What Is Her.meneutics?
The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
books we're reading
All posts from "May 2011"
« April 2011 | Main | June 2011 »
May 31, 2011Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women
Women aren't disappearing from the workplace or ministry staff teams. How will married men adjust?
Another day, another high-profile sex scandal. Many Americans yawned when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s extramarital activities hit the headlines two weeks ago. By now it’s difficult to escape the fatalistic feeling that we’ve seen it all before and will see it all again, and soon.
I will not go out to eat alone with someone of the opposite sex. I will not travel alone with someone of the opposite sex.I really appreciate that Hyatt and other Christian leaders are addressing this issue, because I know what it’s like to watch a Christian leader fall. When I was 15, the senior pastor at my church — a man deeply beloved and admired by his congregation — left his wife for his secretary. Words can’t capture the spiritual and emotional devastation this man and woman left in their wake. Though they would eventually repent and confess their sin before the church, some of us carry scars to this day. So I can be nothing but grateful for Christians who make the effort to stay pure and who teach others to do the same.
I will not flirt with someone of the opposite sex.
I will speak often and lovingly of my wife. (This is the best adultery repellant known to man.)
At the same time, I want to humbly offer a word of caution: Sometimes, practical tips like the ones I’ve described can lead to practical problems.
Jon Acuff of Stuff Christians Like fame discovered this when he wrote a post on “Awkward opposite sex friendships,” inspired by his decision to request a male driver when he spoke at a conference. In the post, Acuff acknowledged some of the difficulties that can come up when Christian men work or have other public interactions with women:
What about having a one on one meeting with a woman? Is it enough to just leave the door open? Or do you have to have three people present at all times? I know churches who use both approaches.
What about a lunch meeting? A married friend recently told me that if he couldn’t go out to lunch with females he couldn’t do his job. Is lunch with a lady a date? What if it’s a business lunch? The CEO of Zondervan is a lady, what if she calls me and says, “Jon, we’d like to give you a 37 book deal and your own Honda Ruckus Scooter for a cross country tour called ‘Ruckus by Ruckus,’ can we go out to lunch to discuss the details?” Do I have to invite someone along with me? What if my wife is not available that day?
Acuff knew that he was broaching an “awkward” subject, and admitted he didn’t have any hard and fast solutions, but I doubt he was prepared for the way his comment section exploded on the post. While some of his commenters agreed that his boundaries were justified, many others wrote to tell him just how many difficulties such boundaries can cause for working women.
The dissenters' consensus seemed to be not that there shouldn’t be boundaries, but that those boundaries should be drawn in a way that respects women as working professionals trying to do their jobs. Several of them asked Acuff to stop and think about what it’s like to be a woman who’s told that a man doesn’t want her driving him solely because of her gender. Turning down even a one-time ride can give a woman the unpleasant impression that she’s viewed not as a professional person but as a sexual temptation waiting to happen.
Admittedly, it’s a much harder task to create boundaries when you try to factor these things in. But when we don’t, we run the risk of going to un-Christlike extremes. Christian women working for churches and other ministries have been left out of important discussions and meetings because of unrealistic boundaries. A commenter on Acuff’s site confessed that years ago, he and several other seminary students working at a restaurant had refused to give a ride home to an older woman with car trouble, because, well, she was a woman.
One prominent pastor used to say that if he were driving alone in his car on a rainy day and passed a woman from his church walking down a road, he wouldn’t stop to pick her up. Now, maybe I’m being naïve, but would someone tell me exactly how much two people can accomplish in a car while one of them is driving it?
On a more serious note, this anecdote makes me wonder if this man had ever preached on, or even read, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Or did he feel okay about it because the beaten-up man in the story wasn’t a beaten-up woman?
Of course, as I stressed earlier, boundaries are crucial in preserving marriages. But overdoing those boundaries can reduce interactions between Christian men and women to something that looks like the “wicked city woman” skit on I Love Lucy. To avoid this problem and to create boundaries that really work, I believe we need to learn to see each other — and ourselves — in a more holistic way. What I mean is, instead of viewing the women in their world as potential problems to be avoided as much as possible, and viewing themselves as explosives wired to go off if the heat gets too high, Christian men might want to try something different. They might practice viewing everyone concerned as human beings who are made in God’s image, and are therefore to be treated with respect, courtesy, and an approach that’s neither too familiar nor too distant.
As we discussed Hyatt’s post, Her.meneutics writer Ellen Painter Dollar came up with an analogy I really like:
I think of a parallel to weight loss advice. No one says to people trying to lose weight or maintain weight loss, “Never go to a wedding or holiday party again. Never walk into a bakery again.” Instead, they offer strategies for how to minimize temptation in situations where temptation will be greater. Seems like that’s a more realistic approach to this topic.
Because women aren’t about to vanish from either the church or the workplace, it may be that men are better off learning to deal with our presence than trying to minimize it. There’s plenty of room for debate about what such an approach might look like. But to base our boundaries on this idea might just be healthier, not only for men’s and women’s careers, but for their marriages and spiritual lives as well.
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 “Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, NOW Responds,” “The Social Network’s Women Problem,” "Facebook Envy on Valentine's Day," "What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?" "Why Sex Ruins TV Romances," and "Don't Think Pink" for Her.meneutics. Her book, “‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin,” is now available on Amazon.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson and Lauren Winner debated the topic of male-female workplace boundaries for Christianity Today in 1999.
The Top 10 Posts of 2011 - So Far
What got our readers talking this year.
Compiling top 10 lists give editors like me a chance to remember the good, hard work that has gone into their publications in recent days. Putting together the list below, the good, hard work that came to mind was primarily that of the tireless writers who faithfully contribute to Her.meneutics, some since the blog's inception in 2009. Our mission statement, in case you've missed it in the left-hand navigation bar, is to provide "news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women." Without the evangelical women on our blog roll, Her.meneutics would have little reason to exist.
But of course, without Her.meneutics, our bloggers would have many reasons to exist! Some of them, in fact, have found time to blog, teach, parent, participate in church life, and publish books of their own. Gina Dalfonzo (best known at CT for "The Good Christian Girl: A Fable") just released 'Bring Her Down,' a Kindle book about Sarah Palin and the media. In July Jennifer Grant will release Love You More (Thomas Nelson), about adopting a 15-month-old girl from Guatemala. Also in July, Elrena Evans releases This Crowded Night (DreamSeeker), centered on the women found in the Four Gospels. In August Amy Julia Becker will release A Good and Perfect Gift (Bethany House), about grace and her daughter, Penny, who has Down syndrome; and also in August, Caryn Rivadeneira releases Gumble Hallelujah (Tyndale), about praising God amid disappointment. We're excited to see the cultural impact our writers will have beyond the women's blog.
A note about metrics: Our top 10 lists are based on number of unique pageviews per post, and thus do not necessarily reflect posts' popularity among readers or editors. If you had favorite posts from 2011 that don't appear below, make sure to list them in the comments section. Now to the list!
(10) Sex Sells - So Does Virginity, by Sharon Hodde Miller (April 27, 2011)
Nickelodeon star Miranda Cosgrove is being marketed as the embodiment of purity in a sex-saturated culture. Why Christians should be concerned.
(9) Why I Don’t Want to Be a Chinese Mother, by Amy Julia Becker (January 17, 2011)
I don't want to be an American mother, for that matter.
(8) What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway? by Gina Dalfonzo (January 31, 2011)
Not much, if Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla's wedding announcement in The New York Times "Vows" section means anything.
(7) Confessions of a Beth Moore Convert, by Karen Spears Zacharias (March 29, 2011)
Why the Bible teacher with the big Texan hair may just be our female Billy Graham.
(6) When Christians Get Divorced, by Amy Julia Becker (March 23, 2011)
A popular Christian blogger recently announced the end of her marriage. How should churches respond to those grieving?
(5) Lady Gaga: Where's the Outrage? by Alicia Cohn (May 17, 2011)
What happens when a pop culture phenomenon becomes a 'religious experience.'
(4) The Argument for Girl-Boy Wrestling, by Caryn Rivadeneira (February 22, 2011)
Joel Northrup cited his Christian faith for refusing to wrestle Cassy Herkelman in last week's Iowa state championship. I say his Christian faith should have taken him to the mat.
(3) Another Assault on Little Girls, by Jennifer Grant (January 3, 2011)
Vogue Paris's "Gifts" photo spread is one more example of how our culture robs children of innocence.
(2) Miss America and the Bikini Question, by Katelyn Beaty (January 20, 2011)
Do modern-day pageants ask young evangelical women to compromise their values an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny too much?
(1) Sin, Grace, and the Royal Wedding, by Caryn Rivadeneira (April 28, 2011)
What I'll tell my 6-year-old daughter about marriage as we watch the festivities together.
