Sin, Grace, and the Royal Wedding

What I'll tell my 6-year-old daughter about marriage as we watch the festivities together.

Caryn Rivadeneira

I’m just going to say it: I can’t wait for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding. One, I love weddings. (The dresses! The flowers! The dancing!) Two, I love pomp and circumstance. Probably because much of my life feels chaotic, the order and ritual of weddings, graduations, funerals even, move me. Three, I love princesses — not the Disney kind, mind you, but the real kind.

The kind I discovered, in fact, back when Will’s mother, Lady Diana, married his dad, Prince Charles. I was 9, and while my mom rolled her eyes at the “charade,” I was enthralled. It was during that charade that I discovered that real-life princesses lived in big houses with tons of dogs and had country houses with tons of horses. And that they got to travel around in beautiful clothes and say nice things for which people gave them roses.

What a life, I thought. A perfect life.

Which leads me to the fourth reason I’m excited: because I have a 6-year-old daughter who will love this wedding too. She will love it because she’s a romantic at heart who loves the Disney sort of princesses and their Prince Charmings and happily-ever-afters. She’ll watch this and think, like I did, What a life. A perfect life.

I’m excited about William and Kate’s wedding because I need to kill this off in my daughter. Or at least scuff it up a little.

I don’t want my daughter growing up believing in happily-ever-afters. I don’t want her to grow up thinking that one day or even one moment will perfect her life. I certainly don’t want her to grow up thinking that her wedding day is the climax of her life or even the most important day. Or the day she arrives, or worse, becomes.

Of course a wedding day is a wonderful day (at least mine was!). It’s a serious day (vows before God and all!). It’s even a defining day (I went from having two difficult names to having three!). Absolutely, a wedding day should be a happy and celebrated occasion.

And I get why People magazine has article after article about guest lists and wedding dress predictions for Will and Kate. I get why some are counting down the days. I understand why there are commemorative plates. Why some might buy the Kate Middleton dolls.

Weddings — especially this kind of wedding — are times when many of us lose ourselves in the fantasy of what a wedding and a marriage are really about. The fantasy that just that one thing or event can finally make us happy, complete, fulfilled. Can make our life perfect. So we celebrate that. Beautifully.

In all that beauty, however, we risk forgetting that the real beauty of a wedding is not the sparkle or the tulle. It has nothing to do with flowers or candle flickers. You can’t even see it in the most blushing of brides or the most breathless of grooms.

The real beauty of a wedding is instead found in the truth that marriage is a sacrament, a means of channeling grace. And you can’t channel grace without bearing the brunt of sin.

And few things reveal unholy sin quite like holy matrimony. With all our promises of eternal love and fidelity, we get plenty of hurt. Plenty of frustration. Plenty of annoyance. Plenty of mean words. Plenty of disappointment. Plenty of selfish behavior.

Which all leaves room for plenty of grace. Grace to shower one another with. Grace to learn and grow and become from.

This is what I want my daughter to know. A wedding isn’t the day you become someone or someone’s, but a day that tethers you to a beloved so you can become something together and for another: instruments of God’s dazzling grace.

I will sit with my girl and watch Kate Middleton being pomped and circumstanced and cheered as she goes to meet her prince. I want to wonder with my daughter about the jewels and crowns and clothes that await. About the dogs and the horses and the country houses and enormous opportunities for doing good that I hope Kate’s life holds.

But I also want to talk to my daughter about that what I know awaits the soon-to-be princess. While I hope that plenty of her life and marriage are happy and wonderful, much of it won’t be. Not just because we know the rough side of royalty, but because life, because husbands, because roles never are just as we imagine. Not for any of us.

And that’s okay. Because the real reward, the real beauty, the real “happily ever after” of that wedding day is all about the grace that pours out of two people — fallen but committed, broken but loving — promising God and witnesses to love (which “keeps no record of wrongs,” according to 1 Corinthians 13:5) one another through it all.

It’s the same beauty of God’s amazing love for us. I hope my daughter gets this. And I hope Kate Middleton and her prince do too.

Caryn Rivadeneira is a writer, speaker, and mother of three, and the author of Mama's Got a Fake I.D. as well as a book forthcoming from Tyndale House. She has written for Her.meneutics on parenting, boycotting Amazon, Halloween, burqas, fathers, Mother's Day, spanking, happiness, pregnant Olympians, and boy-girl wrestling.

The title of this post has been updated to avoid confusion.

Sex Sells - So Does Virginity

Nickelodeon star Miranda Cosgrove is being marketed as the embodiment of purity in a sex-saturated culture. Why Christians should be concerned.

Sharon Hodde Miller, guest blogger

In February I reviewed Peggy Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. The book takes a hard look at the culture that imposes itself on our nation’s daughters, and challenges the notion that it is altogether harmless. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I highly recommend it. In a media atmosphere where the facts are often harnessed to fuel fear, Orenstein manages to inform her readers with sobering research without crossing into full-on paranoia.

In a more recent New York Times article, “The Good Girl, Miranda Cosgrove,” Orenstein continues her exploration of the themes in her book. The article features teen star Miranda Cosgrove, who shot to fame in her role on the hit Nickelodeon show iCarly. Cosgrove, who turns 18 in May, stands at the edge of a precipice with her adulthood stretching out before her. And like the teen stars that have preceded her, many are watching to see how she will emerge in the next season of life. Gracefully, clumsily, or catastrophically?

Orenstein is troubled by the media pressure cooker in which young women like Cosgrove exist. But even more concerning is the manner in which these young ladies’ virtue is marketed like a product. For the NYT, Orenstein wrote,

For as many seasons as the illusion can be maintained, [teens stars] remain, at least onscreen, uncomplicated, untroubled good girls, on the verge of, but never actually awakening to, their sexuality. There is a lot of money to be made — and a lot of parental anxiety to be tapped — by walking that line.

At this point in her career, Cosgrove shines as an unsullied embodiment of all the qualities a parent desires in a role model. No objections here. But things get complicated when Christians consider how to respond to an industry that uses morality as a marketing device. Should we praise these young women as role models, or hold them at arm’s length?

Cosgrove’s pristine image is inextricably tied to her career, a dynamic that presents us with two key problems. Orenstein summarizes the first one in her book. Of the partnership between morality and profit she writes, “I suspect that you cannot commodify a girl’s virginity without, eventually, commodifying what comes after” (129). In other words, the entertainment industry isn’t promoting chastity; it’s selling what sells. Up until a certain age, innocence is a powerful marketing image, but when purity no longer garners attention, these young starlets turn to what sells. And what usually sells is sex.

Orenstein thoroughly critiques the entertainment industry and its exploitation of innocence, so I won’t cover old ground here. But there is an additional problem that Orenstein does not broach, and it is here that Christian ethics provides a unique and powerful voice. The second problem we encounter in the combination of purity and profit is divorcing ethics from its necessary context.

In the entertainment industry and even in our churches, good behavior is often applauded regardless of motivation. Purity and abstinence are treated as stand-alone virtues, with or without a transformed heart. That is not to imply that a parent is wrong to praise her child when she makes a good decision. But such affirmation must occur within the larger context of Christian salvation. Without that language as a foundation for ethics, we stray dangerously close to works righteousness.

