapter of life.

The purchase of a Thanksgiving turkey provided the perfect opportunity to begin a new tradition. Like many others, particularly (and fittingly) Christians, I have recently undergone a personal conviction about factory farming. So on a gorgeous fall morning, we drove an hour south to pick up a free-range turkey that had been raised humanely and processed at a local farm. The chance to support a Christian family in their agricultural efforts (and to witness all eight of their children taking part in that wholesome work) blessed us, too.

In the absence of most of the trappings of Christmas, spending Christmas Eve with our church family has become the center of my husband's and my Christmas celebration. We both take part in leading the worship each year in the church’s two candlelight Celtic Christian services. This year, for the first time, I shared the message at the second service, and my parents’ presence was especially meaningful, since it was their example of faith that led me to my own relationship with Christ as a young girl.

When Christmas morning arrived, my husband and I schlepped our stuffed stockings and wrapped gifts up to the garage apartment, where my parents are staying while we build their new house behind ours. Mom had bought a three-foot-tall plastic tree at the drugstore, strung up a few lights, and placed presents underneath it next to the Nativity and a paper mache angel one of my brothers made many years ago in grade school. Pulling the little surprises left by Santa from our stockings and opening gifts by turn, laughing, and reminiscing stretched the morning out, much like those magical Christmas mornings of childhood when unwrapping presents seemed to take all day. I imagine when the disciples handed out to the 5,000 the endless bounty Jesus provided from five loaves and two fishes, it felt a lot like such a Christmas morning. And almost as miraculously for Virginia, it began to snow, creating the first White Christmas our region had seen in years.

Speaking of miracles, having my parents here is awakening my dormant domesticity. Or maybe I just freely borrow from Mom’s. My husband and I are the type who attend parties but don’t throw them. Yet this year I felt inspired to host a New Year’s Eve Eve gathering at our home, inviting all the people who usually invite us. Having my mother here to help me get the house ready while my husband prepared an army’s portion of food made hosting such an event not only more doable but more pleasurable, too.

Sharing the holidays with my parents was certainly wonderful. But even more joyous is sharing the mundane, everyday things: enjoying Mom’s ubiquitous apple pies, for example (okay, those aren’t exactly mundane); taking the daily newspaper to my father rather than directly to the recycling bin; sharing meals and trips to the post office, and driving Dad to the car dealer to pick up his vehicle after servicing; coming home to the laundry having been brought in from the clothesline and folded by Mom; and setting weekly appointments with Dad to watch Modern Family and The Office. These are the things I am treasuring.

I realize that just seven weeks into our new life together — one I hope will extend into a decade or more — my husband and I are in the honeymoon phase with my parents. When I told my mom about these blog posts, she exhibited her characteristically helpful spirit. “Well, if things are going too smoothly,” she offered, “I can always try to rough things up a little to give you more to write about.”

I suspect that, ultimately, won’t be necessary. But for now, I’ll keep enjoying the honeymoon.

A Tarnished Silver Anniversary

What is destroying marriage in the West — and what has sustained my husband and me through several potentially marriage-destroying events.

Christine A. Scheller

A silver anniversary isn’t what it used to be. I know this from experience, having celebrated mine last month, but the data speaks for itself. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, only 33 percent of us reached the milestone 10 years ago, whereas 70 percent of those who married in the late 1950s did. For previous generations, a 25th wedding anniversary was as much a simple consequence of time as it was cause to celebrate. Surrounded by as many divorcing and non-marrying loved ones as I am, I was a little embarrassed to draw attention to our special day. And like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son, I harbored some resentment about this fact.

My husband and I have been through a series of potentially marriage-destroying events in recent years, and I would have appreciated some salutations acknowledging our accomplishment. On Facebook, where I shared photos from our wedding day to mark the occasion, only a few long-married female friends and one never-married person posted well wishes. We received one card in the mail, from my parents. Perhaps we should have thrown a party, but that would have been insensitive given that two of our siblings finalized divorces in 2009. Of the 15 middle-aged siblings and step-siblings in our combined families, only 4 of us are currently married.