Other notable posts of the year:
Christian Dating Do-Over, by Marlena Graves (February 18, 2011)
A Tarnished Silver Anniversary, by Christine A. Scheller (January 4, 2011)
Why I Let My Son Wear Pink, by Ellen Painter Dollar (April 18, 2011)
When Gender-Based Parenting Goes Too Far, by Caryn Rivadeneira (February 1, 2011)
Beyond SlutWalk: A New Conversation about Sexual Assault, by Katelyn Beaty (May 11, 2011)
Sex and Salvation according to Picasso
Seeing the huge Picasso exhibit now touring the world reminded me of why Christians should make time for the fine arts.
Amid the press of daily demands, most of us think we don’t have time for enjoying the fine arts. A recent visit to a Picasso exhibit reminded me why Christians especially should make time for it.
If Horace’s adage is correct, that good art both “teaches and delights” (a description that certainly applies to the works of the Creator), then Pablo Picasso has rightly earned his reputation as one of the great artists of the modern age.
"Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris," an exhibit touring worldwide during renovation of its permanent home in Paris, proved Picasso’s ability to delight even before gaining admission to the show. On the day I attended, traffic was gridlocked, the parking garage was full, and those like me with pre-paid reservations for an appointed time found out our tickets granted a place in line with hundreds of other ticket holders. And no wonder: During its three-month run at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (one of only three U.S. stops), a whopping 229,729 people made time for Picasso.
Of course, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. But Picasso really is good. Known for his place in the avant-garde as one of the originators of cubism, Picasso also produced works in the schools of naturalism and classicism. This exhibit of 176 pieces from among those Picasso selected himself for his personal collection featured a breathtaking array of mediums, styles, genres, and techniques: chalk drawings, classical portraits, sculptures, collages, bronze busts, and photographs.
To dismiss Picasso’s more abstract paintings as mere child’s play, as some do, is a great error. This was a serious artist. To prepare for the creation of his greatest masterpiece, Les Desmoiselles d ’Avignon (1907), Picasso produced 1,000 sketches and studies. Although the eleven-room exhibit represented a fraction of the works produced over a lifetime (Picasso began painting as a teenager and didn’t stop until his death in 1973, at age 92) from it, a worldview clearly emerges. So, too, does the reminder that Christians who wish to have significant influence in the culture ignore the arts at their peril.
In How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer explains, “In great art the technique fits the worldview being presented.” On this test alone, Picasso passes with flying colors. Les Desmoiselles d ‘Avignon was shocking both for its content (nude prostitutes) and its form (human figures reduced to geometric angles representing multiple perspectives).
Literature professor Gene Edward Veith describes how Picasso’s efforts to depict reality “as it is” resulted, ironically, in an extreme version of classical formalism that turns in on itself. In the “attempt to pin down objective form,” Picasso “reduces human beings to objects,” mere “grotesque caricatures or mathematical patterns.” Picasso’s work marked a watershed in art history, Veith says, ushering in a kind of art that's “cut off from ordinary perception and dependent upon theory. The work of art no longer can stand alone; it needs an explanation.”
Take just one issue, one at the center of the culture wars and the focus of Picassos’ masterpiece: sex. The experimentation, subjectivity, and rejection of tradition that define modern art also describe Picasso’s approach to sex in both his life and his art.
Picasso was married twice and had numerous affairs, mistresses, and girlfriends. He depicted many of these women in his paintings. The various styles, colors, moods, and techniques of these works reveal the fragmentation of his relationships and his skewed perspective on sexual relationships. His depictions of women range from classical to naturalistic to cubist. His most characteristic feature — uneven faces in which one eye is higher than the other — reflects a disjointed worldview based on two ways of seeing the world: the way of nature (the lower) and the way of grace (the higher). Schaeffer describes these realms of grace and nature as those dealing with the things of God, universals, and meaning (grace), and the created order of humanity, particularities, and individual experience (nature). Both realms are evident in the body of Picasso’s works, but are rarely in harmony, tending instead to reflect a dichotomized view of nature and grace at war with one another.
Thus Picasso’s portrayals of sexual liaisons frequently resort to abstraction: discombobulated human figures intertwine, limbs arranged helter-skelter, recognizable as isolated parts but not as organic wholes. One mother who brought her young daughter to the exhibit stood before the surrealist painting Figures at the Seashore (1931), explaining to her child, “See? Here are arms . . . boobs . . . and legs.” When nature and grace are dissevered, so too is everything else. Schaeffer says that in the early modern age when nature was separated from God, nature began to “eat up” grace. One can see this phenomenon at work in Picasso’s paintings and personal life.
One of Picasso’s mistresses, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was only 17 when the then-married 45-year-old first seduced her. She later bore him a daughter but eventually found herself replaced by a new mistress. A few years after Picasso’s death, Marie-Thérèse hanged herself.
Just as Christians can and should critique the worldviews expressed by the world’s great artists, so too is our worldview displayed through our creative works. What worldview does the world see in the artistry of Christians today?
A Horror Film about Childbirth
In aiming to spotlight infant and maternal mortality rates worldwide, Christy Turlington Burns's No Woman No Cry relies on fear instead of facts.
You could say I'm passionate about birth. I delivered both my children without medication (the second was a water birth) and am trained as a doula. While I'm aware that situations arise that require intervention, even surgery, to keep mother and baby safe, I'm unconvinced that our nation's high cesarean rate is justified, and I think there are plenty of reasons to actively promote more midwife-attended births, even home births. I'm grateful that for most U.S. women, highly skilled medical help is just around the corner, ready to step in should something go wrong. But I also believe that birth is safe.
Yet for lots of women in the world, birth isn't so safe. It's not just that high-tech help isn't around the corner. It's the whole nexus of social, cultural, and economic reasons that make birth a riskier prospect. It's that girls get married and pregnant too young. It's that they haven't been nourished during their growing years or pregnancies. It's that they hold hospitals and non-traditional birth attendants in suspicion. The result? A woman dies from a preventable pregnancy or childbirth complication about every two minutes.
In her directorial debut, No Woman No Cry, model Christy Turlington Burns tells the stories of some of these women. As a doula, a woman, and mom — and someone who counts fistula pioneer Catherine Hamlin as a heroine — I was excited to see Turlington’s fame and fortune being wielded to bring global attention to these too-frequently forgotten women. The two-hour documentary aired earlier this month on the Oprah Winfrey Network, while a related album went on sale at Starbucks, most of the proceeds of which go back to Turlington’s maternal health project, Every Woman Counts.
Unfortunately, in telling Christy’s own story of complications during her first pregnancy, and the stories of women in Bangladesh, Guatemala, and Tanzania, No Woman No Cry offered variations on the maternal health horror story: the emergency C-section! The postpartum hemorrhage! The botched abortion! (That last one, I thought, seemed a cheap attempt to force the issue of abortion’s near-illegality in Guatemala, a law that reflects the deeply held beliefs of most Guatemalans.) The tone was often condescending and seemingly intentionally incomplete. In one scene, a Bangladeshi woman tells us earnestly that she believes that babies born in the hospital are stolen and sold. In another scene, a young woman is taken to the hospital while in labor to be treated for “dehydration and exhaustion,” but the low-tech solution (an oral or IV glucose hydration preparation) is conveniently left out, perhaps to heighten the drama. But if there’s anything that birth doesn’t need, it’s more drama. It seemed that Turlington wanted to scare audiences into giving money to poor women who don’t have access to OB/GYNs and ambulances, without providing a clear picture of what the challenges are or what the solutions might reasonably be.
The thing is, birth is safe. There are complications requiring some form of intervention 15 percent of the time, but 85% of the time, little is needed beyond clean hands, some string, and something sterile and sharp to cut the cord with. Simple training — the sort that an illiterate woman could grasp — has been shown remarkably effective in improving birth outcomes for mama and baby. But much of what endangers the lives of expectant mothers has to do with the larger social and cultural patterns I mentioned earlier. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn discuss in their book Half the Sky, it’s often unlikely and decidedly low-tech things like school lunches, cloth menstrual pads, and bicycles that have the power to dramatically reduce maternal mortality in impoverished regions. That's largely because these three things help keep girls in school longer, which in turn tends to delay their age at marriage and the number of children they eventually have. Needless to say, these interventions don’t make compelling documentaries.
In my view, the last thing Americans need to see is scary birth emergency footage, stories in which lives would have been lost were it not for the film crew’s van and a bumpy ride to the hospital for emergency surgery. The truth — that prevention is the best cure, that safe birth kits make a huge difference, and that the obstacles to obstetric care in the developing world aren’t going to be surmounted by donations from CD sales — makes for less exciting viewing. And since America has the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation, the patronizing tone of No Woman No Cry is all the more grating.