The relationship between virtue and free grace is what makes Christian ethics Christian. This point could not be made clearer by Orenstein’s reaction to young women like Cosgrove. Orenstein condemns the industry that manipulates young women into unhealthy expressions of their sexuality, but she does not oppose the expressions themselves. In her book, for example, Orenstein worries not that her daughter will have premarital sex, but that she will have it for the wrong reasons. In fact, Orenstein hopes that her daughter will have a vibrant, healthy sex life long before marriage.

Here, Orenstein attempts to construct a context for her sexual ethics — namely one of safety and mutuality. For Christians, our understanding of sex and chastity certainly includes those elements, but we also acknowledge there must be more. A Christian conception of sex must be rooted in the One who created sex, love, and marriage. Within this context sex is to reflect the self-giving, sacrificial, and eternal love of Christ, which means it can occur only within the bonds of marriage. And most important of all, Christians mirror the character of God through our sexuality as a response to God’s love, not as an obligation. We do not need to earn that which we already have.

There is nothing wrong with affirming and admiring the goodness of people outside the church as a sign of common grace. I heartily commend Cosgrove for her dedication to being a good role model. But here a caution is also in order. The entertainment industry simultaneously capitalizes on the innocence of young women while shaping our language about sex and chastity, and that language is antithetical to the gospel of Christ.

Though Orenstein’s beliefs may not be entirely compatible with the Christian faith, she challenges us to question how we talk about sex and chastity. Christians may discourage premarital sex and uphold fidelity in the name of Christ, but that doesn’t mean our language about virtue is, essentially, Christian.

'Three Cups of Tea,' Three Cups of Me

There's ego behind every published fabrication, including Greg Mortenson's, and Christ is its remedy.

Lisa Velthouse, guest blogger

The publishing world has been aflutter recently following a 60 Minutes segment that raised doubts about the truth of author and philanthropist Greg Mortenson’s work and writing.

Mortenson, best known for the 2006 memoir Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee whose nonprofit, Central Asia Institute (CAI), has raised tens of millions toward educating children, especially girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to CBS report interviews, however, a number of stories in Mortenson’s books — including one where he’s kidnapped by the Taliban, one where all the yaks of a region are loaned to him for a school’s construction, and one where a Pakistani village helps him back to health after he happens upon it, ill and lost — are fiction. What's more, Mortenson could be liable for up to $23 million in back taxes from "excess benefits" he received from CAI through 2009.

For now, the Montana (home to CAI) Attorney General has promised to investigate, the CAI has pledged transparency in the process, and Mortenson’s reputable friends have been cautiously coming to his defense. It seems possible to assume that the teacup is half-full: that the unlikely school-builder isn’t also a liar-writer, that his motives have been sound all along.

Yet oh, have we been here before.

One doesn’t have to look far in the memoir/autobiography genre to find authors who have boosted their fame by making stuff up. In 2008, Margaret Seltzer confessed that her Love and Consequences, which told of an upbringing amid gang life in L.A., did not come out of her own experiences but from stories of other people she’d met. At least two books and one almost-book set during the Holocaust have within the last ten years been revealed as false. James Frey, author of the largely fabricated A Million Little Pieces, has so much scandal on his name that it’s still big enough for one of the last Oprah shows.

The simplest math behind sham-autobiographies is this: Great books — the kind that people read and then recommend to their friends, the kind that can bring authors heaps of cash and celebrity — are built on sustained conflict and exceptional characters. And for most of us, A Year in the Life of Me is too dull to pitch to a publisher. The trials we face aren’t flashy enough to drum up interest, the people we know aren’t quirky enough to keep a story moving, and we ourselves aren’t heroic enough to worthily be called protagonist.

So for many hopeful writers, the temptations loom: to fill book proposals with extraordinary, never-happened tales and with fearless, much-embellished people, to submit them as all true. Mostly these are a single temptation: to present one’s self as the kind of Somebody who is an instrumental part of Something Important and Awesome. It’s me, Me, ME. If ego weren’t part of it, the fabricators would write novels instead.

Honesty is the topic at hand, though, so let’s be honest with ourselves: Even the non-writers among us and even those of us who aren’t blatantly self-motivated, are at least a bit smitten with the idea of having our 15 grandiose minutes. There is pride in us lurking everywhere.

Yet what we so easily forget is that the leading role in the realest real Story has already been cast and played. We are the lesser characters; the point of all this is God drawing humanity to himself through Christ. That self-giving sacrifice encompasses what is true: it informs all else, and everything outside it points to it. A spotlight blares on an author’s fallenness when she builds a memoir out of fake details. Yes, but sin is every bit as obvious when an author tells his story in truth.

To write one’s self honestly — to take a day, a month, a year, whatever, and record what actually happened — is not a pretty experience. It’s especially harrowing for those of us who assume we are mostly good. When the veil comes off, when the real thoughts and events and conversations are put to paper, we find that we are not the delightful and winsome people we’d like to think we are. Sometimes we don’t even come close. This is why one of the biggest challenges in writing memoir is presenting the self-character fairly: not skimping on ugly portions, and not giving extra emphasis to attractive ones. There are times when the allure of over- and under-stating can feel constant.

At a most basic level, each of us would like to believe that we are not so flawed as our actions would prove. We’d like to believe we are better, and we’d like to be seen as better. But the gospel of Christ can free us from the desire to masquerade. In him, there’s no need for anything more — no exaggerated trimmings, no theatrical frills — because he is it, and with him we have enough and then some. His light falls on and around and through our sinful realities, and that illuminated darkness is a story worth telling every time. His presence puts meaning in our unseemly and bare details, and makes them spellbinding.

Lisa Velthouse is the author of two books, including her new (and true) memoir, Craving Grace: A Story of Faith, Failure, and My Search for Sweetness. She formerly served on staff at Mars Hill Bible Church (Grandville, MI), and she blogs at LisaVelthouse.com. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

How Do I Explain Easter to My Children?

The reality of a human raised from the dead is hard enough for adults to understand, much less kids. But here are some approaches I've taken.

Amy Julia Becker

I don’t know how to explain Easter to my children — Penny, 5, and William, 2. I’ve tried two approaches so far. I’ve talked about it directly: “Some people killed Jesus and he died and God made him alive again.”

When I said that, William asked, “What does died mean?” I tried to explain death as something that takes people away forever. Penny asked, “Where is Jesus now?” and when I said, “Jesus is in heaven and all around us,” she responded, “But where is Jesus now?”

Then Penny went to Sunday school last week, where her teachers decided to reenact the Passion of Jesus. I was sitting in church when, halfway through the sermon, one of the teachers brought Penny to me. She sat by my side, coloring, for the rest of the service. Her teacher later explained that when Penny had seen Jesus nailed to the cross, she stood up to leave.

I asked Penny later, “What happened in Sunday school? Did you learn something about Jesus?”

Without looking at me she said, “He died. I needed to see you, Mom.”

“Do you know what happened when he died?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

The direct route didn’t get us far.

Then there’s the indirect approach. Another time this Lenten season, I asked William, “Do you know what Easter is all about?”

His eyes lit up the way they do when he knows the answer to a question: “Bunnies!”

“Well,” I said, “kind of.”

