PETA to Launch Porn Site

The group's newest and wholly misguided campaign overshadows a kernel of truth about animal suffering.

Sharon Hodde Miller

Shock and disgust. Those words best describe the public’s reaction to PETA’s most recent campaign. In a decision that can only be described as true to form, the 31-year-old Virginia nonprofit has once again chosen a campaign method that overshadows its own cause.

Continuing its by-any-means-necessary approach to animal advocacy, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced the launch of its own porn site. Peta.xxx will include pornographic material mixed with graphic images of animal abuse. Spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt justified the tactic explaining, “The racy things we do are sometimes the most effective way that we can reach particular individuals.”

Perhaps my favorite response to the misguided idea came from a Feministe writer who sarcastically speculated, “Definitely sounds like an effective way to get people to go vegan — associate animal cruelty with sexual arousal. I see absolutely no potential downsides.”

Jokes aside, PETA’s new campaign marks an escalating pattern of misogyny. Most of us are familiar with PETA’s “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign, in which celebrities pose nude. PETA has also employed numerous body-shaming tactics that included a billboard picturing a fat woman with the caption “Save the Whale, Lose the Blubber. Go Vegetarian.” In another ad that numerous airports banned from the walls of their security lines, a woman’s body was pictured through the lens of a body scan with the following words printed across her lingerie: “Be proud of your body scan: Go Vegan.” It should also be noted that neither ad pictured the woman’s face.

Animal rights and women’s rights are by no means mutually exclusive, which is one of the most unfortunate things about PETA’s strategy. We do not have to choose one cause over another, but PETA clearly has. If the objectification of women somehow promotes its agenda, then so be it.

But perhaps even more unfortunate is that PETA’s methods obscure their own message, a message that Christians need to hear. No, I am not talking about the importance of caring for animals, for which there is ample scriptural support and Christians have long supported. Instead, I am referring to the theological component of animal cruelty, an issue that Christians are less likely to consider but has entirely captivated PETA, whether they recognize it or not.

PETA’s work, as misguided as it frequently is, strives to accentuate the evil of innocent suffering. For Christians, this concept is a theological one and it is deeply connected to the center of our faith. For PETA, it is the center. Both groups would hold to the idea that the innocent should not suffer, so when an animal suffers and dies at the hands of humanity for no reason at all, many viscerally understand the wrongness of it.

This reaction is quite possibly a God-given one. In fact, it sheds an important light on the history of our faith as it relates to animals. More specifically, it helps us to understand the practice of atoning sacrifices that we find throughout the Old Testament.

It is easy to read Old Testament accounts of sacrifice and assume it was an easy, commonplace practice. Perhaps it was for some people. But I suspect the sacrifice of animals was meant to entail more than a dispassionate, forensic exchange. There is a reason Israelites did not atone for their sins through sterile monetary payment or the neat sacrifice of corn. Animal sacrifice, in addition to satisfying the punishment for our sin, was a horrific visual. It forced the Israelites to see the ugliness of their sins. They witnessed the evil of their transgressions and learned that sin has real and tragic consequences.

Whether the Israelites recognized it or not, those animals did not deserve to die. It was not fair that they should bear the punishment of their owners’ sins. When an Israelite offered a goat or a lamb to be sacrificed, a part of him should have been sickened by the act. Animal sacrifice was a theological portrait.

Of course, the death of an innocent animal is nothing compared with the death of an innocent God. Jesus, the perfect Lamb, satisfied the punishment for our sins once and for all. Whenever we feel disgust at the suffering of an innocent animal, it is but a taste of the despicableness of the Crucifixion.

With this salvation history in mind, our approach to animal suffering should be situated within the larger story of Christian sacrifice. When we recoil at the thought of animal cruelty, our spirits remind us of the tragedy of sin and the suffering that has been endured on our behalf, not only by animals but more importantly in Christ. That is why I sympathize in some small part with PETA’s work: They are responding to a divine revulsion against the brokenness of the world as it is manifested in our treatment of animals.

Of course, PETA also exemplifies the danger of divorcing that innate recognition from the gospel. For PETA, animal rights is an idol to which all other agendas must bow, including human flourishing. While Christians, unequivocally, cannot abide cruelty against animals, neither can we abide the objectification of women or any other movement that belittles or abuses God’s creation. PETA’s original intent may have been noble, but their methods ultimately remind us that freedom and justice for all is to be had in Christ alone.

Christ and My Curly Hair

Attempts to undo my wiry hairdo had grown to idolatrous proportions - and taken up three whole months of my life.

Michelle Van Loon

This spring, a friend asked me to accompany her to Africa to document the labors of a nonprofit working in microfinance. She told me we’d be traveling to a number of remote villages to complete our assignment.

Instead of a dewy-eyed, “I’ll go wherever God sends me,” or even the sturdy old-stall tactic, “Let me pray about it," my first thought was, How will I blow dry my hair?

My vain response forced a long, hard look in the mirror, and not just so I could prep for another day of battle with wiry, frizzy hair. I’d sat through decades of sermons and Bible studies telling me that I was fearfully and wonderfully made, urging me to love myself because God loved me. All this self-acceptance talk may as well have been spoken to me in Portuguese. A demanding little idol called the Straight Hair god had rendered the message unintelligible.

As a young girl, I learned about the Straight Hair god from shampoo commercials and TV, and my “Ellis Island” hair wasn’t it. My natural `do makes me look a lot like the people pictured in those grainy pictures of Eastern European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic in steerage class at the turn of the century, probably because I am related to a handful of them.

I tried appeasing the Straight Hair god with a daily offering: blow-drying it into an immovable hair helmet that resembled a pile of scouring pads. Heaven forbid the humidity crept above 65 percent.