God hears the cries of the laboring mother, especially those who are poor and suffering for lack of proper care. And we should, too. Like Christy Turlington Burns, I care deeply about maternal health, but I’d like to respond in a way that’s faithful to the God who made women’s bodies to birth babies perfectly — at least most of the time — which I think means reserving heroic interventions for the women who really need it, and finding ways, however humble or hidden, to help more women and their babies thrive.
Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn, and Power
Why power is so often spiritual poison.
American news outlets have been aflutter with conversations and questions about the messy relationship between power and sex, catalyzed by the coinciding revelations about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sexual indiscretions. Although the two cases are categorically different — Strauss-Kahn is accused of assaulting a hotel maid, whereas Schwarzenegger’s misdeeds, though morally repugnant, are nevertheless legal — both men compel us to look closely at the potentially combustible mix of sex and power.
Sadly, Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger are only two of many powerful men to come before them. Following the likes of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards, Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger perpetuate a sick pattern in which powerful men live as though the rules don’t apply to them. Given this trend, cultural analysts have been asking two key questions. First, what is the cause of this pattern? Why are so many men in power sexual cads? And second, how should we classify these sexual relationships between powerful men and powerless women? When a woman is economically or socially dependent on a man, is the relationship every truly consensual?
On a recent episode of NPR's On Point, Time magazine executive editor Nancy Gibbs responded to these questions by citing a new study on the effects of power in a business setting. According to the yet-to-be-released study, “The higher they rose, men or women, the more likely they were to consider or commit adultery." Social scientists theorize that this trend could be due, in part, to increased opportunity, but they also suspect power breeds a particularly blinding arrogance that borders on entitlement.
As these scandals continue to appear in the news, it would be easy for Christians to stand at the edge and look down. After all, any ideology that divorces one’s public and private lives is bound to fail. Perhaps the American public (as well as the French one) is getting what it asked for.
Then again, Christians are really in no position to judge. Not only is it common to hear about the moral failures of pastors and other church leaders in positions of power, but a pervasive addiction to pornography among Christian men and women is also symptom of it. In a country of free information, free time, and virtually unlimited access to technology, many Christians help fuel an industry that exploits women who are often poor and sometimes underage. To be sure, that is an abuse of power.
How, then, should we respond to this turn of events? Abraham Lincoln once wrote, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Lincoln’s words, when read alongside the above cited study, remind us that worldly power is not a neutral entity. It has the potential to change an individual in the most fundamental ways. It can distort our vision by perverting the way we see ourselves and those around us. This means that Christians are to handle power with fear and trembling. Worldly power is not beyond the redemptive work of God, but it is a great seducer that has ruined the lives of men and women throughout history. We cannot be naïve to that reality.
Realizing that each of us is vulnerable to the trappings of worldly power, Christ offers Christians an important example. When tempted in the wilderness, Jesus rejected Satan’s offers of worldly power, opting instead for the invisible yet everlasting power of God. And in a scene that many theologians consider to be the clearest display of Jesus’ divinity on earth, Christ forsook his right to worldly power to hang on a cross instead.
Does this mean that Christians should not be people of influence? No. But it does mean that there is a crucial difference between the power of God and the power of man. The power of God does not create hierarchy and injustice. It does not require the trodding over of the weak for the exaltation of self. It is not threatened by the strengths of others and it is not a zero sum game. In the kingdom of God there is no scarcity of blessing and freedom. And the power of God does not require the slavery and subordination of others.
Christian theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once challenged the believers of his generation with the indictment, “Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power.” Christians today do well to heed his warning. It is difficult to attain worldly power without being self-serving along the way. It is not impossible, but it is unlikely. That is why power manifests itself so similarly wherever it is found, both in the halls of national leaders and in our homes, both inside and outside the church.
Let us therefore reject the lie that worldly power is more effective than sacrifice. It is tempting to accept the world’s way of doing things because power has proven effective. But as long as our measure of faithfulness is pure pragmatism and not conformity to Christ, we are sure to hear many more stories of men and women who fall victim to the powers and principalities of this world.
A Sketchy Ad from Skechers Shape-Ups
Do 7-year-olds really need butt-boosting training shoes?
A new ad campaign by Skechers takes its popular Shape-Up sneaker and markets it to girls. Skechers' line of “Shape-Up” sneakers was originally targeted solely to women but now includes men’s and girls' versions. It promises to burn calories, improve posture, and tone your legs and butt - ”all without stepping foot in a gym!” Conspicuously missing from the lineup are boys' Shape-Ups, which only add to the controversy over what, exactly, Shape-Ups are about.
You may recall the Skechers Superbowl commercial with spokesmodel Kim Kardashian in a steamy scene with her “trainer.” Complete with sweating, panting, and gratuitous body close-ups, Kardashian coyly tells her trainer that they have to “break up.” Flipping her hair and pointing her famous rear at the bewildered “trainer,” she looks him up and down and says, “it’s not someone, it’s something” while kicking her foot behind her so her new Shape-Up can point, well, at her behind.
Although Skechers claims its Shape-Ups are about being healthy, that’s not exactly what Kardashian's ad appearance portrays. The message seems to be that thanks to Shape-Ups, her butt looks great, men drool over her, and she doesn’t even have to work hard for it. This advertising sells the message that a woman’s body is made for adoration and that every woman should want to get into steamy-sex shape with as little work as possible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about that. Remember Suzanne Somers' “thank you Thighmaster” ads in the early 90s?
And now Skechers brings that same message to girls in shoe sizes that would fit a 7-year-old. In the commercial for girls' Shape-Ups, an enthusiastic cartoon named Heidi sings in front of her adoring fans, “Heidi’s got new Shape-Ups, has everything a girl wants, she’s got the height, she’s got the bounce, she’s looking good and having fun!”
As Heidi “bounces” along, a group of schlumpy surly teenage boys dressed in junk food costumes follow after her, presumably, perhaps, indicating that she’s “broken up” with them and is moving on to better things now that she’s “looking good and having fun.”
Like so many other things, something that is good (healthy bodies) is twisted into something that is not (quick fix, appearance-oriented solutions that are just $100 away). As Christians we must think about how we’ve interacted with a culture that encourages women to pursue fitness in order to look good rather than feel good, mind, body, and soul.
I see many girls and young women whose attitude toward food and fitness is directly related to how they look. I know women who won’t miss a workout, even when they are sick. I’ve known several teenagers who take pride in wearing clothes that they wore in middle school (or before), a testament to their ability to keep a girlish figure against their own biological clock. In both cases, the relentless demands of the perfect figure actually trump healthy choices.
So yes, kid-sized Skechers cause me concern. When I showed the commercial to my 6-year-old daughter, I wondered if she would want “the height and the bounce” and think she needed Skechers to “have everything a girl wants.” Instead she looked at me, somewhat bewildered, and said, “I like them because those would be good on the playground and easy to tie.” I took a deep breath, ready to lay into Skechers and the problems with this world we live in. But then I stopped. I won’t shame or “educate” my daughter for liking them, lest she think that my anger toward this sexualized culture is really anger toward her choices.
The best way to respond to the new kid-size Skechers isn't to ban them from our homes, risking that we communicate to girls that “looking good and having fun” is itself sinful. We must be careful to listen to the messages our girls get from both our words and our lives. And we should use things like Skechers to start conversations with girls about fitness, beauty, and the goodness of bodies. In that conversation, we adult women might realize that we have a lot to learn along with our children.
I wish we lived in a world where Shape-Ups for 7-year-olds would never even enter a marketer’s wildest imagination. But since we don’t, we should choose to engage - not condemn. The same God who made our bodies curved and beautiful made them strong and resilient. We must not lose one or the other. And if Skechers Shape-Ups force Christian women to face our own body image ambivalence, then so be it.
Nicole Unice, a contributing editor for Gifted for Leadership, is director of women's ministries at Hope Church in Richmond, Virginia, and blogs at The Stubborn Servant.
Why Divorce Devastates Children
Divorce pulls the rug out from under a child's sense of self, contends Andrew Root in The Children of Divorce.
I begged her not to marry him. Our family members pleaded — all to no avail. She would have none of it. She claimed we were being negative, blind to all of his wonderful attributes. Only recently, after eight years of a tense and tumultuous marriage, after giving birth to three beautiful girls now ages 7, 6, and 5, and after he reconnected with his junior high flame on Facebook and filed for divorce, does she now see what we all saw back then.
This week, a dear friend who lives across the country contacted me to tell me that her husband left her in February without any explanation. She’s reeling. They’d been married 20-plus years, and she didn’t see it coming. No one did. To top it off, in the next week or so, her two daughters will graduate, one from high school and the other from college. These young women are now forced to negotiate important milestones in the midst of the dissolution of their Christian family.