I understood his confusion. He came home from preschool with Easter eggs. A man at our local coffee shop gave him a chocolate bunny. And we have an “Easter tree” on our kitchen table, with forsythia in bloom and painted wooden eggs dangling from the branches. So, I thought, maybe I could explain Easter using the springtime symbols, and we could talk about death and rebirth, about caterpillars and butterflies or chicks hatching or crocuses in bloom.

But the analogies fall apart so quickly. First, nothing in the natural world is brought from death to life. What’s dead stays dead. Furthermore, suggesting that the Cross and the Empty Tomb are just like the daffodils threatens to cheapen our faith and hope in Christ.

We didn’t have this trouble with Christmas. Although we haven’t tried to explain the Virgin Birth yet, our kids have the story down. They know about babies being born, and they’re happy to take our word for it that God wanted to live with us to heal us and care for us and teach us and forgive us. The birth story was easy.

One of the reasons I have trouble explaining Easter to my children is that I have trouble explaining it to myself. Even the New Testament writers couldn’t find adequate words or images to explain what happened that weekend in Jerusalem. While the facts remain easy — Jesus died on the cross, and God raised him from the dead — understanding the significance of those facts remains a challenge.

Again and again, New Testament writers describe the impact of Jesus’ death and resurrection as a “mystery.” In Paul’s long defense of the reality of the Resurrection, he concludes: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed — in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51-52). In Ephesians, we read of the “mystery of God’s will” in reconciling all things through Christ (Eph. 1:9) and “the mystery of the gospel” (Eph 6:19). In Colossians, we read that the “mystery” is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).

Christians believe that Jesus’ death was more than martyrdom, that it actually effected forgiveness of sins and reconciliation between God and humanity. The Resurrection bolsters that faith as God’s validation of Jesus’ willing self-sacrifice. And yet, as liturgical traditions assert, when we describe the events of Holy Week, we proclaim the mystery of our faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

I don’t mean to dismiss the intelligibility of our faith or to imply that it cannot be explained in words. But for now, I’m not going to worry about it if my words fail to convey the message of Easter to our children. Instead, I am beginning to look for ways that our practices as Christians can convey the message of sin and salvation, brokenness and healing, rupture and forgiveness, death and resurrection.

Our children will witness some of those concepts in real life, I hope, when they watch their parents snap at each other and then reconcile, or when they receive a hug after they have misbehaved, or when they hear us talk about our hope of seeing their deceased grandmother once again. They will also enact these concepts as they participate in the life of the church.

As it happened, last Sunday was communion Sunday. Because Penny had excused herself from witnessing the crucifixion in Sunday school, she unwittingly had invited herself to the Lord’s Table. Together we walked to the front. She tasted the bread dipped in juice and watched me take bread dipped in wine. I don’t know how much she heard when our pastor read the story of the Last Supper. I don’t know if she noticed that we partook of those elements in front of a wooden cross. But I know that she practiced remembering Jesus’ death and resurrection as a part of the body of Christ. She participated in the final song, raising her hands in the air and singing “My Jesus, My Savior.”

On Easter Sunday, my children will not be able to explain the meaning of death and resurrection. But I have faith that they will participate in the faith and hope that come from Jesus’ gift of new life.

A Christian Woman's Midlife Crisis

With the guidance of older, wiser mentors, women can face the existential angst of midlife hoping for a new identity in Christ, one stripped of status and comfort.

Michelle Van Loon

When we flipped our new calendars to January 1, 2011, the first wave of baby boomers began turning 65. According to the Pew Research Center, every single day for the next nineteen years, ten thousand more will join them.

As psychologist Vivian Diller recently noted, midlife is being redefined by the boomers who are now marking their passage through this life stage. Twentieth century notions of aging and retirement are being challenged by a combination of generational preference and financial necessity. The fastest growing demographic enrolling in seminaries are people over 50.

Even with the boomer propensity toward reinvention, there is no way to re-brand (or circumvent) the spiritual crisis that happens at midlife as we move from the ambitions that forge the first half of our lives to our search for meaning in the second half. As author Dale Hanson Bourke noted at Her.meneutics last summer, “Few decisions made in our second stage of life represent a natural progression toward what has been built in the first half of life. It’s as if we have to completely turn our backs on our first-half identities in order to invest fully in our second callings.”

This is not an abstract question for me as a woman born at the tail end of the boom. My age-peers are asking a lot of hard questions these days, best captured in a conversation I had with a friend not long ago. Kim invited me to follow her into her youngest son’s now-vacant bedroom as she searched an item I’d loaned her in a forgotten corner of the closet. As we stood in the empty space, she said wistfully, “I was prepared for the nest to empty. I am busy with work and church responsibilities. But I’m stuck. I feel I’ve stalled out spiritually. To tell you the truth, I think I was there long before Tyler started packing. I feel as empty as this room, and it scares the heck out of me.”

Kim and I shared the same unsettling existential questions at that point in our lives: What’s next for me? God, where are you in this confusion?

Each one of us could have used a mentor — an older, wiser woman to journey through midlife with us. Those who have had wise moms or generous older friends willing to share their experience have been handed the gift of a compass to help them navigate the upheaval of midlife.

However, I learned (via an admittedly informal poll of the midlife women I know) that many of us involved in intentional mentoring relationships with younger women have never had a mentor in our own lives. If there were ever a time we needed spiritual direction, it’s during midlife.

Though it is certainly not the same as having a mentor, a canon of literature can help us begin to make sense of our experience at this crossroads, but it may not be found where we’d first think of looking, which might be in the self-help or women’s section of a bookstore or online vendor.

Rather, it's found in the experiences of contemplatives through Christian history. Sister Rosemarie Carfagna notes, in Contemplation and Midlife Crisis, the profound connection between midlife crisis and the contemplative life:

People who try to describe what happens to them during a crisis frequently mention experiential signs that contemplatives also report . . . in crisis, their sense of identity seems to change. They become aware of apparently irreconcilable opposites. They realize vividly their own weaknesses and shortcomings. Emotions arise that can be very disturbing. There might be feelings of anxiety, even terror at what they find themselves facing.

Carfagna notes the powerful linkage between the spiritual crises experiences of contemplatives, which often come into flower during this life stage, and the specific developmental tasks and changes that happen to all of us at midlife. She says the contemplatives' example of spiritual struggle traces for all of us the jagged contours of transition and the promise — if we are patient and cooperative with God’s work in the process — of a more mature and engaged spirituality. She affirms Hanson Bourke’s observation about what can happen on the far side of the crisis, suggesting that we will no longer ". . . recognize ourselves by the benchmarks that previously defined us: status, security, predictability, possessions, comforts of all sorts. They are gone, but to our amazement they are hardly missed. The new life that is given us surpasses them all."

God's purposes for the disorientation of midlife can bear fruit out of the intimacy of the contemplative's experience. But perhaps the most lasting fruit will come if boomer women become a generation of generous, ruthlessly honest Titus 2 women who search for every opportunity to pass along own compasses to younger friends who are entering midlife. We are responsible to help them understand what happens when an empty room tells the story of their own echoing souls.

Why I Let My Son Wear Pink

The real trouble with the J. Crew ad controversy is not a gay/transgender agenda but our culture's sexualization of children.

Ellen Painter Dollar

In case you missed the news story that Jon Stewart has named "Toemageddon," here are the facts: Retailer J. Crew sent out an online ad last week in which creative director Jenna Lyons appears in a photo with her 5-year-old son, Beckett. A quote from Jenna reads, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.” In her hand, she cups her son’s foot, done up with bright pink nail polish.