Except for a brief stint going natural in the mid-70s, and the big hair era of the 1980s, my type 3C curly hair and I have appeased this god with a daily offering of blow-drying for 40 years. I did the math: 10 minutes with the blow dryer every morning works out to over 100 24-hour days spent with a blow dryer and a round brush in my hand. I have given more than three months of my limited time on earth to blow-drying my hair.

Author Anne Lamott has written about her long war with her wiry hair: “[I’d devoted] most of my prayer life to the desperate hope that there not be any weather. Also, that no one trick me into getting into a convertible and then suddenly insist on taking the top down. . . . The only alternative is that you wear a hat, but then when you take it off you have terrible hat-hair, where it looks like a cartoon mouse has been driving a steamroller around your head all day. And you obviously can't wear a scarf or you end up looking like your aunt Bev.”

Though many women exercise the “Wanting the Kind You Don’t Have” rule when it comes to hair, many curly girls live with a certain level of insecurity because the prevailing standard of beauty in our culture is flat-ironed. There are a few high-powered women with curly hair who are trying to battle the notion that their untamed tresses diminish their workplace credibility or makes them less desirable. As curly-haired Megan McArdle, senior editor for The Atlantic, recently noted in “Can A Professional Woman Go Curly?”, “For better or worse, smooth straight hair has become synonymous with ‘professional’ in America. Show up with curly hair, and you might as well show up with waist-length beads and an incense burner.”

Some of us secretly believe that a part of our physical appearance came with a faulty manufacturer’s warantee. That unchallenged belief is a perfect breeding ground for the kind of idolatry that drove my morning grooming routine for four decades. Lamott notes that it took the words of a dying friend about wasting time on the unimportant to see her hair woes in a healthier light.

The Holy Spirit used my fretting about caring for my curls in an African village to confront me about my hairdolatry. Once he had my attention, I found an invitation from bouffant bondage in New Testament passages like 1 Peter 3:3-5 or 1 Tim. 2:9-15. These passages are often used as running chainsaws in the debate over gender roles in the church or, in fundamentalist circles, to create legalistic standards for women’s dress. I carry a few scars from the wounds of those ill-wielded chainsaws, and I’m sorry to confess that those scars got in the way of hearing the words that could free me from serving the Straight Hair god with my daily blow-drying offerings. Simply, both Paul and Peter urge believing women not to become enslaved by serving their external appearance because this enslavement would limit their ability to serve others.

There was a big difference between the healthy components of my grooming routine each day (moisturizer, mascara, blush, simple-but-current clothing choices), and the fear of not being acceptable or attractive to others. That unhealthy fear had turned me into a blow-drying slave.

My journey to freedom began with repentance, as well as a trip to a new hairdresser this summer, who spent an hour showing me how to take care of my curly hair without using the blow dryer. It took several weeks and a series of really bad hair days before I got the hang of it. I’m guessing my unplugged detox this summer is a little like coming off a 40-year nicotine addiction.

I’d lived the lie that my wild hair was a mistake on God’s part or some sort of failure on my own. When I look in the mirror these days, my untamed hair preaches a sermon at me every time I look at it, telling me I am fearfully, wonderfully made after all.

Adderall Arrives at Christian Colleges

Are well-meaning evangelical faculty and administration in part to blame?

Marlena Graves

Like any university campus, Christian colleges/universities have their share of students who abuse street drugs. But in my work with Christian college students over the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more over-the-counter and prescription drug abuse. One of the newest and seemingly innocuous (from the students’ perspective) drugs of choice is Adderall.

Adderall is prescribed to those suffering from ADHD. However, students who feel pressure to achieve high grades and maintain the requisite college experience are turning to Adderall, known as the "study buddy," for a boost. As an "academic steroid," it gives students the energy and focus they need to pull all-nighters or study for long periods during the day. And it's easy to get. A student can buy it on campus from other students or lie about their condition in order to obtain a prescription from a medical provider. Inside Higher Ed reports that nationally, the number of students who are using Adderall and Ritalin as “study aids” is close to10 percent. In a New Yorker article titled “Brain Gain,” Margaret Talbot writes:

. . . in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement . . . .

I first heard about Adderall a few years ago when a sharp, highly involved, and winsome student sent me an e-mail asking me “to keep her accountable.” This precious student confessed to using Adderall during finals week and on a few other occasions when pressures piled up. When I asked her where she procured it, she told me that she got it off of another student.

This student looks and acts like an upstanding member of any youth or young adult group — she could be a ministry leader in church. In fact, I love her dearly. And that is often the case with students who are abusing neuro-enhancing drugs; most of the time you can’t tell they’re abusing by just looking at them.

As I already mentioned, for many, abusing these drugs is a means to a tangible end. Students are concerned with getting into grad school, pleasing their parents, and getting the coveted internship that lands them the desired job in this precarious economy. To do that, they need an impressive resume. Balancing a social life, academic pressures, and over-involvement in organizations and campus ministries can be overwhelming. Thus the temptation to abuse a tiny neuro-enhancing pill.

What can Christian campuses do? First, it’s imperative that we not incite an over-commitment and false guilt frenzy by explicitly or implicitly placing too many demands on our students. We need to examine our spoken and unspoken rules about academic performance and ministry involvement.

Second, we (as well as churches and parents) need to lead the way in modeling the natural rhythms of worship in our common life — rhythms of work, prayer, Sabbath, service, and play. As Her.meneutics editor Katelyn Beaty pointed out to me, “Christian colleges in particular should incorporate a spirit of Sabbath and worship into their common life, and should thus be distinct from their diploma-generating secular counterparts.” I couldn’t agree more.