Strangely, these sad stories came while I was reading The Children Of Divorce: The Loss of Family As the Loss of Being (Baker Academic), by Andrew Root, professor of youth ministry at Luther Seminary.
Root’s book is meant not to chastise or heap guilt on parents who have divorced, but rather to help the Christian community understand the ramifications of divorce from a child’s perspective. The child need not be under the age of 18 either; Root's thesis is that no matter the age, divorce, even “the good divorce,” has profoundly negative effects on a child’s ontology, or sense of being. Root writes that “even in instances when divorce was a great gift to one or both parents, it was a silent nightmare to a child. What I am asserting is that divorce . . . leaves major marks on children, marks that reach all the way to the core of their being.”
Throughout the book, Root, himself a child of divorce, carefully and successfully supports his thesis. By weaving together arguments from Scripture, history, philosophy, psychology, theology, as well as his own experience and that of other children of divorce, he makes it crystal clear that divorce imperils a child’s very being. However, he is careful to say that this doesn’t necessarily apply to those fleeing a marriage due to abuse.
As I read the book, I thought of the classic film Back to the Future. In a series of twists and turns, Marty McFly finds he has interfered with his mother and father’s first meeting and therefore marriage. Throughout the movie, as the likelihood of his parent’s marriage grows dim, so does his and his siblings’ existence. In one scene, Marty and Doc Brown examine a photo of Marty’s family only to discover that Marty’s brother is vanishing. Doc exclaims, “Just as I thought. This proves my theory. Look at your brother.” Marty replies with, “His head's gone. It's like it's been erased.” Then comes the memorable line from Doc: “Erased from existence.”
. . . the family serves as one of the last organic communal realities of belonging and corporate purpose that allow children to discover their selves. In the security of the love of the marriage union that shared the child’s very biological material, they are blanketed and safe to develop and understand their selves. What is there for the self . . . when there is no place to belong, when a family narrative is shattered, and purpose is disconnected from the community of one’s being?While there is no easy fix, Root believes that the church as community is what “children of divorce need to solidify their shaken ontology.” The church bears witness to a Savior who bore suffering and death and was raised to new life. It is thus uniquely equipped to stand with children of divorce in their brokenness, offering a place of listening and belonging. Here, Root has more than programs in mind; he believes that the church in its very life together provides a "these people" that children can be real with, and the confidence that they themselves are real.
In the last chapter, using Karl Barth’s framework for being-in-encounter, Root suggests four actions churches can take to “make us, and our neighbor, real":
1) Seeing and Being Seen. We must see children of divorce and, crucially, allow ourselves to be seen. We must “allow young people to come close to us and see our feelings of compassion for them or, even more important, our own unique journeys of pain and suffering.”
2) Speaking and Listening. Root observes: “By listening to and allowing young people to speak, the congregation, through its life, offers young people the chance to (re)construct their stories.” A drive by “Hello, how are you?” and pat on the back won’t do.
3) Routine as Mutual Assistance. Whether it’s worship, coffee hour, youth group, or regular service projects, dependable routines are probably the “most essential component for ontological security.” Root states, “Within the routines of the congregation, people find a place to stand and be in time and space. We attach and then know ourselves in relation to these routines.”
4) Bracketing Anxiety by Acting in Gladness. Congregational life provides a stable and dependable environment for children of divorce and thus can “assuage” their anxiety. However, these relationships cannot be rigid. An “ability to act in gladness” is what brackets anxiety.
Root rounds out the chapter with practical tips for how children/youth ministers, parents, and friends can embody these actions. May we heed his timely advice. By doing so we’ll become the communities of belonging these children so desperately need.
Lady Gaga: Where's the Outrage?
What happens when a pop culture phenomenon becomes a 'religious experience.'
During her appearance on American Idol last week, Lady Gaga told the audience, without being prompted, that she wasn’t interested in judging the contestants, only in bringing out what was special about each of them. “I want to free [my fans] of their fears and make them feel . . . that they can create their own space in the world,” Gaga has said, a goal that sounds nearly salvific in nature. When an interviewer recently called Lady Gaga the “Billy Graham of pop,” she claimed, “I'm teaching people to worship themselves.”
This successful mode of evangelism — the discipleship of Gaga, so to speak — is significant because even though Lady Gaga proclaims a fairly conventional “peace and love” message, her marketability relies on her ability to make that message outrageous (thus, the bizarre makeup and leotard she wore during American Idol).
Gaga has even referred to her Monster Ball concert tour as a “religious experience” and “pop culture church.” And the result Lady Gaga promises in return is a transformation not all that far removed from Oprah Winfrey’s message of self-empowerment through extreme makeovers and confession.
It might seem an unusual comparison, but Lady Gaga and Oprah — who both appear in the top 10 on Forbes’s most powerful women list — have crafted similar cultural personas when it comes to outrageous extravagance, cultivating an audience-as-family dynamic (Oprah with her personal appeals and studio setting, Lady Gaga referring to her fans as “little monsters”) and supposedly all-inclusive non-judgmental outlook.
In the new book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, religion scholar Kathryn Lofton writes, “Celebrities are indistinguishable from corporate brands. What separates Winfrey’s work is the soul-salving signification attached to her recommendations.” Lofton identified the allure of the Oprah brand (modeled after Oprah’s image) as something the consumer could feel good about buying because of its calculated promotion of diversity, tolerance, and goodwill. Lofton writes:
[Oprah’s] consumption of products, people, and ideas possesses an impressive diversity, yet she assimilates all those characters into herself, into her incorporated individual “she.” Oprah toys publicly with her racial identity, constantly searching for a way to include more (more people, more ideas, more confession, more objects) and exclude fewer from her particularity. Preachers and saleswomen share the common ambition to convert the multitudes under their advertising slogans proposing exclusivity.
Both Oprah and Gaga encourage this club of consumerism, crafting an unwritten understanding that true fans will subscribe to Oprah’s magazine or devote hours to the game of FarmVille in order to hear the advance stream of Gaga’s new album. Their star power is defined in large part through their influence over fans’ buying decisions. In a demonstration of good marketing, in order to stand apart from the cacophony, these stars cleverly attach a powerful message to the product.
But once a star like Gaga or Oprah is established, the product, the message, and the messenger can all become blurred into one larger brand.
So what about when one of these stars defines something as unworthy? Intriguingly, although both Oprah and Gaga claim a wide embrace of life and love, they have been outspoken in their notable exclusions. For instance: Oprah turning the considerable public force of her ire on James Frey following the revelation of his “embellished” memoir; and Gaga speaking out against controversial political decisions, such as the immigration law in Arizona and the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.
The impact that icons like these have on our culture shouldn’t be dismissed in conversations revolving around what they wear, what is coming up next, or how their fans behave. Somehow, their relative value in our society can also make Oprah the appropriate unifying choice as host of an interfaith ceremony in the wake of national disaster, and Gaga’s campaign draw responses from multiple politicians, including the Senate Majority Leader. Self-definition as a “fan” has become part of our culture, so much so that having an informed opinion about icons such as Oprah and Lady Gaga is necessary in regular conversation.
Yet when pop culture demands that we define ourselves by our devotion to cultural icons, we must see that demand as one of discipleship — and ask how it weakens our devotion to Christ. I myself will always be wary to call myself a “true fan” of any person or pop culture icon — despite liking some of Oprah’s book choices and singing along to Gaga’s catchy choruses. This is not because Oprah and Lady Gaga offend me, but because I cannot completely buy into the messages they are touting. I can't give them that much power.
We Christians risk giving too much power to even our own cultural icons. It would be just as wrong to "buy into" the messages of Christian leaders like Rick Warren and Beth Moore without discernment as it would be with Oprah or Lady Gaga. It’s the potential for idolatry that is the danger, not, for example, the controversy-baiting behind the recent Catholicism-borrowing imagery and lyrics in Gaga’s new single, "Judas."
The power of pop icons in our culture includes their ability to define the worth of a thing, and that is the true outrage of Lady Gaga or Oprah: the power that we give them.
Gender Differences: All in the Brain
Recent findings from neuroscience highlight why the church needs diversity in order to thrive.