Well.

Out came pundits accusing J. Crew of pushing a liberal agenda in which gender distinctions no longer matter, glamorizing a transgendered lifestyle, and, according to Erin Brown of the Culture and Media Institute, “targeting a new demographic — mothers of gender-confused young boys.” Fox News blogger Keith Ablow accused J. Crew of being “hostile to the gender distinctions that actually are part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race.” Ablow put nail-polish-wearing boys on a spectrum of disturbing behavior, including boys in sundresses and people coloring or bleaching their skin so they could appear to be of a different race.

I didn’t want to write about this brouhaha for the same reason I felt compelled to: my 5-year-old son. Until recently, my son’s favorite color was pink. He says it no longer is, which is fine, although I’m sad that the major reason is that some boys at school (sweet, lovely little boys) told him that only girls like pink. Until then, he didn’t seem to know that his love of pink, occasional wearing of nail polish, and devotion to Dora the Explorer (as opposed to her male cousin, Diego, who is marketed to boys) mattered one way or the other.

But I knew. Once, I overheard two moms in the pool locker room talking about my son’s pink flowered swim goggles. “I understand,” one said to the other, “that we need to let our kids be who they are. But that’s just too much.” People would often comment, “He must like pink because he has sisters!” I would respond, “No, it’s because that’s what he likes.” As the mother of this bright, creative boy who continues to defy some gender stereotypes, even though he now names turquoise as his favorite color, the J. Crew ad backlash hit me in the gut.

Some facts are in order.

Fact: The association of pink with girls and blue with boys was not decreed by God at creation. As Jeanne Maglaty recently wrote for Smithsonian.com, the association is a modern phenomenon. A 100-plus years ago, pink was considered a masculine color, blue a feminine color, and all children, boys and girls, wore white dresses and long hair until around age 6. Ablow asked how we would respond to a photo of a boy in a dress. Perhaps he should find a photo of one of his male ancestors at age 3 or 4, and answer his own question.

Fact: As Jon Stewart pointed out, nail polish washes off. If what we did on a relaxed Saturday at 5 years old determined our future lifestyle, we’d all be dropping our babies in the sandbox because our neighbor friend just showed up with Popsicles. Putting on nail polish is fun. Many parents of boys, particularly those who also have daughters, have fielded their sons’ requests to get in on the polishing action.

Fact: Although this particular firestorm has played out along liberal/conservative ideological lines, the association of pink-loving boys with transgendered or gay identity is not solely a conservative idea. Two Halloweens ago, The New York Times’s Motherlode blog posted a question from a mom uncertain whether to let her young son dress as a ballerina for Halloween. Of the commenters urging the mom to let her son be a ballerina, which were many, a distressingly high number also advised her to look into support groups for the parents of transgendered and gay children, assuming that an early love of pink, frilly dress-up clothes must predict adult sexual orientation.

That, to me, is the most troubling part of the J. Crew fracas. I can write off the people who are certain that a mother’s allowing her son to love pink and wear nail polish is a harbinger of doom, because I know it’s not. The problem is that we adults, of all ideological stripes, seem determined to sexualize our children from a very young age. Assuming that a 5-year-old boy wearing pink polish or a ballerina dress is a future transgendered adult is just as bad as buying young girls high heels, string bikinis, and sweatpants with words on the backside. In both cases, we impose adult sexual identity, behaviors, and motives on children who are nowhere near sexual maturity.

The creation of human beings as two genders is central to the biblical narrative (Gen. 2-3). Clearly there are innate differences between male and female — differences that add to the richness and flourishing of human life. But our innate gender differences are not synonymous with the culturally mandated differences apparent in the J. Crew controversy.

God created us male and female, but he did not decree which colors and fashion accessories are appropriate for boys and girls. God created us as sexual beings, but he also gives us children who are refreshingly free of the need to categorize and sexualize other people. Both those who claim to support God-given gender differences and those arguing for tolerance seem determined to define everything, even our kids, through the lens of our culture’s obsession with sex.

Obese and Beautiful

As the West exports its fat stigma to developing countries, the church might export its welcome embrace to those on all ends of the body mass index.

Marlena Graves

The New York Times recently reported that the West is exporting its ideals of beauty and body size to developing nations, including our stigma against overweight people. We are, it is said, globalizing the “fat stigma.” It appears that our prejudices have so proliferated that they’re even infecting those societies that traditionally preferred larger bodies, such as Puerto Rico and Samoa. And our notions aren’t just affecting women; increasingly more and more men are suffering from a negative body image or what some have called “body image distress.” The term manorexia has arrived in our vocabulary.

These reports turn my thoughts toward Sandra,* one of our family’s dearest friends. Together, she and her husband Matthew* were hospitality incarnate. Their home was open to myriads of people. From kids in our youth group to church folk, from grad student jazz musicians who endlessly wailed on the piano and other instruments through ungodly hours of the night, to their peers, to neighborhood kids and folk — anyone looking for a heart-warming, welcoming place to call home found it with them. Shawn and I were, like others, invited to walk in anytime, whether day or night, without knocking or needing to unlock the door.

Hesitant to take them up on the too-good-to-be-true offer, at first Shawn and I balked, but Sandra insisted. She meant it. And since she and Matthew, like Jesus, were so magnetic because of their love, we happily spent much of our time with them. Christmas Day was the only day reserved for their immediate family members. It’s no exaggeration to say that from her home, Sandra directly influenced thousands of people in the name of Jesus — and plenty more indirectly.

Sandra was morbidly obese.

She spoke freely to us about the dirty looks and the under-the-breath mutters of “disgusting” that she heard while out and about. She knew first-hand the biases against fat people. Yet we found her to be one of the most gorgeous persons alive and an engaging disciple. Six months after our job relocation, she died in her sleep. It has been nearly four years, and we still miss her like crazy.

We are made to believe, through advertising and entertainment, that a youthful, well-endowed size 0 is the ideal for women, and that a chiseled David Beckham-like body is the archetypal man. (Never mind that the glossy magazines we consume are air-brushed, or that many of our celebrities are nipped and tucked or enhanced so that even our ideals are illusions.) Accordingly, the further away on the spectrum of the ideal we find ourselves — the more we look like a Sandra or her male counterpart — the less worth we are implicitly thought to have. As Father Greg Boyle notes in his book, Tattoos on the Heart, “The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.” Hopefully our churches are welcoming communities where our looks and body mass index don’t rule the day, a refuge for those who struggle with their weight or body image. In my experience, it has been. Then again, I have never been in Sandra’s shoes.

Of course, we cannot divorce our bodies from discipleship (see Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart). God has made us stewards of our bodies. We dare not resort to Gnosticism. But I wonder if there is a way for us to dismantle the “fat stigma” along with other corrupted notions of beauty and body image — notions that communicate that some people matter less than others. Is there a way to be “culture makers” in the arenas of beauty and body image? I think so.