That’s why I repeatedly remind my resident assistants, students, and myself that we don’t have to be involved in a lifetime of ministry in one semester, or in four years. We don’t have to take every opportunity that comes our way. Not even Jesus Christ, God incarnate, did that. There are seasons in life — seasons with differing levels of involvement. As Lauren Winner once noted in Christianity Today magazine, getting eight hours of sleep may very well be the most holy thing we do as followers of Jesus. It’ll help keep us from making ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Busyness, hurry, and over-commitment are not badges of honor. On the contrary, they are indicative of a sick soul. (In this vein, I highly recommend reading Jan Johnson’s newest book (IVP 2011) Abundant Simplicity: Discovering The Unhurried Rhythms of Grace; look for fellow Her.meneutics writer Amy Julia Becker's review in the next couple weeks.)

Surely no doubt parents, Christian college campuses, and churches need to address the danger of abusing neuro-enhancing drugs like Adderall. We dare not assume the stance that “my student would never do such a thing.” But we can go further than raising awareness. We can curb the demands and expectations we place on students and diffuse the temptation to take these drugs through learning and modeling “unhurried rhythms of grace."

'One Thousand Gifts,' Reconsidered

A second take on Ann Voskamp's bestseller about gratitude.

Micha Boyett Hohorst, guest blogger

Like every other woman in Western Christendom it seems, I’ve been reading Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. This month our family moved from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. The book group for the church I visited last week? Reading it in October. The women’s group of the church I looked up on the Internet? Reading it in September. And why? With its lyrical — some might say grammatically adventurous — prose ("I am all eye, seeing through life as glass to God"), the book is nothing like the prose we’re used to from our Zondervan-pressed inspirationals.

Though everyone may be talking about it, not everyone is convinced that the book belongs alongside C. S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers in the devotional canon. Two weeks ago, regular Her.meneutics writer Rachel Marie Stone critiqued the book, believing Voskamp’s emphasis on Eucharisteo (joyful gratitude) is overreaching as “the key that opens all locks” in the Christian’s spiritual life. Stone expressed concern that gratitude was being upheld as an additional requirement for salvation to be effective.

Stone also noted that Voskamp’s “wrestling to be grateful for everything” is not necessarily biblical, citing a scene from the book in which one of Voskamp’s sons throws a piece of toast in his brother’s face. In that moment of anger and frustration, time seems to pause and Voskamp grasps for thanksgiving, a “Zen-like acceptance” that seems Stone says runs counter to biblical examples. Stone cited the Book of Job and Jesus’ prayer from the cross as proof that thanksgiving is not a proper response to all of life's circumstances.

The comments in response to Stone’s post were passionate. Whatever the concerns many of us may have (I for one could have done without the bit about making love to God in Paris — what would John Calvin say?), women are connecting to this book. It’s worth asking why the book has captivated enough women to keep it on The New York Times bestseller list for months?

When my 3-year-old was born, I had romantic notions of the hours I would spend breastfeeding him: hours to finally be the woman of intercessory prayer I’d always wanted to be, hours for motherhood to wise me up, make me deep and transformed. Instead, my nipples hurt. I worried about homemade baby food versus the jarred stuff and whether I was enforcing enough tummy time. I smiled at him and he stared at me. After months of this, I realized I’d been failing the “motherhood is making me a wise woman of God” plan.

Then he was crawling, walking, running, shouting “no!” And I lost all sense of quiet in my life. I’d try to wake up early for prayer, and he would wake up early as well. I’d plan on transformative contemplation during naptime, but my sleep-deprived body would nod off along with him. I realized I needed to relearn prayer.

I read about monastic practices, taped prayers all over my home. I told myself to pray during snack time and lunchtime and every moment of pause in my day as a SAHM. Some days it worked. Some days I felt the failure I’d been bearing for the entirety of my son’s life.

Fast-forward: Mom to two, longing for the quiet days of my first son’s babyhood, longing for the right catalyst to launch me into the kind of praying life, the constant response to Christ, the renewed sense of the Spirit in my day, that I know would make me more kind to my children, less anxious, more wholehearted in my view of the world and joyful toward the monotony of the work of the home.

I read Voskamp’s book and began listing 1,000 things for which I am grateful. And I learned why this book , despite its improper grammar, is so popular: Mothers love this book because we have forgotten how to connect with God. We’ve lost our sense of wonder at the world. Many of us are so consumed with the details and demands of motherhood that the line linking us to God has gotten tangled and dusty. In One Thousand Gifts, we find a wise mother telling us how she discovered God in the midst of this life with children. It isn’t by recommending another Bible study. (We’ve tried it.) It isn’t by guilting us into more time in prayer. (We feel guilty enough.) It’s as simple as listing the beautiful things God is giving us, right now in this moment.

One Thousand Gifts is changing my life, not because gratitude is the key to salvation, but because gratefulness brings me into God’s presence every time. Gratefulness is simple, yet it is shaping me into a woman who prays while doing the dishes, folding the laundry, and singing in the car with my kid. Without God’s healing presence, I am like Voskamp was: anxious, quick to despair, continually asking questions about why God allows what God allows. When I escape my glaring natural (and broken) tendencies and thank my Lord for what is truly a gift in my everyday life, the poopy underwear is not a deal breaker for my mood, the baby’s cries are not worth my raised blood pressure and raised voice at my preschooler. When I’m grateful, the world is not only beautiful, God is good and worthy of adoration too.

As Voskamp says, “Eucharisteo precedes the miracle.” We enter into “his gates with thanksgiving,” not with plans, not with goals, or books, or commitments.

Thanksgiving is simple. And that’s the beauty of this book. Sometimes we all need to remember that God is here right now, in the midst of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And that’s a sandwich I’m suddenly grateful for. Who knew?

Micha Boyett Hohorst blogs at MamaMonk.com, and just moved from San Francisco to Austin with her husband and two boys. This is her first Her.meneutics post.

How to Avoid Marrying the Wrong Christian

Why "he's a really great, godly guy" is not enough.