Last month author Lane Wallace highlighted two new studies in The Atlantic, both of which offer new insights into the relationship between biology and worldview. In her first piece, “Are Liberals and Conservatives Hard-Wired to Disagree?,” Wallace examines the work of cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai. Kanai conducted MRI scans on 118 college students whose “self-reported political views ranged from ‘very liberal’ to ‘very conservative.’ " Kanai’s findings were rather compelling:
Many areas of the subjects' brains showed no difference based on political orientation. But the subjects classifying themselves as "liberal" had a higher volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex of their brains than study participants who classified themselves as "conservative." The anterior cingulate cortex is believed to play a role in helping people cope with and sort through uncertainty and conflicting information, as well as affecting their levels of emotional awareness and empathy. The "conservative" participants, on the other hand, had a higher volume of gray matter in the right amygdala region — which is thought to play a big role in identifying and responding to threats.
In a second article, “Why Do Women See the World in Shades of Grey?,” Wallace details a British study that found women “were more likely to reject absolute answers in favor of the ‘somewhat.’ ” Men, on the other hand, “were far more likely to assert that the objects were completely in or out of a particular category.” In short, the men saw the world in black and white, whereas women saw more grey.
Of particular note in the second study is the fortitude with which the women responded. The female participants’ answers were not born out of indecision but were instead made in confidence. The women were definitively more comfortable with ambiguity.
The questions fueling these studies are not new. For at least a century, psychologists have hypothesized about the connections between biology and cognitive style. In fact, long before psychology was a formalized field, philosophers and theologians recognized the inherent, oft-intangible differences between men and women.
Only in recent history has this research extended to neuroscience, a means by which scientists are literally able to observe the connection between biology and cognition. Even so, this is a new frontier with lots of unknowns, a point Wallace makes in both of her articles. Not only is the brain incredibly complex, scientists are still discovering the extent to which the environment impacts brain formation. Perhaps men and women were socialized to respond differently. Or perhaps liberals and conservatives are hardwired from birth. These two small studies cannot offer concrete clarity on either theory.
While we still have much to learn about the brain, Wallace ends with an important point: “All of us see the world through lenses. None of us has a completely objective view of reality or truth.”
As Christians, we can respond to this research, and Wallace’s subsequent conclusion, in one of two ways. One, we can reject it as an argument for relativism that makes no room for absolute truth. Or, we can embrace Wallace’s conclusion on the basis of biblical ecclesiology.
Consider, for a moment, Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12. In this chapter, Paul provides us with the essential framework of the church. It is a body made of many parts, many gifts, many “kinds of service” and many “kinds of working” (v. 6). In addition to this diversity, Paul describes a crucial interdependence between these parts. When we downplay or exclude the “weaker” or “less honorable” parts of the body, the church is crippled. Unless every part is included and functioning according to God’s design, the Body is weakened.
At a time when Christians are split by politics, priorities, and gender, Paul’s ecclesiological paradigm remains timely. Rather than see our differences solely as obstacles to be overcome, we should see them as a resource. It’s not enough to merely appreciate one another; we profoundly need one another.
It is easy to forget how truly diverse the church is. 1 Corinthians 12 is typically read within the context of spiritual gifts, but God’s design for Creation points to much more. Not only does Christian diversity include talents and types of service, it extends to gender and even brain function. Whether our differences come from biology or the environment, our God is the Lord of both.
That said, the manner in which we respond to these emerging studies, as well as the God-given diversity to which they point, says much about our belief in God’s sovereignty. These studies also challenge us to consider whether our understanding of the church is a biblical one. And finally, these studies compel us, as women, to take seriously our unique contribution to the church, without which the church would be a crippled, limping Body.
Food Cleanses and the Integrated Self
How nourishment illuminates the relationship between the body and other aspects of our humanity.
We live in a culture obsessed with food. Eating disorders, once the exclusive terrain of adolescent girls, plague populations as diverse as older adults, Orthodox Jewish women, and young men. On the other hand, the nation as a whole is experiencing an “obesity epidemic.” Whether through self-starvation or self-indulgence, many Americans have an unhealthy relationship with food.
When I was 14 years old, I was diagnosed with a condition called gastro paresis, paralysis of the stomach. The doctors couldn’t determine a cause and they didn’t know of a cure. In retrospect, I think I had been eating so little that my body slowed to a halt in response. Soon enough, I couldn’t keep any food in my system. It came right back up. I told myself, and others, that I was suffering from a rare illness. The thing was, I liked being sick. Or at least, I liked being able to eat whatever I wanted without any worry about weight gain.
In the midst of those years of doctors’ appointments and visits to therapists and hospitalizations and continuing to insist to everyone around me that I was “doing just fine,” I remember my aunt asking, “What is there in your life that you need to purge?”
It took me years to understand her question. My aunt knew that I had more than a physical problem. She recognized that mind, body, and spirit exist within an integrated whole. And until I was willing to see the same, I wasn’t able to heal. In the end, recovery took an integrated approach. I needed prayer. I needed physical therapy to get my organs moving again. I needed medication for a time. And I needed to address the perfectionist tendencies (aka idolatries) that caused me to fear gaining weight and to want to appear thin and beautiful to the outside world.
As a result of my difficult history with food, I still avoid magazines about “health and fitness” because the images and tips inside could send me back into self-destructive patterns of thinking. I’ve noted but tried to ignore the Atkins diet, the Zone, the Mediterranean, and the like. But when two of my friends talked about the “cleanses” they were doing of late, I was interested.
These “cleansing diets” caught my attention because, according to my friends, the purpose wasn’t weight loss. Rather, it was changing patterns of eating and drinking in order to rid the body of toxins. No alcohol. No caffeine. Real food, albeit incredibly healthy unprocessed food. But in addition to the physical benefits, my friends told me that cleansing their bodies of toxins would lead to greater mental clarity and well-being. Although it wasn’t explicitly Christian, it sounded like an approach to eating that understood the relationship between the body and other aspects of our humanity.
Paul’s theology of the body demonstrates an understanding of the self as an integrated whole. He describes ways that our physical actions and choices necessarily influence the spiritual, emotional, and relational aspects of our being. In a discussion of the impact of the physical act of sex upon our spiritual lives, he reminds us that our bodies are “temples” of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). Bodily acts cannot be divorced from spiritual consequences. In Romans 14, Paul takes up the question of eating food sacrificed to idols, and although he gives permission to eat any food, he does so with the understanding that what we eat impacts how we relate to God and to our community.
In America, we have plenty of food and yet that plenty has often led to the twin problems of deprivation and overeating. Jesus delights in the richness of a feast on occasion (Matthew 11:19) and at times he practices fasting as a means of communion with God (Luke 4:2). He models an approach to food that recognizes the body as more than physical. The one who is the bread of life also taught us to ask God for our daily bread.
I still haven’t tried an official cleanse. I’d rather eat every day with the recognition that what I put into my body has an impact on my thoughts, my emotions, even my prayers. That what I eat makes a difference in my relationships with others and with God. (The issue of food justice, which is to say, how our food purchases impact individual workers and animals and so forth, is a topic for another day. See “A Feast Fit for a King” for more.)
As I try to return to the size I was before getting pregnant with our third child, I remind myself that the goal isn’t appearing good to others or achieving some ideal of a “perfect” body. The goal isn’t exclusively, or even primarily, about myself. The goal is to honor God with my body and to remember God’s intentions for this body of mine.
As I sit at a computer, as I play ball with our kids, as I nurse our daughter, as I delight in a walk with a friend on a spring day, my body is a temple of the Spirit, fed by God’s goodness and by God’s physical provision. Food is not a way to serve myself, but a way to nourish my body for God’s glory and the blessing of those around me.
When Christian Teens Doubt
Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost beautifully captures the moment when an evangelical girl encounters the real world.
When you're a teenager, everything is the best - or worst - thing that’s ever happened to you. This is the blessing and curse of the years from age 12 to 20. What can match the all-consuming passion of your first crush, or the devastating assurance that no one has ever been through what you are going through, that no one could possibly understand how hard it is to be you? These emotions, in their painful, confusing, and worldview-altering messiness, are the subject of Once Was Lost, Sara Zarr's wonderful young adult novel, out this year in paperback.
I've been a fan of young adult fiction since long before I fell into its target audience and long after I outgrew it. In all those years of reading, rarely did I find a character asking the kinds of questions I was asking about life and especially faith. The tendency of Christian YA fiction is to veer toward the didactic; it’s risky to allow characters to question their spirituality. But that is what makes Zarr’s books (Story of a Girl, Sweethearts) such a treat: she uses the particular experience of being an American Christian teenager to explore the big questions that many struggle with long after high school.
Samara Taylor is definitely struggling. After a DUI lands her mother in New Beginnings, an upscale suburban rehab facility, Sam ends up home alone with her father, an overworked pastor who can face any problem except those in his own family. Then Jody Shaw, a 13-year-old girl in Sam’s church youth group, disappears, and Sam’s hometown and church take center stage of a national media circus. Sam can't help noticing that the circumstances have led to a lot of alone time for her dad and her single female youth leader who keeps trying to get her to open up about her problems. And just as she is pulling away from her closest friends, Sam stumbles into a relationship with Jody’s older brother, Nick, who seems to be the only other person who knows what it’s like to have your life upended by tragedy.