A recent Pew Research Center / Time magazine study indicated that over the past 50 years, “a sharp decline in marriage and a rise of new family forms have been shaped by attitudes and behaviors that differ by class, age and race,” with lower levels of income and education correlating with lower marriage rates.

The executive summary further states that “even as marriage shrinks, family — in all its emerging varieties — remains resilient.” But wait. More respondents said they would feel “very obligated” to help a parent (83%) or adult child (77%) in need than said this about a stepparent (55%) or a step or half sibling (43%), and only 39% would feel similarly obligated to a best friend. The old definition continues to have traction when it matters most.

The key finding of a 2010 study conducted by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia is that divorce, non-marital childbearing, and unmarried cohabitation have led to a dramatic increase in “fragile” and “typically fatherless” families over the past five decades. The executive summary includes this dire warning: “Today's retreat from marriage among the moderately educated middle is placing the American Dream beyond the reach of too many Americans. It makes the lives of mothers harder and drives fathers further away from families. It increases the odds that children from Middle America will . . . lose their way.” As marriage increasingly becomes an institution aligned with wealth and eduction, the divide “threatens the American experiment in democracy and should be of concern to every civic and social leader in our nation.”

In a blog post about the Pew study, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler declared, “Marriage was given to us by our Creator as the central institution for sexual relatedness, procreation, and the nurture of children. But, even beyond these goods, God gave us marriage as an institution central to human happiness and flourishing. Rightly understood, marriage is essential even to the happiness and flourishing of the unmarried. It is just that central to human existence, and not by accident.”

I believe this. So, although my 49-year-old husband is unlikely to ever work again because of a physical disability that has fundamentally changed both our marital and financial health in ways I didn’t anticipate, divorce is no more an option than it ever was. What is a daily choice is how we live together in light of these and other challenges. Not only do love and faith constrain us, so do the above cited personal and professional stats.

I am simultaneously compelled to resist the encroaching pressure of the easy out and feel a deep obligation to model fidelity and stability to the next generation in light of it. This is no easy task. I vowed to love my husband in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer and can say unequivocally that rich and healthy is a whole lot easier than sick and poor. I can also affirm that hardness of heart is the fastest route to marital decline (Matt. 19:8).

Penn State sociologist Stacy J. Rogers is co-author of Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing. She explained the National Marriage Project findings to the Huffington Post by saying that education, first marriage, no children from previous relationships, and financial health produce fewer external stressors. She also concluded, “We put a lot of emphasis on the marriage to make us happy, and fulfill our lives. We're victims of unrealistic expectations.”

As much as I affirm lofty marriage ideals like Mohler’s, I believe discipleship in our age inevitably involves putting unrealistic expectations to death. Consider how we enthusiastically memorize a verse like Psalm 37:4 because it tells us that if we delight in God, he will fulfill our desires. We would do well to keep reading. Verses five and six add, “Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun.”

When my husband and I were in pre-marriage counseling, our pastor noted our mutual realism as an indicator of relational health. Twenty-five years later, reality is much more insistent and the truths of 1 Corinthians 13 are much more compelling.

Another Assault on Little Girls

Vogue Paris's "Gifts" photo spread is one more example of how our culture robs children of innocence.

Jennifer Grant

The most recent issue of Vogue Paris (or should I say l'issue de janvier/février?) struck a nerve when it hit newsstands, upsetting the very readers who count on the magazine to be provocative. They’re guaranteed it. Vogue Paris’s editor in chief, Carine Roitfeld, once told a British journalist that she tries to include “something every month that is — how you say? — not politically correct. A little bit at the limit. Sex, nudity, a bit rock'n'roll, a sense of humour.”