We do well by listening to artist-theologians like Bruce Herman. In a brilliant essay entitled “Wounded Beauty” (in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, edited by Daniel Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin), Herman posits that

Beauty is inextricably intertwined with eros, and . . . the best expression of both (beauty and eros) is seen in the face of the earthly beloved — not an idealized and unattainable one. . . . Redeemed marriage . . . is the best image of human beauty we have. The face of an earthly beloved transfigured by lifelong committed fidelity is likely someday to be full of wrinkles and loss of muscle tone. But trust me, as a seasoned artist and one who has been married for over thirty years to the same woman, that aging face will be a beautiful face. . . . Only eyes trained by gazing continually toward the cross — only eyes cleansed by that second innocence, childlike habitual charity — can see true beauty, true goodness.

Singles need not feel excluded. Herman explains that true beauty and love are found in other forms of covenantal relationships where there are mutuality and reciprocity. And that is what the church is when we are at our best. That is what the church was for Sandra. Instead of spreading the fat stigma, in our words and attitudes, may we overcome evil with good in the name of Jesus by incarnating the best expression of beauty in our Christian communities.

*Names changed to protect the family’s identity.

The Praying Artist: God Is My Editor

How praying through my work changed me (part 2).

Anna Broadway, guest blogger

Prayer is one of those disciplines we often approach like going to the gym: either do it big, time-wise, or not at all. But with “prayer time” often looking like prolonged concentration and bodily stillness, it can be difficult to do faithfully. Limbs get stiff, the phone rings, it seems boring.

As I wrote about last week, a trip to California several years ago played a significant role in reviving my prayer life through the practice of short but regular prayers for a block in my neighborhood. But those proved to be baby steps preceding far longer, more intense walks, which changed me in ways I never expected.

A year or so into my prayers for the block, my church organized a two-day prayer conference. In addition to various short times of praying with others, we wrote a goal for our prayer lives on an index card. Because I was working on the manuscript for my first book, a memoir of reluctant chastity due within months, I said I wanted to pray about my writing more.

I didn’t know how that could happen, so, as with many things, it was easy to be pessimistic that I could change this part of my life. Then, mid-summer, relational drama ensued. Under normal circumstances, this could have easily consumed all emotional energy, leaving me useless to do much else. But my writing was already behind schedule. I couldn’t not try to cope, but I also couldn’t fall further behind on the manuscript.

Overwhelmed by the strain one night, I decided to go for a walk. Once out amid the decades-old brownstones and well-established trees of Sixth Avenue — the route I’d been accustomed to walking down from 10th Street — it seemed natural to address God.

As I walked up the warm, quiet street, with the cover of dark and sweet smell of flowering trees in the air, I dove into all the details of my anxiety: the situation I was unsure how to handle, the stuck part in my writing, the small disappointments of the day. Before I knew it, a mile had passed; two, by the time I came home. A 40-minute walk, and I had spent the whole time praying. It somehow hadn’t been hard at all, compared with what 40 minutes of kneeling would have been like.

When my worry returned the next night, I set out for another mile up and back down Sixth Avenue, then another night and another night. Before long, I was walking to pray almost every night and sometimes even twice a night when I was in the worst shape (needless to say, I did not have a typical sleep schedule then). It was not as if prayer ever fixed the prevailing problem that night, but every time, something good happened, even if what changed was hard to describe.

Some nights when I didn’t feel like praying, I would start by going through my day and thanking God for everything I could be grateful for, like tying up loose ends with little spiritual thank-you notes. And, increasingly, that 40-minute stretch allowed time for the intercession I’d wanted to do for others but struggled to carry out as I wanted to.

And the more I took the snags and stuck spots in my writing to God, the more I found solutions and made progress. I started to think of the Lord as a kind of editor, a co-laborer in the project to a degree I had not imagined. My standards for the work got higher, and lazy, self-indulgent passages kept getting cut and re-written.

Then one night, about three weeks into my writing prayer walks, I was startled by a burst of admiration and gratitude. The feeling was not unfamiliar, but had always been inspired by my current object of romantic interest. Not once had such true worship been extended to God.

I’d always known there was something “off” and broken in the way I got attached to men, but the fact was that I worshiped them. As much as I might have tried to love God, I always believed, deep down, that there were much deeper reserves of love and affection that would be tapped only by a husband and lover. I’d never thought that was possible with God. But now, after three weeks of nightly walks in which I processed my day and poured out my heart, God had finally drawn truer worship from me.

The summer ended, I finished the book and moved away from Brooklyn to a job and routine on the West Coast where it was been harder to maintain a prayer life like that. But that time forever changed me. And every time I do succeed in getting out for a prayer walk, something deeply good takes place. What routines have or could become your place for meeting God?

Rethinking the Death Penalty

Why recent information has shifted discussion about capital punishment away from debating morality and toward exposing abuse in the criminal justice system.

Jennifer Grant

In March, the state of Illinois became the sixteenth state to abolish the death penalty. In his remarks after signing the bill, Governor Pat Quinn didn’t debate the morality of executing murderers. He didn’t discuss whether or not the death penalty deters heinous crimes. He didn’t even linger on the fact that all but fewer than 60 nations around the world reject capital punishment. No countries in Europe, except Belarus, practice it; other countries which continue to use the death penalty include Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and, of course, the United States.

Quinn simply said that our system of imposing the death penalty was defective. "Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it," the governor said.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to “serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment,” reports that since 1973, more than 130 people have been released from death row after having been found innocent of the crimes which brought them there. About five people per year are released after DNA or other evidence establishes their innocence.

It seems that only in the past decade or so has such information about our criminal justice system’s faults, as they relate to capital punishment, been established and revealed, shifting the conversation about capital punishment away from debating morality and toward exposing abuse in the criminal justice system. That is, it’s only been in the last 10 or 15 years that we have become aware, as a nation, that issues such as prosecutorial misconduct, eyewitness error, and even the false confessions of those who are mentally ill or intellectually disabled have resulted in the wrongful convictions of innocent people.

Investigative journalist Maurice Possley has had a lot to do with opening our nation’s eyes to the problems in the criminal justice system. Possley, a Pulitzer prize-winning author whose most recent book, Hitler in the Crosshairs: a GI’s Story of Courage and Faith (Zondervan) will be published later this month, is currently an investigator for the Northern California Innocence Project at the University of Santa Clara’s School of Law. Prior to joining the Innocence Project, Possley spent almost 25 years at the Chicago Tribune where, during his tenure, he covered the criminal cases of Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, among many others. Eric Zorn, a Chicago Tribune columnist, raised a virtual “toast” to Possley and his colleagues in a column following Quinn’s decision.

I recently spoke with Possley about Illinois Governor Quinn’s decision to abolish the death penalty, a decision – not surprisingly – which Possley supports.

“The system isn’t as perfect as we think it is,” Possley said. And he should know. When we spoke, the Innocence Project’s investigative efforts had recently established the innocence of two more people.  One had been in prison for more than twenty years for a crime he did not commit. Turning the conversation about the death penalty away from debating its morality to establishing whether it can be used accurately is a positive step, he said.

“No one flippantly says, ‘Well, I don’t mind if an innocent person is executed.’”

While anti-death penalty activists rejoice in Illinois about the recent repeal, across the country in Connecticut, state legislators who support capital punishment scramble to introduce an amendment to speed up the death penalty process in that state in case the death penalty is repealed.

“We believe that abolishing capital punishment would jeopardize the safety of the people of Connecticut,” said Representative Steve Mikutel. “For justice to exist, the punishment must fit the crime.”