Marlena Graves

What do you do if you’re engaged but have serious misgivings about your decision, red flags popping up left and right? Do you a) get married, since you’ve set a date, sent out the invitations, spent a boatload of money, are too embarrassed to back out, and believe that most people get cold feet anyway? Or b) call the whole thing off until further notice? I think most of us would choose the latter, and would recommend thus to any friend or family member having serious doubts. But in practice, it isn’t what we many of us do, and understandably so: Calling the whole thing off is difficult, painful, and risky.

Jennifer Gauvain, a licensed social worker and coauthor of How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy, recently reported in the Huffington Post’s “Divorce” section that 30 percent of the nearly 1,000 divorced women she surveyed admitted to marrying despite serious doubts they had about their relationships long before the wedding day. According to reporter Katherine Bindley, the website IndieBride.com now hosts 33,000 conversation threads just about the urge to bolt.

I did.

I broke off an engagement to a really nice Christian guy. When it came down to it, we were incompatible on many levels. I had doubts at the inception of the relationship, but ignored them. Continuing the relationship was my way of trying to force a puzzle piece into a place it didn’t fit. As the doubts grew, I tried harder to make the relationship work. However, if I hadn’t heeded my gut-wrenching doubts, and paid attention to my mom and abuelita’s words, (“he’s a nice guy, but not the one for you”) and the words of a friend I deeply respected, I would’ve made the worst mistake of my life. Even so, breaking the engagement and ending the relationship was far from easy.

For a while I balked because I didn’t want to hurt the guy and was worried what others would think of me should I call it off. But in the end, I preferred the pain of breaking up with him and potential lifelong singleness over the pain of being married to him. If I had married him, I would’ve wilted. And now I know I would have forfeited marrying my priceless treasure of a husband, the one person I most love, admire, and respect.

Unfortunately, there are many Christian women (and men) who ignore their gnawing suspicions. They forge ahead into marriages they didn’t belong in. Why?

Gauvain lists four overarching reasons cited by the women in her survey: 1) “Age: The self-imposed biological clock is starting to tick a little louder.” 2) “Marriage will instantly make the relationship better.” 3) “It's my last chance to get married and no one else will come along”; and, 4) “If it doesn’t work out I can always get a divorce.” I’d add a fifth and sixth reason that are specific to Christian men and women: 5) to legitimize sex, and 6) because of guilt associated with premarital sex or over having conceived a child out-of-wedlock.

I counsel many Christian college students (mostly women, but some men, too) and can’t tell you how often I am fit-to-be-tied over their relationships. There are so many instances when I want to bang my head against the wall because they proceed to ignore the red flags they themselves point out or because they admit to pursuing marriage for the wrong reasons (for example, to avoid falling prey to the worst fate imaginable in the evangelical church: lifelong singleness). I think that partially explains why many Christian marriages end in divorce — we ignore the road signs that say “turn back” or “cease and desist.” We think that companionship or sex or children will alleviate relational problems. But most often, they only intensify underlying incompability.

Marriage is a holy institution. We should enter into it with fear and trembling, fully dependent on God and the community of Jesus to uphold and guide us in all of our relationships (whether we are single, dating, or married). If we have persistent doubts or if those closest to us, those we most respect, express grave concern, we must pay attention. We cannot let our sexual desires, our desires for companionship, or fear of what others will think keep us from doing what is right and healthy.

Is it better to marry the wrong person or someone we have nagging doubts about rather than stay single? Absolutely not. Granted, singles might quip, “That is easier said than done.” And they are right. However, none of us is alone and dependent on our own resolve. We have God and his community to assist us.

Consider this: If we forge ahead, marrying someone we have doubts about, a community of people may become casualties of what could potentially be a mal-formational, death-dealing marriage. Marriage is to be life-giving, an icon of our relationship with God. So let us choose life, for both ourselves and for the people whose lives are closely linked to ours, by paying attention to our doubts and the concerns of our trusted community. We may end up saving a life besides our own.

The Her.meneutics Gender Debates (Part 2)

We talk to theologian Russell Moore about Bachmann, the divorce culture, and why a feminist reading of Scripture would often be easier than a complementarian one.

Interview by Rachel Stone

Yesterday on the blog, we heard from theologian William Webb, an egalitarian who says the Bible's "redemptive movement" shows that because of Christ, women are more, not less, free to exercise gifts in church ministry and beyond. Today we hear from popular pastor and blogger Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and, as of today, the board chairman of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Moore says that headship in marriage actually empowers women, and that complementarians and egalitarians can find common ground around fighting a pornographic culture that reduces women to sexualized bodies.

Many evangelicals who would elect Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann for President wouldn’t attend a church with a female pastor. Is there a contradiction here?

On the face of it, there is no contradiction since Scripture teaches that the church, not the world, is presently the outpost of the new creation. The state in this age doesn’t — and can’t — reflect God’s kingdom purposes in the way that the church or a family can.

I would gladly vote for someone to be my president who disagrees with me on whether or not infants can be baptized. I wouldn’t want that same person to be my pastor, because we will have to decide together who and how to baptize. The Kuyperian principle of “sphere sovereignty” is helpful here.

On the other hand, that’s the ideal and, very often, not the reality. Unfortunately, American evangelicals have too often longed for a secular authority to serve as a spiritual leader, and political professionals have been all too willing to exploit this by teaching candidates to parrot evangelical-sounding phrases and “testimonies.” In such cases, political leaders become totem-like for evangelicals. An attack on a candidate who identifies with “us” is an attack on “us” or, worse, on Jesus. That’s unhealthy, regardless of whether the politician is male or female.

In the case of evangelical over-identification with political partisanship, though, there can be a subtle shifting in what it means to define a woman’s life, or a man’s, as a “success.” There is quite a bit of inconsistency in evangelical complementarians talking about a “gentle and quiet spirit” while cheering Ann Coulter’s latest sarcastic barbs.

Lots of evangelicals, such as William Webb, take the Bible seriously and are still comfortable seeing a woman in the pulpit. What about you?