There are things we tell ourselves when tragedy strikes, things that are true and good and meant to keep us afloat, but that can lose their power when the reality of tragedy sinks in. When Sam’s dad becomes the spokesman for the family of the missing girl, he addresses the national media to tell Jody, if she is out there listening, not to be afraid, because she has the love of her community and her God, and love drives out fear. His words are meant to soothe, but as they come out of her father’s mouth, Sam is forced to confront the fact that real, embodied truths are more complicated than the truisms we settle for. “Love can’t be the answer to everything," she says.
If it was, us loving Mom should have kept her from falling apart. Her loving us should have made her want to change . . . I’ve paid enough attention to his sermons to know that what Dad said wasn’t exactly right. Perfect love drives out fear, is what it says in the Bible. Perfect love. And who, my Dad included, really knows anything about perfect love? Anyway, if God loves Jody so much, how could he let this — whatever it is — happen? And what else is he going to let happen to me?
These are not easy questions, and Sam doesn't find easy answers, though she finds some resolution in her relationships with her parents and Nick. That is part of what it means to grow up: to find a way to deal when people whom you love fail you, and to see that despite these failures, God can still work in and through such broken people.
Once Was Lost is not a book that exaggerates or exploits the heightened emotions of a teenager. Samara is dealing at an early age with events that would rock the world of a person at any age. When her youth group gathers to plan ways to help Jody’s family, she says, “The last time the youth group got together on a non-Sunday was before most of them went on the mission trip. Nick had been there, I remember, playing Guitar Hero with Daniel. For some reason that memory makes me so sad, like it’s just another thing that will never happen again, because how can you sit around playing video games, that carefree, once you know how life really is?”
It’s difficult to write compelling fiction about a Christian character. It’s easy to turn her into a caricature, to rob what defines her and every decision she makes — her relationship with God — of its richness and mystery. With young adult fiction, in particular, the temptation can be to preach, to model an example for how people should act rather than how they do act. But Zarr offers a suspenseful, angsty, and rich contemplation of what it means to doubt and trust, to love and risk, to curl inward and to reach out. More importantly, she reminds the Christian community that it’s good to allow teenagers to ask questions and to wrestle with doubts.
As someone who works closely with teens in my church's youth group, I've come to believe that we expect too little of teens. We ask them in school to dissect Shakespeare; what are we asking them to do with their faith?
Beyond SlutWalk: A New Conversation about Sexual Assault
Why Justin and Lindsey Holcombs' new Crossway book, Rid of My Disgrace, is the perfect conversation starter.
Last month thousands of women took to the Toronto streets dressed in lingerie and miniskirts. Calling their movement SlutWalk, they were protesting a police officer’s statement to college students, after a wave of sexual assaults at York University, that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Organized mainly through social media, SlutWalks have now occurred throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe. The goal, say organizers, is to debunk the belief that victims of sexual assault are responsible for the assault because of their clothing — or for any other reason.
Christian singer Rebecca St. James, discussing SlutWalk with Sean Hannity on Monday, put to words this entrenched belief. The newly married St. James said, “Women are asking for sex if they are dressed immodestly.” While she said “there is never an excuse no matter how a woman is dressed for a man to abuse a woman,”
I mean, I love the t-shirt modest is hottest. I absolutely believe it. I got married two weeks ago to a holy hunk. I have lived out purity. . . . I think there has to be a responsibility though for what a woman is wearing, personal responsibility. . . . Purity and modesty go hand in hand. I think when a woman is dressing in an immodest way, in a provocative way, she has got to think about what is she saying by her dress?
If SlutWalks and “modest is hottest” t-shirts sum up the current public conversation about sexual assault, then we need a better conversation. That’s why Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault (Crossway Books / Re:Lit) comes as a breath of gospel-infused fresh air.
Authors Justin Holcomb and Lindsey Holcomb are uniquely gifted to write this book. Justin is a pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle and director of the Resurgence, and has taught classes on sexual violence at the University of Virginia. Lindsey worked at a sexual assault crisis center, then at a domestic violence center, before serving as a deacon at Mars Hill, where she counsels SA victims. Together they provide a theologically rich and meticulously researched resource for women and men who have suffered any forced sexual conduct or behavior — which is an estimated 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men in the U.S.
The Holcombs' goal is to show SA victims that the gospel directly and clearly heals the psychological pain of sexual assault. For an SA victim to hear that they are pure, accepted, blameless, affirmed, and made new in Christ, they say, is far more transforming and true than the self-help messages that are normative in secular counseling models: “What victims need are not self-produced positive statements but God’s statements about his response to their pain,” they write.
The book defines SA as any type of sexual behavior or contact where consent is not freely given or obtained and is accomplished through force, intimidation, violence, coercion, manipulation, threat, deception, or abuse or authority. SA is at root about violence and power, not sex, and usually occurs between people who know each other (dispelling the “armed man hiding in the shrubs” myth). The Holcombs list 60 possible effects of SA, including depression, panic attacks, self-mutilation, hypervigilance, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet one of the most devastating aspects of SA is what it tells victims about themselves, the Holcombs note: that they are “vile, defiled, filthy, and dirty, as opposed to them having had a vile, defiled, and dirty act done to them.” Many victims struggle through denial, shame, guilt, anger, and despair, and a distorted self-image.
Yet Christ meets victims in each of these destructive emotions. God gives victims in denial permission to grieve, as the Psalms demonstrate. Christ himself “was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). He doesn’t turn away from the victim’s suffering but in fact identifies with her in it. Jesus, the great high priest, opens the way for victims to approach God in confidence and honesty (Heb. 4:14–16). Many SA victims feel their very self was robbed in the assault, and suggestions from family or friends that the victim cued the assault reinforce a negative self-image. The Holcombs show that the victim's lingering question of “Who am I really?” is answered throughout the New Testament: In Christ, SA victims are redeemed and forgiven (Eph. 1:6-8), chosen, holy, and beloved (Col. 3:12), a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), and the very righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21), to name a few. This identity is far better than what the experience of assault tells victims as well as what self-help culture tells them.
Despair is the most commonly reported symptom of sexual assault. To this, the Holcombs preach that God is making all things new (Rev. 21:5) and promises a future glory not worth comparing to present sufferings (Rom. 8:18). Some readers might balk at the notion that “eventually everything that happens, without exception, will be for your good” — an outgrowth of Reformed theology’s high view of the sovereignty of God. Yet the Holcombs never suggest that God wills sexual assault, only that he is powerful and holy enough to turn the worst evil, even SA, into the believer’s good.
Refreshingly, Rid of My Disgrace offers a strongly Reformed articulation of the gospel yet includes Christian voices from outside the Reformed camp. The book’s final two chapters outline God’s grace shown throughout the Old and New Testaments, and propitiatory views of atonement and expiation are central. Yet Cornelius Plantinga’s classic book on sin, Miroslav Volf’s work on forgiveness, and Dan Allender and Tremper Longman’s book on the emotions appear often in the footnotes. Further, the Holcombs rely almost exclusively on secular research to frame the clinical effects of SA. More refreshingly, while Rid of My Disgrace is written specifically for SA victims and should be used with them in counseling, its scripturally soaked message is a healing balm for anyone grappling with despair, shame, and guilt.
The truth is, we all need our disgrace removed and transfigured into beauty. The Holcombs have offered a gift of love to victims of sexual assault, and a reminder of God's relentless redemption to all who dare to pick up this challenging book.
The Happy Death of Soap Operas
Social media and real-life drama have replaced soaps as the daytime audience's entertainment of choice.
When, last month, ABC executives announced the cancellation of two of their network’s soap operas, devout fans of All My Children and One Life to Live panicked. They signed petitions and threatened to boycott ABC if the decision was not reversed. They may have expected, however, that their efforts would be futile. Again and again in recent years, daytime dramas – even the long-running Guiding Light, originally a radio show before the onset of World War II – have been canceled.
In their desperation, ABC soap enthusiasts even sought divine intervention to save these shows. But, as much as she empathized with their feelings of grief, Oprah said there was nothing she could do. With her hands folded primly on her desk and speaking in a patient tone, Winfrey addressed her supplicants in a YouTube video, explaining that soaps no longer have the audience to keep them on the air: “Believe me,” she said, “if there was a dime left to be made from them on broadcast television, it would still be happening.”
As of this writing, more than 560 soap fans have left comments in response to Winfrey. They accuse her of callously dismissing the genre of daytime drama. They say she is insensitive to the feelings of actor Susan Lucci, who has played Erica Kane on All My Children since 1970. Others seem genuinely disturbed that Winfrey would be motivated by financial gain.