A new conversation about capital punishment doesn’t need to tangle itself around how or whether we are given the right – by God or by society – to exact justice on criminals.  It makes us ask, if the inmates on Connecticut’s death row are executed quickly to circumvent the repeal of capital punishment there, will innocent people be killed?

“I might want to kill a person who has murdered one of my loved ones,” Possley said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right. Do I want him to be locked up for the rest of his life?  Yes. Do I want him to repent? Yes. I don’t think anyone is beyond redemption in God’s eyes, no matter how bad they are. When we kill someone, we’ve decided that they are beyond God’s redemption. I can’t accept that.”

Navigating the Sea of Electronic Media

How we can foster a family environment that deters sexting, distracted driving, 'Facebook depression.'

Ellen Painter Dollar

The New York Times last week told the story of eighth grader Margarite, who “sexted” (sent a naked photo of herself via cell phone) her boyfriend. When he and Margarite broke up, the boyfriend forwarded the message to another girl—a former friend of Margarite’s with whom she was having some trouble—with the caption, “Ho Alert!” The girl forwarded it, and soon the whole school had access to the photo that the 14-year-old meant for her boyfriend’s eyes. Several students were eventually charged with child pornography for their role in forwarding the message, although charges were eventually downgraded to harassment, punishable by community service.

As my oldest daughter prepares for middle school next year, I’m pondering the best ways to equip her to handle the changes and challenges of adolescence with wisdom and grace. One of my central concerns is how to help her (and our other two children) navigate the digital world of cell phones and laptops. Sexting, distracted driving, cyberbullying—these modern scourges can leave kids damaged, lonely, in legal trouble, or even dead.

Recognizing that online activity (sexting and cyberbullying, as well as less overtly threatening Facebooking and texting) has potentially negative effects on kids’ physical and mental health, the American Academy of Pediatrics is urging pediatricians to inquire about media use during check-ups. Experts have coined the phrase “Facebook depression” to describe the plummeting self-esteem that can result from constant exposure to friends’ happy status updates and photos indicating a packed social calendar. Although it has yet to show a causal link, one study found that teens who text a lot (120 text messages or more per day) are more likely to engage in sexual activity and drug use. Experts speculate that factors contributing to excessive texting (impulsivity, a need for constant stimulation and social interaction, inadequate parental supervision) also contribute to risk-taking.

What is a parent to do? Some parents might ban electronic media altogether, but that’s not the right answer for most of us. Electronic connectivity will play a larger and larger role in the workplace and education. I am a writer for whom online media are indispensable for sharing and marketing my work (and frankly, central to both my social life and my household management). My husband is a librarian transitioning his university library from being a repository of printed material to an access point for online resources. My daughter’s middle school homework will require Internet access, as many teachers post homework on web pages, rather than passing it out in class. Facebook, e-mail, and texting can also be tools for enhanced connections between people, if used with respect for others and within limits. Forbidding my kids from using computers and cell phones would be shortsighted and, really, impossible.

But we can have rules: No texting at the dinner table. All computer use takes place in public areas of the house, not behind closed doors. Cell phones will be turned in to us at bedtime. Kids must “friend” a parent if they want to use Facebook.

It seems to me, though, that the unhealthy, sometimes tragic consequences of teen media use are rooted in something deeper than a lack of parental supervision or teen impulsiveness. Teenagers, particularly girls, inhabit a culture that constantly tells them that their worth is measured by outward things—looks, popularity, sexual experience, worldliness, the ability to post clever one-liners that elicit plenty of ROFL’s and LMAO’s from friends.

Actually, it’s not just teenagers that inhabit this culture. I do too. My own consumption of media does not always give my kids a good example of how to be part of today’s online world without letting the values promoted by that world define you. And I’m not just talking about my tendency to scroll through my e-mail while only half-listening to my kids.

My consumption of media—reading consumer magazines and watching reality TV as well as using Facebook, e-mail, and texting—often skews my self-image and tempts me to focus not on what is meaningful and lasting and healthy, but on what is superficial and fleeting and destructive.

The more I obsess over shelter magazines featuring updated, perfectly coordinated, clutter-free homes or watch TV shows such as TLC’s What Not to Wear, the worse I feel about my own cluttered, unrenovated, dust bunny-infested house, and my cardigan- and sneaker-heavy wardrobe.

The more time I spend online obsessing over my blog comments, envying other authors’ publishing successes, and wondering why I wasn’t invited to the party that friends are posting photos of, the more focused I become on myself and my insecurities, instead of on my family, my work, and my community. Media saturation has a way of skewing our sense of how things really are and what is eternally significant. Other writers get rejected. Most people’s houses are rarely camera-ready. My friends spend many weekends hanging out with their children instead of dressing up to attend parties (or, alternatively, doing errands and cleaning bathrooms instead of planning outings or supervising extravagant craft projects with their kids). But such real-life experiences rarely make it into Facebook photo albums or status updates.

As Paul reminded Christ’s followers in Phillippi, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” The fruit of such a life is not a guarantee that you’ll never be hurt by a friend, disappointed in romance, rejected in the workplace, or feel lousy when you discover you weren’t invited to the party of the year. The fruit of such a life is that, “The God of peace will be with you.”

Our rules about computer and cell phone use will likely change as the technology changes, and as we see what kind of people our children—today still so young and innocent—turn into. But I will do my best to foster a family environment that puts the real world ahead of the virtual one by both setting clear rules about media, and focusing on seeking first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness. I will strive to better model healthy behavior in my own media use. And I will say many prayers for all that is beyond my control, which is plenty.

The Praying Pedestrian: A Lenten Discipline

How praying for my neighborhood changed it (part 1 of a 2-part series).

Anna Broadway, guest blogger

In the nondenominational Bible churches of my youth, Lent was considered a "Catholic thing." But as I’ve attended PCA churches in my adulthood, I’ve gained appreciation for the church calendar and, in particular, this pre-Easter season of penitence. Observing Lent can include forgoing habits or foods, but it’s also a time of adding something, such as a spiritual discipline.

For me, the discipline tied to my richest seasons of spiritual life has been prayer-walking.

I was properly introduced to prayer-walking during a visit to a friend’s small California church in a cliff-side community of surfers and artists. For a few years they had walked the entire town every few months, taking a calendar or gift to each house where the owners welcomed them, and praying over every residence. I happened to visit the week of their quarterly prayer walk, and joined them in praying a verse for each house in the few blocks my partner and I were assigned to.

Ours was ordinary work, and it was hard to see how so few words could accomplish much. Yet my friends believed their prayers had gradually increased the community’s spiritual receptiveness. And when I thought back to my most scarring stab at "spiritual work," on a summer evangelistic project, I noticed it was marked by a striking absence of prayer.

Once back home in Brooklyn, I started to realize how little compassion I had for my actual neighbors. One day, when I was walking home from praying for my own needs, I started to look at the street around me. I noticed more clues to the neighborhood's health than I expected. After a few days, I committed to pray for one particular block on my route to and from the Subway. Before long, the short prayer became such an entrenched habit that taking an alternative route became unthinkable.

Praying for a street you don’t know, whose residents you don’t know, is weird. But it can tune you into how many houses are in poor repair or on the market (a signal of change or loss). I got to know the place where homeless people bedded down. When I saw a cart and the mattress on the bitter night of Thanksgiving — as I hurried home to warm blankets and steaming cider, escaping 20-30 mph winds — I started crying. That night I couldn’t pray at all; I just wept.