I don’t think the issue is one of comfort — there are many women I would love to hear preach, and who are much better Bible scholars and communicators than any man I know. But the issue is whether the Scripture’s qualifications for this office (1 Tim. 2 and others) are normative.

There are some so-called “complementarian” Christians, I’m sure, who hold the position simply because they have never seen anyone but a man in the pulpit, and just find anything else odd and disquieting.

I have never met a convictional complementarian, though, who holds that position out of reflexive comfort. For most of us, the Scripture is pulling us in the other direction from our comfort. It would be much easier, especially for those us under 40, to embrace a more feminist stance here and elsewhere.

Complementarians sometimes say that a feminist or egalitarian reading of the Bible owes more to our own cultural prejudices than to a faithful reading of Scripture. Is this true?

I do not believe that egalitarian Christians are evil, Bible-destructing people. Most of them are trying to reconcile some things they find in Scripture (Jesus’ affirmation of women, for instance) with others that seem to contradict these (the teachings of Paul and Peter on the church and family, for instance).

I do think there’s a tendency for all of us to read the Scripture around our own “plausibility structures.” Paul obviously can’t mean that women aren’t to teach men, we conclude, because the very idea seems absurd, so he must mean something else. I think that’s a mistake.

This is not unique to egalitarians by any means. For example, American Christians have a great deal of difficulty hearing Jesus and his apostles on issues of wealth and poverty. We seek to make Bible elastic enough to allow us to pursue our dollars and follow Jesus simultaneously.

When complementarians argue that we shouldn’t conform the Bible to our cultural expectations, we are not saying that this is unique to egalitarianism. We’re saying, across the board, that we should let the Bible be as countercultural as it is.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood claims that evangelical feminism has caused a "tragic loss of the beauty of manhood and womanhood as created by God." What would you consider an example of this?

I think this is one area where complementarians and feminists can find common ground. The pornographic “revolution” has not empowered women but the men objectifying them. The abortion-rights “revolution” has not empowered women but sexually predatory men. Women and children are the first hurt by the kind of unaccountable divorce culture we have allowed to be cultivated in our culture and our churches.

Moreover, in Christian circles, there is often a diminishing of the value of the unique contribution of women to the church and to the home. What is implied is that a woman’s gifting is only valued if it is the same as that of a man.

What complementarianism contributes to this discussion is to say that where there is a loss of self-sacrificial, other-protective male leadership, the result is not equality but the worst form of patriarchy. In the Bible, headship is not dictatorship, but instead the responsibility to sacrifice oneself for another (Eph. 5:25-30). In a Christian view of reality, women’s value is not determined by her sexual attractiveness or availability to men. A truly complementarian Christianity will value the full spectrum of gifts, and the cooperative economy that God brings about through the distinctions between women and men as well as through their commonalities.

Thank you, Dr. Moore!

Many Her.meneutics blog posts touch on issues of gender and gender roles. Here's a sampling. Parent publication Christianity Today magazine has an online section devoted to sexuality and gender.

The Gender Debates Come to Her.meneutics

In the first of a two-part series, we hear from egalitarian theologian William Webb on Michele Bachmann, slavery, and his 'redemptive-movement' reading of Scripture.

Interview by Rachel Stone

Submissive wife and president of the United States — an oxymoron, if you ask many journalists analyzing the faith of 2012 hopeful Michele Bachmann. In a recent GOP debate, responding to the question of whether she as president would submit to her husband, Bachmann said, “I'm in love with [Marcus]. I'm so proud of him. What submission means to us, it means respect. I respect my husband. He's a wonderful godly man and great father.” Journalists have spent days analyzing her response, seemingly baffled that a modern woman could take the words of an ancient text so seriously.

Yet evangelicals have taken the Bible’s words about men and women very seriously — enough to write tomes on what Paul meant when he told wives to submit to their husbands, when he said he did not allow women to assume authority over a man in church, and when he said women would be saved through childbearing. Inter-evangelical debates have traditionally centered on whether Paul’s injunctions forbid women from leadership in ministry, and whether male-female complementarity describes a work-home delegation of “roles” between husband and wife. Today and tomorrow on Her.meneutics, we’ll hear from two prominent theologians who have carefully thought through these and other passages. The first, William J. Webb, is an egalitarian New Testament scholar noted for his “redemptive-movement” approach to the Bible. The second, Russell D. Moore, is dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as a pastor, writer, and blogger, and complementarian. First we hear from Webb.

Many evangelicals would be uncomfortable attending a church pastored by a woman, even though they would vote for Bachmann or Sarah Palin as U.S. Commander in Chief. Is there a contradiction here?

Absolutely. I see a glaring inconsistency in the way that hierarchalists (I consider “complementarian” a misleading name) understand and apply Scripture. If one sees the Bible teaching restricted leadership — it speaks to issues of leadership in all three domains — home, church, and society. Not just home and church.

Many evangelicals think that you can't take the Bible seriously and be comfortable with women in the pulpit. But you do, and you are! How do you read 1 Timothy 2:12?

The prohibition of 1 Timothy 2:12 has both cultural and transcultural components embedded within it. The rationale that women are “more easily deceived” (2:13) was true of women in the ancient world. But today, this isn’t so: women share equal knowledge in university, college, trade school and seminary education. And primogeniture — the idea that Adam has authority by virtue of being created first (2:14) — dominated the ancient world. But this isn’t as prominent or persuasive a rationale in our times. We don’t leave a “double inheritance” for the first born (as Scripture instructs) within an egalitarian society. We should apply the transcultural teaching within 1 Tim 2:12-14 — the ultimate ethical application implied within the culturally bound concrete text — by doing the following: put into leadership/teaching positions only those, either men or women, who are not easily deceived and who are respected within the Christian community.

Many complementarians believe that an egalitarian reading of the Bible owes more to our own cultural prejudices than to a faithful reading of Scripture. What's your answer to them?