What? Oprah won’t bail out the soaps? She wants her projects to be profitable? Shame on her!
In the video, Oprah said that the demise of the soap opera can be attributed to the fact that there are “just are not enough people who are at home in the daytime to watch them.” I don’t mean to fuel the anti-Oprah ire of her critics, but the “not enough people at home during the day” explanation seems thin to me.
I followed the storylines of a couple of soap operas every few years as a tween and teenager, but that was in a very different time. People weren’t burdened by living under Orange Alert, with lingering wars, or in a tattered economy.
And I was a child. Soaps offered me a larger-than-life, exaggerated view of the conflicts inherent in adult relationships. They gave a delicious peek into the lives of the impossibly rich and beautiful. (And that Noah Drake on General Hospital? I swooned.) In the early and mid-1980s, when I was tuning in, some of the characters and storylines became so popular that they burst through the bubble of daytime television and garnered a wider, general audience. Remember the media frenzy that was Luke and Laura’s wedding on General Hospital? In 1981, more than 30 million people watched their nuptials and celebrated their sweet union, even though Luke and Laura’s romance began with a drunk Luke raping Laura.
Although it’s true that fewer women choose to – or can afford to – stay home during the early years of their children’s lives, and that “housewives” were the audience for which these shows were created, there are still plenty of people at home during the day. Telecommuters, the unemployed, college students – as well as patchwork, freelancing, work-at-home, primary caregivers like me – are among them.
But the majority of us who pad around in our tube socks and sweats choose to click around on Facebook and watch cooking shows in our spare time rather than follow the antics, adultery, and amnesia of soap opera characters these days. I don’t think that the shows have changed; instead, we have.
Don’t reality shows provide even more titillation than the soaps do? Maybe people changed channels from the soaps because our culture is dishing up so much real scandal, cynicism, and hyped-up stories that not even the most stylized soaps can compete. If a culture is already inundated with news of the real-life bad behavior and lavish lifestyles of celebrities, perhaps soap characters seem less shocking to us now. Noah Drake, as portrayed by pop star Rick Springfield in the early 1980s, is as tame as Anthony from the Wiggles when compared with Charlie Sheen living with multiple partners in Sober Valley Lodge.
And Charlie? He’ll even Tweet directly to our phone so we know what he’s up to. (If Charlie’s on tour or in court or otherwise occupied, there are always celebrity mug shot sites to peruse when we need to feel superior.)
When no one else is in the news, there’s always the likes of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan to oblige our culture with a bit of scandal. And, these days, instead of dreaming of living in the fictional Palmer Cortlandt’s manor in Pine Valley, we have the option of getting a good long glimpse into how the garishly rich live in the Housewives of Beverly Hills.
What could have kept soaps interesting to an American public numbed by disappointment and anxiety and for whom scandal and conspicuous consumption are shrugged off as simple facts of life? Maybe soaps would have been revived – if only for a time – had the characters connected with viewers via social media. Or had more of the stories, in a complex and authentic way, spoken to our most hidden fears or more truthfully explored the human condition. Maybe if they had they told more soul-satisfying stories, stories about the "life that is really life" (1 Tim. 6:19), they’d still be alive and well.
Alas, there’s little money to be made from that sort of thing.
For Those Grieving on Mother's Day
How Christ meets women during a holiday that's often marked by unmet desires.
Mother's Day is a tricky holiday. Like any holiday, it is sweet for some and bitter for others. For some, it’s both.
I remember feeling on the outside looking in on Mother’s Day, first as a single woman and then after I miscarried our first. Our church had an entrance near the nursery called the Family Entrance. Could I use it? Were we a family? I finally used it regardless, almost as an act of defiance. Now, as the mother of a 4- and 6-year-old, I can deeply appreciate someone setting aside parking near an entrance that kept me from having to walk my toddlers across a busy intersection. But at the time I was dealing with emotions that weren’t swayed by practical realities. I just wanted to be a mom. And that sign at the church entrance reminded me I wasn’t.
It is an age-old conundrum in humanity in general and Christianity in particular: How do you honor someone who has something good that you want too? How do you applaud the sacrifices of one without minimizing the suffering of the other? I don’t know exactly, but I do think there is an overarching principle that's helpful.
Motherhood is not the greatest good for the Christian woman. Whether you are a mom or not, don’t get caught up in sentimentalism that sets it up as some saintly role. The greatest good is being conformed to the image of Christ. Now, motherhood is certainly one of God’s primary tools in his arsenal for this purpose for women. But it is not the end itself. Being a mom doesn’t make you saintly. Believe me. Being a mom exposes all the ways you are a sinner, not a saint. Not being a mom and wanting to be one does too.
We may long to get pregnant, looking at motherhood from afar. God sanctifies us through that longing. We may lose a pregnancy or a child, and mourn the loss of our motherhood. God conforms us to Christ through that as well. We may have a brood of children of various ages, and heaven knows God roots sin out of our hearts that way. It’s all about the greatest good, being conformed to the image of Christ – reclaiming the image of God that he created us to bear through gospel grace. And God uses both the presence and the absence of children in the lives of his daughters as a primary tool of conforming us to Christ.
Single woman watching your biological clock tick, I encourage you to look today at your longings through the lens of the gospel. You don’t have to deny your longing or talk yourself into a happy attitude for all the good things you can do without kids. It’s okay to mourn the loss. God said children are a blessing. But after the fall, we do not all get to experience that blessing. The gospel makes up the difference.
While you are disappointed in deep ways and that disappointment is real, you will one day sit with Jesus in heaven profoundly content with his work in you through this disappointment. In heaven, you will have no longing for something you missed. You will not be disappointed. May confidence in that hope sustain you.
Married woman experiencing infertility, I encourage you with similar words. People can be callous with their words, especially in the church. But believe in confidence that God, in this very moment, loves you with a deep love. You may feel estranged from him, knowing he has the power to give you that sweet infant that he has given so many around you. It seems like he is dangling a desire in front of you, teasing you with it. But understand that unfulfilled desire is a tool he uses to give you even better things – things of himself that you cannot know in easy ways.
Believe in confidence that this time of waiting is not just a holding pattern with no discernible value, but it too is a blessing, albeit in disguise, as it increases your strength to run and not grow weary and to walk and not to faint. Wait on the Lord, dear sister, in confidence.
And mom who fails her children regularly (that’s everyone else), preach the gospel to yourself this day. If you have any grasp on your reality, you are likely painfully aware of every failure you’ve made with your children. Maybe you are fatigued by the fears of future failure as well. It’s okay that your children expose your own sin to yourself. In fact, it’s the mom who doesn’t seem daily aware of her failures that most concerns me. Christ has made the way for you to be at peace.
If you sinned against your kids, ask their forgiveness. If you are kicking yourself for your failures, preach God’s grace to yourself. Don’t learn to live with your sin – don’t embrace it with the attitude, “That’s just how I am.” But don’t deny it either. Be honest about it. You sinned. You confess. God forgives. You get up and walk forward in confidence. It’s called gospel grace, and that is the legacy to leave your children.
Wendy Horger Alsup is a wife and mom who loves math and theology. She is the author of Practical Theology for Women and By His Wounds You Are Healed. This blog post originally appeared on her blog, Practical Theology for Women.
Churning Butter in Bonnets with Laura Ingalls Wilder
Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life answers why we all wanted to live the pioneer life of Little House on the Prairie.
Have you ever connected with someone through a mutually loved book? Of course, there are many ways to love the same book, but some books inspire a similar kind of devotion in their fans. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series seems to call forth reverence for their author and protagonist, Laura, and a persistent yearning to enter her world. Thousands of Laura fans embark each year on their own searches for the historical Laura, visiting the sites and homes where the Ingalls and Wilders lived.
Wendy McClure has written The Wilder Life, a funny, insightful memoir about her adventures pursuing “Laura World” — the partly historical, partly fictional, partly fantastical mental space she inhabited as a child and revisits by re-reading the books, researching the history of the Ingalls and Wilder families, and traveling to their every homesite. Along the way, McClure, a Chicago-based children’s book editor, purchases a half-dozen bonnets and attempts to recreate the "vanity cakes" Ma made in Little House on Plum Creek — a recipe for which begins, “take 2 pounds of lard,” among other things. Throughout, McClure is trying to figure out why these books, more than any others, so captured her imagination in childhood as well as adulthood.