Wait, I should clarify: Roitfeld is French Vogue’s former editor. Within a few weeks of the December issue’s release, Roitfeld announced that she was leaving the magazine. Some commentators speculate that the Cadeaux, or, for English speakers, “Gifts,” photo spread went too far, even for French Vogue. What, in this unfailingly erotic publication, could be so troubling that it would arouse rumors such as that one?

In “Cadeaux,” the models are very slim — but that's nothing new. Nor is it earth-shattering that they wear too much makeup or that there is something suggestive in the picture of the model inexplicably holding a toothbrush in her mouth. Aren’t such photos de rigueur for Vogue? It couldn’t be the opulence of the props or that the stiletto-wearing models recline on animal skins. Nor should their blank (yet at the same time, somehow, hostile) expressions raise eyebrows. Non, c'est vrai, all of that is to be expected.

So what could be so bad that it could possibly have cost Roitfeld her job?

I suppose the fact that the models are no older than six or seven years old might have something to do with it.

Wait, a minute, though. Are fans of the December issue correct when they say that those of us who find some of these images disturbing are just dirty-minded ourselves? The girls, after all, aren’t naked or engaged in sexual acts. What’s wrong with a game of dress-up? Don’t all little girls love to raid their mommies’ closets and put on high heels and silky slips from time to time? Could I be — how you say? — prudish or naïf to find the pictures unsettling?

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth is known for having written poems idealizing the innocence of childhood. His "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" explores the damage to "delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood" as children glimpse and then engage in the adult world.

That poem came to my mind a few years ago when my older daughter moved out of size 6X clothes. Suddenly instead of the lollipops, ladybugs, and butterflies that had adorned the shirts and dresses on the racks in the little girls’ department, I found myself in a land of low-riding, “distressed” blue jeans and where skulls leered at me from the fronts of T-shirts. They were clothes that seemed suitable for young adults experimenting with an edgy new look or for Jennifer Beals’s character in Flashdance. They didn’t, however, feel appropriate for my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. I retreated online to Hanna Andersson and L. L. Bean — the latter a name so often seen on my kids’ clothes that, once or twice, one of my kids was called by that name. I liked the way these companies viewed children as children. The models in their catalogs smiled brightly. They were pictured on swing sets or skiing or jumping rope. Not to get all poetic on you, but they seemed to embrace Wordsworth’s notion of childhood’s creed. The children were happy, and they were free.

And, yes, of course toddling around in your mom’s high heels is a happy pastime for many girls. But the French Vogue spread is different. Its purpose is to sell high-end products, such as parfum, to adults. That there is so much sex in the surrounding pages also affects the way these images are understood.

Fashion designer Tom Ford was the guest editor and designed the controversial issue, including “Cadeaux.” Is it relevant that Ford is a close friend to photographer Terry Richardson (whose work is featured elsewhere in the December/January issue), and that Richardson has been accused of preying on child models and has written and gleefully performed a song called "Child Molester's Coming For You"?

I think so.

It’s not only the surrounding pages or Ford’s affiliation with Richardson that trouble me in regards to the photos. It’s some of the elements of the wider culture as well. This is a world in which many very young girls look to Paris Hilton as a role model, a woman who was arrested for the third time (most recently for cocaine possession) last summer and who addresses her young fans about the perils of making sex videos with their boyfriends. “I want young girls to never put themselves in that situation. . . . Don't ever let someone talk you into doing something you don't want to do," she advises. It’s a culture in which teen clothing companies add maternity lines to their offerings. (And what’s with Justice’s “Monster High?” Blech. It makes me long for the soft embrace of my old Raggedy Ann doll.)

Fashion can be inventive and fun. It can drive us to question some of what we take for granted — and I think those are good things. But the cynical “Cadeaux” goes too far. Instead of eroticizing them and presenting these little girls as sexy pushers of luxury items, mes amis, I say let them eat cake.

Fresh out of the Easy-Bake Oven.

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