I think this question betrays two incorrect assumptions. First, it wrongly assumes that hierarchicalists or patriarchalists do not have their own cultural and subcultural prejudices that impact their reading of Scripture. Second, it wrongly assumes that Scripture itself has not been impacted in its own formation with cultural components and a fallen-world context that shapes its social ethics. One would do well to read Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis to see how communities dominate how we read Scripture (many preachers used Scripture to defend slavery). Did ancient culture impact the biblical ethics of slavery but not that of women?

What would be an example of something in the Bible that most North American Christians ignore, but that is as clearly (or more clearly) mandated than "do not permit a woman to teach"?

In a new book, Corporal Punishment in the Bible, I outline seven ways that pro-spankers have gone beyond the Bible. By not doing what the text explicitly teaches (and by doing something different, something ethically progressive), Christians fulfill the underlying redemptive spirit of Scripture better. One of the seven examples that I raise is the clear teaching of Scripture about the virtue of beatings that leave welts, wounds and bruises. Even pro-spankers like James Dobson (and the broader Focus on the Family movement) would call this kind of physical beating abusive. In seven ways they’re not really doing what the Bible instructs. We need to stop a selective reading of the text and embrace a hermeneutic (interpretive method) that is able to incorporate (not ignore!) texts that are ethically problematic.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood claims that evangelical feminism has caused a "tragic loss of the beauty of manhood and womanhood as created by God." What's your response to that? And what does the church miss out on when it keeps women out of leadership/teaching roles? What does it gain by having women in those roles?

I call my own position “complementary egalitarianism.” I believe that women and men complement each other sexually, reproductively, and in other ways, too. Fathers provide something different in families than mothers do; men and women are certainly not wired in identical ways. The real question, however, is whether or not hierarchy (unilateral submission) has to be one of the necessary or biblically required components or not. I believe in complementarity without hierarchy. Or, better put: mutual deference and shared leadership. Do we lose something here? No. We gain something incredibly valuable while maintaining male-female complementarity.

How passionate are you about this conviction?

Passionate enough to be willing to lose my job over it. After 20 years with a particular seminary in southern Ontario, I was terminated because of my complementary egalitarian views and writings. I’m now an adjunct professor with Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Canada’s largest evangelical seminary. My journey has been painful, but I wouldn’t have done things differently. I’m excited to be at Tyndale and would much rather be there as an adjunct (despite the obvious demotion) than full time at a seminary where I’d be required to wear the badge of patriarchy under the complementarian label. Am I passionate about an egalitarian understanding of Scripture? I think so.

Thank you, Dr. Webb.

Look for the second part of this series, in which we’ll hear from complementarian theologian Russell Moore.

How Much Do Our Stories Matter?

Christian theology makes clear both the limits and the necessity of stories for meaningful moral discourse.

Ellen Painter Dollar

In yesterday’s post, I told three stories about people who used reproductive technologies to have babies: A mother became pregnant via IVF after her first three children were tragically killed. A couple turned to an Indian surrogate to bear the child they could not. A fictional character wanted a baby for many reasons, stemming from both self-protection and love.

I put people’s stories (including my own) at the center of my study of and writing about reproductive ethics. There is a name for moral deliberation that gives significant weight to people’s stories: narrative ethics. Traditional ethics uses a juridical process, in which experts consider the moral questions raised by a situation, explore those questions using established ethical principles, and render a judgment based on which principles are most applicable. Narrative ethics is less cut-and-dried. It allows room for amateurs to weigh and discuss the complexities of a particular person’s story, acknowledging that such factors as the person’s intentions and past experience are relevant.

But there’s a problem with focusing exclusively on our and others’ stories: Humans are prone to self-absorption, self-pity, and a tunnel vision that puts our own pain, problems, and desire for happiness front and center. We are all too capable of justifying poor decisions and bending or obscuring the truth to suit our needs. In short, we are all sinful and overly caught up in the self.

So practicing narrative ethics does not mean that anything goes, that people have unlimited freedom to pursue whatever they want in isolation from moral, cultural, and emotional consequences. Rather, practicing narrative ethics means that we give weight to the myriad and significant circumstances that lead people to make ethically fraught decisions, and allow people’s stories to influence our dialogue and our language.

When we fail to incorporate people’s stories into our ethical discourse, we risk making moral judgments appear irrelevant. For example, the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ 2009 statement opposing assisted reproduction, "Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology," states in one passage, “In an important sense, the spouses [who rely on egg/sperm donors and/or surrogates] have decided not to be fully the mother and father of their child, because they have delegated part of their role to others.” Several months ago, I had a friend over with her infant daughter, who was conceived via IVF using a donor egg. As her daughter keenly followed her mother’s every move and protested the minute she left her sight, my friend said, “I challenge anybody to tell me I am not this child’s mother.” The bishops’ language fails to recognize the story of a donor-conceived baby who clearly knows exactly who her mother is.

In another example of how people’s stories can influence our moral discourse, consider this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine article on parents who 'reduce' twin pregnancies; that is, they ask a doctor to kill one of their healthy fetuses (by injecting potassium chloride into the fetus’s heart) so that they will give birth to only one infant. Most twin-to-singleton reductions are due to parental preferences, not medical necessity. My observation after discussing this story on my blog and reading various online responses: Even knowing a bit of the stories behind the reductions profiled, most people found the article disturbing. Our empathy for the parents' fear and stress when they discover they are expecting two babies was not enough to outweigh our sense that being emotionally, physically, and financially overwhelmed does not justify pregnancy reduction. Such a decision is particularly hard to swallow when parents have gone to great expense and effort to conceive via IVF (as did a number of the couples profiled in the article). In this case, knowing the stories behind ethically fraught decisions made people less, rather than more, likely to condone them.