Then one night I saw a moving van. Newcomers! I thought of how my California friends greeted their new neighbors, hesitated, then waited until I saw someone approach the van. I asked the man how I could pray for him. He looked rather surprised, but gave it some thought and a serious answer. So did the three other people I asked over the next week or so. Each time the talks went better, and I learned more about the block — their concerns about rent, and a woman whose son had died of HIV/AIDS.

The months went by, and I kept trying to pray for the block. Gradually I got to know a homeless guy who often parked his cart on the street. One night C. J. asked me to tell him why I was a Christian, since I had told him that it was Jesus who changed me from being someone who hurried past people like him, to the woman who gave him fruit and stopped to talk.

For most of my life as a Christian, I’ve wanted the chance to see God bring someone to Jesus. But it’s never really happened. I hadn’t even had a clear invitation to talk about why I followed Jesus until that day, when C. J. had to know why we had become friends. It wasn’t exactly how I had envisioned increased spiritual openness on 10th Street, but what else would you call it?

A year or so into my prayers for the block, and a few months before I left Brooklyn for good, I learned that a pastor and his family had moved into my section of 10th Street, after I started praying for it. And I had prayed specifically for God to bring Christians into that area to love the people who lived there. After the pastor moved in, his upstairs neighbors started attending church with them — another answer to prayer.

I still marvel that God let me glimpse how he was answering my prayers, petitions I so often made uncertainly. It takes me back to my earliest childhood memory of prayer, which was a request that God give me a little brother. Not long after, Mom shared the news that she was pregnant with my second brother.

As a single 32-year-old, I’ve certainly learned that God doesn’t always answer as quickly or closely to what we want, but I’m nonetheless convinced that prayer seems to be part of how he invites us into what he’s doing and wants to do. What baby steps might you take in your prayer life this Lent?



Anna Broadway is a writer and web editor living in the San Francisco Bay area. She is the author of Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. She has written for Her.meneutics about Eat, Pray, Love, Christian dating, and Mel Gibson.

Liberty U. Students on Interracial Marriage Trends

I asked five female alumni whether their marriages mirrored recent sociological data on mixed-race marriages in the South. Here's what they told me.

Karen Swallow Prior

Some moons ago, my first official “date” was with a black boy. (I am white, by the way.) Technically he was half-black, but in the remote Maine community where I grew up, it didn’t make much difference either way. There was one black family in town; they had only one child around my age, so he was the only black kid in my school. We didn’t think of him as “black” or “half-black” or “mulatto,” though. We thought of him as Jeff. That experience has largely defined race relations for me.

Not so, of course, for much of our nation’s history and many of our nation’s people.

But interesting new trends are emerging from the 2010 U.S. Census, particularly in race dynamics. One finding is that a more general population shift to the southern states now includes an increased number of African Americans who, for the past century, have lived in higher concentrations in the Northeast. Perhaps related to this trend are reports that in the Deep South, inter-racial marriages are gaining wider acceptance.

The New York Times recently reported based on Census data that of all the states, Mississippi saw the greatest increase in mixed-race marriages. The couples profiled in the story, despite minor tensions over their inter-racial status, report smooth sailing in a state once home to some of the country’s most volatile racial conflicts.

We’ve come a long way, and that’s good news.

Liberty University, where I teach, is located in Lynchburg, Virginia, not far from the former Confederate capital, and the school offers a good snapshot of that progress. Its founder, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, at the same time he was growing a church and becoming a national conservative leader in the 1960s, was also gaining notoriety as a sort of accidental segregationist. In his autobiography, he wrote candidly about his formerly racist attitudes and his later profound remorse for those views, inherited honestly, if uncritically, through his cultural context. Inasmuch as one can make amends for such things, then certainly he achieved that before his death in 2007: there has long been a thriving population of minority students at Liberty, one that reflects national percentages.

I’ve seen these trends being played out among my students, a number of whom are now partnered in mixed-race marriages; I contacted five of them to see if their experiences square with the reports above. As it turns out, the answer is yes — and no.

It is clear from their experiences that great progress has been made for inter-racial couples and families in the South. The women told me that public attitudes are generally “more receptive” and “positive” overall. Rachel, who is white, says the fact that her husband is black is “not an issue at all” where they live in Virginia. They both work at a small liberal arts college where diversity is a core value and attend church with a mixed-race congregation that “appreciates” having her husband as a worship leader. Jessica, whose husband is a native of Nigeria, also lives and works primarily around communities that value diversity. She says, “Our social circles are pretty tolerant and many times, racially diverse, and this may also have something to do with the positive reception we feel.”

But all is not rosy. Each of these women cites the greatest hostility as coming from older black women, some of whom have vocally objected to a black man marrying a white woman. When Jessica and her husband are in social situations dominated by one race or the other, they “downplay” their connection. Chris-Robin says she and her husband “have experienced quite a bit of angst” because their marriage is inter-racial. Living in Virginia, they had enough “confrontations”—from tense stares to nasty comments meant for them and their children to hear — that they have a rule: If they are in a public place and either of them says, “Go, now!” they do just that, no questions asked.

Unlike the couples in the Times article, Chris-Robin, whose family is from Mississippi, and her husband simply won’t go there. “Pamela,” who also lives in Virginia, has one child with her African American husband, whom she met in high school and dated throughout college. She’s not sure if the “negativity” she experienced when they were first dating has diminished or if she simply has stopped noticing it. Some things, however, are impossible not to notice. Recently, she overheard fellow residents of her apartment complex complaining to one another about people who have children with “nasty a** n*****s." The words stung, reminding her that “words can do way more damage than we can possibly imagine.”

All the women mentioned the crucial role their families played in shaping the dynamics of their marriages, having more effect than perhaps anything else. Most experienced some initial resistance, even opposition, from concerned parents, only to have them won over with time. “Pamela,” whose father was initially opposed to her marrying a black man, says, happily, now she thinks her father loves her husband more than her. But things did not turn out so well for “Brittany” and her husband, who are estranged after a couple years of marriage. The inability of her husband’s family to accept his white wife, along with his failure to sufficiently support her, has contributed to the disintegration of the marriage, which seems beyond repair, although “Brittany” is praying for a miracle.

I am praying with “Brittany” for the healing of her marriage, as we in the body of Christ should pray for all marriages. Genesis 1:27 says that God created us as “male and female.” In the next chapter, God exhorts the man and woman to hold fast in the marriage bond. When God designed marriage, he made no mention of race. Why should we?

'It Must Stop'

The death of 14-year-old Hena Akhter spotlights concerns the international response to sexual assault.

Elissa Cooper

Last July, Bangladesh’s High Court declared fatwas, a ruling or legal opinion given by an Islamic religious leader, illegal. Investigations and news reports of fatwas invoking violence against women led human rights organizations to submit petitions to the court, which then took action.

Yet the practice is still used in Bangladesh, particularly in rural villages, and not always documented. The first reported case of fatwa since the ruling occurred last November when 40-year-old Sufia Begum was brutally caned for an alleged affair. Although doctors suggested she be taken to another hospital that could better tend to her, her family claimed they could not afford to move her. Begum died in December from her injuries.

Violence against women, such as sexual assault, is a global problem; April marks Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the U.S. Bangladesh is just one country where the problem is spelled out on the international scene.