For readers like me, who dreamed of being Laura or Laura’s best friend, who longed for pinafores, butter churns, and the occasional blizzard, McClure’s journey will elicit laughter and some new reflections on why, exactly, Laura’s stories have held readers in enduring enchantment. Even as each of us imagines the worlds of Laura’s words differently, many seem to share a fascination in the real world (now mostly lost) and real people (now all dead, and with no living descendants) behind the stories. Those stories, though frequently regarded as "straight" biography, are more likely fictionalized. (For instance, Carrie was born on the prairie, not in the Big Woods, as the books have it, and when the Ingalls family moved to Indian Territory, Laura was only 3, not 6 or 7, as the story has it.)
In her travels, McClure meets historical re-enactors, girls entering Laura look-alike contests, homeschoolers, and even a nondenominational, rural Wisconsin church that’s preparing for the apocalypse, which they believe to be imminent. They do so by learning Ingalls-style self-sufficiency and food preservation and regularly holding “survival drills.” I was sad that McClure’s and her boyfriend’s interactions with Christians were largely limited to the church. Agnostics, they were “freaked out” by these folks, whose witness meant warning them of a coming tribulation and asking if that scared them. (It did, but not in the way the lady meant.) The church was an extreme example of the people who McClure continually encountered: those who found in Laura’s world inspiration for living simpler and returning to the frontier world that was already fading when Wilder began penning her books.
So what is it that has McClure hooked on the Little House books?
Well, hand-ground flour, maybe. And Ma’s china shepherdess. And the leeches that stick to Laura’s legs when she wades in the creek. What’s most appealing for McClur e— and for me — is the books’ frank delight in the specific ordinaries of their present, the people, things, and places that make life sweet. Laura wrote in Little House in the Big Woods:
[Laura] thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.This pleasure in the “now” runs richly and deeply throughout the books. Sure, there are some “moral lessons” tucked in for good measure, but beyond manners, calico dresses, and McGuffey’s Readers, there’s this: celebrating what is. As writer, cook, and Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon wrote in The Supper of the Lamb:
The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms; wine is in order to be wine: Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else.In other words, to love the world as God does, we celebrate his gifts for what they are, where we are, and with those around us. Good books can enhance our love for God, our neighbor, and creation by allowing us an excursion into the past (or the “preposterous”) that sends us back “with renewed pleasure to the actual, as C. S. Lewis wrote in his essay “On Stories.” I’m grateful to have connected with McClure over our shared love of Laura World and the way her books enrich our lives — not by making us wish to live in the past, but by enhancing our love for the people, places, and things, however humble, that make the now so precious.
Confessions of a Breadwinner Wife
Most American women still want to 'marry up' on the socioeconomic scale. How I hit the jackpot on a totally different scale.
I married up.
While I am impatient for the traffic light to change, the summer to arrive, and the bottle to drop from the soda machine, my husband is the most patient person I know. While I am cynical and sarcastic, my husband is the epitome of kindness. While I have to stop, literally, to figure out my left from my right, my husband could move a mountain aided only by a pulley and a lever. He can build a house, play the guitar, repair a car, win at golf, change the dog’s bandage, cook up a storm, arrange flowers, sing on key, sketch a design, and operate a backhoe. I can read books and talk about them. Write a little. And run long distances, very slowly.
So when a report like this one comes out, expressing doubt that even in these modern times most young women will “marry down,” I don’t know whether to snicker or snort.
For one thing, the number of women earning a college degree has been surpassing that of men since 1996, and a report based on the most recent Census shows that women now outnumber men in obtaining graduate degrees too. Statistically speaking, then, the pool of men with equal or greater education than any particular woman is shrinking and has been for some time.
Compound this fact with that of the decreasing presence of mature, single men in the church, and the situation looks even starker for single Christian women who are old enough to have earned advanced degrees and want to marry a Christian man. If the experiences of my single female friends are any indicator, satisfying that requirement alone is difficult enough, even before considering equality in education and income.
There has been some variation, but surprisingly little, in the age-old tradition of hypergamy, the tendency of women to “marry up” on the socioeconomic ladder. According to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center, in 1970, 20 percent of wives had more education than their husbands; by 2007 that number rose to 28 percent. In terms of income, these years saw a more significant change: in 1970 only 4 percent of wives earned a higher income than their husbands, but by 2007 that figure rose to 22 percent. Despite some slight shifting, clearly, hypergamy remains the cultural norm.
As for me and my husband, we had no idea when we married that I would change my major to English, be accepted into a Ph.D. program with only my bachelor’s degree (owing more to economic and market conditions than my own merit), and embark upon an arduous academic path into which we both invested much blood, sweat, and tears. When we married, I had a year of college under my belt while my husband had been a self-employed musician since high school, having grown up in circumstances that put college out of reach. I now consider my Ph.D. to be earned by both of us, for I never could have — or would have — done it without my husband’s support. He deserves more than I do the modestly higher income I bring home compared with what he earns as a public school teacher (a job he was able to get, incidentally, once my university appointment allowed him to return to school).
Let the world define “marrying up” or “marrying down” according to such criteria as education and income. But let those of us who are in Christ be equally yoked in things of eternal consequence.
recent posts
tags
- abortion
- abstinence
- abuse
- activism
- adoption
- adultery
- advertising
- afghanistan
- africa
- Aging
- AIDS
- alcoholism
- American Idol
- anglicanism
- animals
- anorexia
- Art
- atheism
- athletes
- authors
- autism
- babies
- barbie
- beauty
- beauty pageants
- beth moore
- bible
- birth control
- blasphemy
- body image
- book club
- books
- boycotts
- breast cancer
- breastfeeding
- burqa
- business
- cambodia
- cancer
- Career
- catholicism
- catholics
- CCM
- celibacy
- censorship
- chick flicks
- childhood
- children
- Children
- china
- christmas
- Church history
- church life
- church-state
- churchlife
- circumcision
- clothing
- cohabitation
- college
- community
- confession
- consumption
- contraception
- conversion
- cooking
- cosmetic surgery
- cosmetics
- Counseling
- courts
- craigslist
- creation
- crime
- dads
- dating
- daughters
- death
- Death
- deaths
- deconversion
- depression
- disability
- discipleship
- discipline
- disney
- Divorce
- domestic violence
- doubt
- doulas
- down syndrome
- drugs
- easter
- eat pray love
- eating
- eating disorders
- economy
- Education
- embryos
- empathy
- employment
- entertainment
- environment
- Ethics
- evangelicalism
- evangelicals
- evangelism
- evolution
- exercise
- faith
- family
- fashion
- fasting
- fatherhood
- fathers
- Fear
- feminism
- film
- finances
- food
- forgiveness
- friendship
- gender
- girls
- Grief
- haiti
- halloween
- hangout
- happiness
- harry potter
- health
- health care
- higher education
- hindu
- history
- homelessness
- homeschooling
- homosexuality
- hookup culture
- hospitality
- human rights
- humor
- hutterites
- immigration
- india
- infertility
- international politics
- internet
- interview
- iran
- iraq
- islam
- israel
- IVF
- ivf
- japan
- jesus
- journalism
- judaism
- justice
- kissing
- language
- lawsuit
- leaders
- leadership
- legislation
- lent
- life ethics
- loneliness
- makeup
- mammograms
- marriage
- Media
- media
- memoir
- men
- menopause
- mental illness
- mentoring
- michele bachmann
- michelle obama
- midlife
- military
- ministry
- miscarriage
- missions
- modesty
- mormonism
- motherhood
- mothers
- movies
- multitasking
- music
- natural disasters
- nonprofits
- north korea
- nuns
- obama
- octuplets
- one-child policy
- onlinedating
- orphans
- outreach
- pain
- parachurch
- parenting
- pastors
- pentecostalism
- persecution
- philosophy
- planned parenthood
- politics
- pornography
- Poverty
- prayer
- pregnancy
- premarital counseling
- prison
- privacy
- prostitution
- psychology
- race
- rape
- reading
- relationships
- Relationships
- religious freedom
- research
- review
- romance
- sabbath
- samesexmarriage
- sarah palin
- science
- scripture
- sex addiction
- sex trafficking
- sexting
- Sexual abuse
- sexual abuse
- sexuality
- shopping
- singleness
- sisters
- slavery
- smoking
- sociology
- sotomayor
- sperm donation
- spirituality
- sports
- stay-at-home dads
- STDs
- stem-cell research
- students
- studies
- sudan
- suffering
- suicide
- supremecourt
- surveys
- tattoos
- technology
- teenagers
- teens
- television
- terrorism
- thanksgiving
- theology
- Tithing
- top 10
- trafficking
- travel
- twilight
- violence
- volunteering
- war
- Weddings
- weight
- widows
- women
- women of note
- women pastors
- women's ministry
- work
- worship
- writing
- yoga
- young adults
- youtube
- YouTube
Archives
May 2012April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009