Putting stories at the center of moral and theological discourse is exactly what Jesus did with the parables. In fact, Jesus’ reliance on emotion-laden stories points to one of the primary reasons that I am a Christian. While Christian theology has elements of transcendence and detachment from human experience, at core, Christianity is about a God who willingly and fully took on our human-ness, in all its madness, tragedy, perplexity, and radiance. Jesus offers a way of being that embraces the mess and miracle of living our very human stories.

Is it right or wrong, moral or immoral, to create embryos in a lab or hire another woman to carry a baby for you? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to answer those questions definitively. But I remain committed to raising such questions as well as listening to the stories of people who desire children for all sorts of reasons. When we talk about reproductive technology, we’re talking about having and loving babies, some of the most physically, emotionally, and spiritually transformative human experiences. Few other life experiences lay so bare our bodily limits, capabilities, and needs, our emotional vulnerability and the centrality of self-giving love. Our language and our dialogue must reflect those realities by welcoming people’s stories and taking them seriously.

Three Stories About Reproductive Technology

A heartbroken mother, an infertile couple, and a novelist’s characters reveal the emotional tales behind technological reproduction.

Ellen Painter Dollar

What do the stories of a grieving mother, a couple traveling to India, and a fictional character have in common? All three stories involve people using reproductive technology to have a baby.

In a Ladies Home Journal article, Jackie Hance describes the incomprehensible loss of all three of her young daughters one summer afternoon. On July 26, 2009, Hance’s sister-in-law, Diane Schuler, was driving the girls and her own kids home from a camping trip when she drove the wrong way on New York’s Taconic State Parkway. In a head-on collision, the three Hance girls, along with Schuler, Schuler’s two-year-old daughter, and three passengers in the other car died. An autopsy indicated that Schuler had been drinking and smoking marijuana, although Schuler’s husband insists that there must be another explanation.

Hance describes how she has survived such a loss, supported by friends who cooked meals for an entire year and continued to come get her for their morning runs. She also accepted a fertility doctor’s offer of free IVF services (Hance previously had a tubal ligation). The treatment gave her something to focus on, though she wasn’t sure she could go through with having an embryo transferred to her womb. But then she had a dream.

I was standing in heaven and I could see Emma, Alyson, and Katie through these big gates. God would not let me inside the gates. He said that I had been given a gift from that doctor and I had to use his gift before I could be with my babies. So, almost in a daze, I told the doctor I wanted to try to get pregnant, never expecting it to work.

I got pregnant the very first time.

Several weeks ago, the PBS NewsHour showed clips from a film titled Made in India, about Western couples hiring poor Indian woman as gestational surrogates. The film focuses on an American couple in which the wife had a hysterectomy due to pre-cancerous cells in her uterus. Because she retained her ovaries, she and her husband could have a genetically related child using a gestational surrogate. Unable to afford IVF and surrogacy in an American clinic, they turned to India, where a mother of three agreed to bear their child in return for several thousand dollars.
A home video clip shows the couple opening an e-mail with news that the Indian surrogate is pregnant. They whoop and embrace; their dream of being parents is coming true. The father talks about how unfair it is for outsiders to ask them, “Why don’t you just adopt?”

Finally, I just finished reading novelist Jennifer Weiner’s new book,

Then Came You, which chronicles the lives of four women involved in a surrogacy arrangement. (Disclosure: I liked this book, but it has sexual themes that some blog readers might object to.) India, a petite 43-year-old beauty thanks to multiple plastic surgeries, punishing exercise, and a strict diet, is the self-described “trophy wife” of a wealthy older man with three grown children. India and her husband, Marcus, hire a gestational surrogate to carry a baby conceived with Marcus’s sperm and a donor egg. Jules is the Princeton-educated egg donor who uses the money she gets for her eggs to pay for her addicted father’s rehab. Annie is a happily married mother who sees surrogacy as a chance for her family to stop living hand-to-mouth. Bettina, Marcus’s grown daughter, is convinced that India is not what she appears to be, and sets out to find the truth about her stepmother’s past.

In an interview with New York Times writer Lisa Belkin, Weiner said that the true story of Alex Kuczynski planted the seed for her novel. I vividly remember reading the New York Times Magazine article in which Kuczynski described the process of having a baby with her older husband using a surrogate. Like many readers, I was troubled by the article and photos, in which Kuczynski came across as extremely entitled. Weiner told Belkin, “I read [Kuczynski’s account] and I wondered: What led her to this? What’s this woman’s real story?”

Seeking the “real story” is central to reproductive ethics. I was sympathetic to the characters (real and imagined) in these three stories. While I have concerns over how IVF tempts parents to believe they can completely control childbearing, I am glad that Hance will once again wake to the sound of a child’s voice calling for her. While I think that outsourcing pregnancy to poor women in India raises urgent moral questions, I bristled along with the husband baffled by people who, in a paraphrase of his words, put the weight of the world’s orphan crisis on the shoulders of infertile couples. And while I was turned off by Kuczynski’s surrogacy story, I appreciated Weiner’s attempt to show that every human is multidimensional, full of both dark and light. Everyone has a story — one that cannot be fully told in a sensationalized magazine article.

Hearing these stories makes it harder for me to judge whether technologies such as IVF and surrogacy are right or wrong. Does my empathy for individual’s emotionally charged, complex decisions mean that I believe that anything goes, any decision is morally acceptable, as long as it makes someone feel better?

In a word, no. Stories matter. But stories are not all that matter. In my post tomorrow, I’ll introduce the concept of “narrative ethics,” which puts people’s stories at the center of ethical discourse. I’ll name some of the benefits and limits of this approach for Christians.

The Battle for Bert and Ernie

As Change.org asks Sesame Street to 'marry' the roommates, our culture risks losing another archetype of non-erotic male friendship.

Caryn Rivadeneira

When I was 4, our local PBS station gave away stuffed Ernie dolls as part of its pledge drive. As soon as I saw the announcement, I did exactly as WTTW hoped I would: I ran to the other room and begged my dad to send money. Six weeks later, I got my very own Ernie doll.