On January 31, 14-year-old Hena Akhter died after a fatwa ordered her to receive 101 lashes. Her crime was that she allegedly had an affair with a married man; her family says the man, a 40-year-old cousin, raped her. The cousin was sentenced to 201 lashes, which he did not undertake.

Bangladeshi authorities condemned Akhter’s fatwa, which occurred over 50 miles away from the capital, Dhaka. “This is against the rules of Islam,” said Haji Abdul Wahab Bepari, chairman of the Naria sub-district. “We don’t have these strict Shari’ah laws in our country. The villagers should have stopped this.”

Authorities were further outraged when it appeared that the fatwa was deliberately hidden. Police officers have been investigated for their report; now, four doctors are facing charges of hiding the cause of Akhter’s death. Their autopsy report ruled that it was a suicide and there were no injuries. A second autopsy was ordered by the court, which found severe injuries on the body and claimed the girl had bled to death. Justice Shamsuddin Chowdhury Manik of the High Court said, “We are appalled to see the magnitude of illegality.” Other justices similarly decried the doctors’ actions and their audacity to fabricate the suicide story.

Bangladesh professes to be a moderate Muslim-majority country (of its population of 160 million people, almost 90 percent falls in this category). But it faces the difficult task of changing cultural mentality, as well as enforcing punishment against those who carry out fatwas. Chowdhury called for the ministry of religious affairs to cease funding for the mosques and madrassas (Muslim schools) that order fatwas.

Is that enough? Akhter’s case brings up another problem: the response to sexual assault. Nicholas Kristof blogged, “Let’s hope that the public reaction and punishments are so strong that the word goes out to all of Bangladesh’s villages that such misogynist fatwas are not only immoral but also illegal. And that the crime lies not in being raped, but in raping.”

Akhter’s father said, “The thing that happened to my daughter, the kind of justice she received, it should not happen to anyone else. It must stop.”

In 2002, the World Health Organization released a report on violence and health. On sexual violence, the report collected data from the police, nongovernment organizations, clinics, and survey research, but states: “The relationship between these sources and the global magnitude of the problem of sexual violence may be viewed as corresponding to an iceberg floating in water. . . . The small visible tip represents cases reported to police. . . . But beneath the surface remains a substantial although unquantified component of the problem.” It also acknowledges that “sexual violence has been a neglected area of research. The available data are scanty and fragmented.” The report warns that cultural differences may affect the data too, as some places were not willing to divulge information.

On the RAVE website (Religion and Violence e-Learning), the late Dr. Catherine Clark Kroeger wrote, “It is impossible to know the prevalence of abuse in a particular congregation because it is so carefully concealed.” The Christian Coalition Against Domestic Abuse states: “Sadly, religion is NOT a deterrent . . . there is just as much abuse (spousal, child and sexual abuse) in Christian homes as in non-Christian homes.”

Begum and Akhter’s deaths are tragic and unnecessary. Offering international attention towards their stories is a step forward in recognizing and responding to the significant but overlooked issue of violence against women. Do their stories prompt you to make a change in your mindset, your community? What can we learn from these events to apply to our own Christian faith? 

Keeping Kids Junk-Food Free

What Christian communities might learn from Amelia Brown, the Philadelphia principal who sees childhood obesity as the next urban crisis.

Rachel Stone

Amelia Brown, principal of the William D. Kelley School in Philadelphia, recently called on parents and Operation Town Watch Integrated Services (which helps neighborhoods fight crime and drug deals) to position themselves strategically around corner stores around the school. Their mission: to keep kids from buying junk food and encourage them to eat a real breakfast at school.

Since becoming principal last August, Brown has focused intently on improving the diets of her students. She began by urging corner stores to refuse to sell candy and sodas to kids in the morning, with mixed results. Brown, convinced that junk food is to blame for the headaches and stomachaches that consistently undermine academic performance, as well as for the steadily-increasing “flab” of older students, noted that she’d have no choice but to organize boycotts of the stores that wouldn't stop selling to students.

Brown’s efforts seem extreme, better reserved for the fight against underage smoking, say, or illegal drug use. After all, we're just talking about soda, candy, and chips. Or are we?

As The Times noted, we’ve known for a long time that cravings for sugar, salt, and fat are inborn; even newborns can’t resist the taste of sugar. Those "primal" cravings are exactly what the food industry capitalizes on, endlessly engineering, testing, and retesting products for "hyperpalatability": an elusive quality that renders edibles both irresistible and addictive. PET imaging shows these kinds of foods work on our brains in ways similar to heroin, opium, and morphine; it’s thought that they even stimulate the release of dopamine, which prevents the brain from turning on the “brakes” that would normally prevent us from overeating. Maybe Brown's calling in the neon-vested, walkie-talkie equipped neighborhood watch isn't extreme after all.

I, for one, admire her courage, especially considering how particularly vulnerable children are to the promises of advertising. I can remember walking through a store with a young friend who spotted a box of candy decorated with pictures of Shrek. “Oh, I bet those are good,” she said. (She was a fan of the film and all of 4 or 5 years old at the time.) Young children, especially, aren't easily able to distinguish between fact and fiction, and the implied promise that a certain sweet breakfast cereal will cause magic animal friends to appear at the table with them isn’t clearly fantasy in their eyes.

Children are vulnerable in other ways. Their quickly growing bodies and brains need optimum nutrition for good development, and they are, to a much greater degree than adults, forming habits and tastes that will stay with them for the long haul. If their taste buds are trained on processed food and sugary drinks, that’s what they will expect, want, and crave.

The tasty junk that tempts our nation’s kids and adults alike were once rare and expensive treats, if not entirely non-existent. Now the opposite is true. Junk food is cheap and ubiquitous. Processed foods create larger profits for food producers than non-processed foods, though they are among the cheapest items in the supermarket. Calculating the cost-per-calorie, carrots are four times more expensive than potato chips, and sodas contain some of the cheapest calories in the place — which is why the most obese people in America are also most likely to be the poorest. Whereas childhood obesity was once a rarity, it is becoming tragically common, and every bit as serious as underage smoking, drinking, and illegal drug use.

In conversations about obesity rates, the concepts of personal responsibility and self-discipline come up again and again. There are those who will look at Brown’s efforts in Philadelphia and charge her with failing to prepare kids to face the real world, where they’ll be free to buy and eat what they want. But I tend to look at it in a different way. Bearing in mind the substantial evidence demonstrating that industry-engineered foods are addictive by design, and considering that children are very vulnerable both to the pull of palatability and propaganda, I consider that perhaps God would be pleased to have us plead the case of these children — to act boldly in their defense and to push back against the system that would just as soon have them addicted to junk, on diabetes and ADHD meds, and desperate to lose weight.

Jesus said that when we feed the hungry, we are feeding him. Today’s poor, like many of those Philadelphia kids, are more likely to be suffering from an excess of bad food than a lack of any food. So it’s worth considering: How do we serve them as if we were serving Him? Maybe by taking simple steps to bring healthy lunches to schools, supporting your local food bank in adding fresh produce to their regular distributions, and encouraging your church to commit to serving wholesome meals in its own communal life. There are lots of things you can do to help ensure that the most vulnerable are fed — and fed well. And as is true (almost) always, it’s a good idea to begin your efforts at home.

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