Of all the Sesame Street characters I loved, Ernie was my favorite. The way he wore his hair. The way he snickered. The way he bothered Bert. I was crazy about him. And once I had my own sweater-striped Ernie, he became my favorite nighttime snuggle buddy. Unlike Bert, who had to sleep in the bed next to him, I got to hold Ernie right up in the crook of my elbow. I loved it.

Maybe it’s because I have these fond memories of bedtime with Ernie that I reacted so weirdly to a recent online petition at Change.org urging the folks at Sesame Workshop (the creators of Sesame Street) to marry Bert and Ernie, as well as to introduce a transgender character. While, of course, the rumors of their sexual orientation have been around for years, even in my childhood, those rumors have always seemed harmless enough and easy to brush off.

But this organized effort — which had over 9,300 signatures as of this writing — troubled me. I remembered the sway PBS had over me, and worried about what this sort of sway would communicate.

The petitioners believe that a married Bert and Ernie would somehow lessen the bullying toward kids who identify or are identified as gay. I certainly want less bullying of any children! Beyond that, even if most evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage (74 percent), many of us can understand the impulse behind some members of the gay community to legally and publicly solidify their relationships.

No, a couple other things got under my skin. If Bert and Ernie were really secret lovers who had been waiting all these years for New York to legalize gay marriage, that means Ernie my childhood snuggle puppet is a sexual being old enough to marry his lover of 40 years. And that makes the idea of a 4-year-old me snuggled up to him kind of creepy for me. And confusing.

First the confusing: Translating a long-portrayed platonic friendship between puppets into a sexual one adds a heap of confusion to the already troubled world of friendships between boys. Having to explain to children why Bert and Ernie held hands on their way to City Hall to get their marriage licenses stands to harm kids more than help them — even with those with same-sex parents or those who might face bullying for presumed same-sex attraction down the road.

Instead of markedly decreasing the stigma attached to homosexuality, “outing” Bert and Ernie seems more likely to sharply increase the stigma surrounding friendships between boys. It would give credence to the lingering idea that boys with too close of friendships (i.e. where they sleep over and share their worries, a la Bert and Ernie) are really homoerotic in nature. One of the best-known, sweetest, and closest if fictional friendships in contemporary pop culture would be sexualized.

Which leads to the creepy part of the problem: A marriage between Bert and Ernie introduces sex into a place where it just has no business: the minds of preschoolers. I understand that there is more to a homosexual relationship than sex, but when it comes to offering explanations to preschoolers, it’s hard to get around the sexual dimension without totally confusing that friendship issue.

While I never seek to shun my kids from the realities of life, and try to answer my kids’ questions as honestly as I can, having to explain why two roommate boy puppets wanted to marry is simply beyond the pale.

While some families may have to have this conversation with their preschoolers, most of us don’t. And shouldn’t have to. 4- and 5-year-olds, of all people, should be allowed to understand friendship in its most basic and beautiful state. They are already bombarded with sex, on magazine covers in the grocery store checkout lines, on highway billboards, on the sassy clothing sported by some of their young friends. They don’t need it on Sesame Street.

The people at Sesame Workshop clearly agree. In their response to the petition, they wrote, “Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Indeed. Saying no to the Change.org petition isn’t about homophobia or intolerance or passing judgment. Neither is my opposition to it. Rather, it’s about allowing preschoolers to love who they want to love without confusion, without it getting tangled up with sex. It’s about letting them see a good example of agape love — the kind that “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres" (1 Cor. 13:7) — and keeping the more complicated eros at bay, since they will be bombarded by untrue claims about that kind of love for the rest of their lives.

Taming the Twitter Tongue

Why I'm still not tweeting.

Sharon Hodde Miller

Ever since I was little, God has been teaching me the same lesson over and over again. My growth has been slow and nearly imperceptible at times, but God has not flagged in his insistence that I learn to tame my tongue.

The process has been painful, to say the least. I have a mortifying memory of smart-mouthing a high school teacher and a number of cringe-worthy interactions with famous people. I have grossly miscommunicated myself through e-mail, offended friends and family with too much honesty, and generally embarrassed myself by over-sharing. Over time I recognized this pattern as a real problem, so I launched a spiritual offensive against it. Drawing on Scripture for help, my prayers were shaped by verses such as Proverbs 17:28: “Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.”

Thankfully, God was faithful to answer my prayers and I have witnessed growth in this area of my life. Nevertheless, my tongue has remained an Achilles heel that I have continued to monitor closely. It is also the reason why, thus far, I have not joined Twitter.

Now I am not opposed to the tool itself, which has tremendous power to encourage believers and build up the church. The reason for my hesitancy has less to do with Twitter and more to do with human nature. The instantaneous broadcasting of spontaneous thoughts presents even the most diligent Christians with risk. Several months ago John Piper posted the tweet heard round the world, bidding farewell to Rob Bell and launching a flood of controversy. More recently, a minor Twitter kerfuffle developed between two prominent Christian authors that drew responses from their Twitter followers, including Her.meneutics. Our own re-tweeting drew subsequent criticism via tweets.

The combination of human brokenness with this particular form of social media lends itself to miscommunication. The ability to tweet at all times to hundreds of people is a dangerous power, one that Scripture actually warns about. In addition to the verse I already mentioned, Proverbs 10:19, 13:3, 18:6 and 21:23 all teach that the path of wisdom is to be found in the way of silence. The more we talk, the more likely we are to say the wrong thing.

In his work Of the Imitation of Christ, medieval monk Thomas à Kempis echoes these scriptural warnings:

“Some one has said: ‘As often as I have been in company, I have returned a less man than I went.’ We often find this when we allow ourselves to mix freely in society, and give our tongues the rein. It is much easier to be silent altogether, than to use moderation in speech . . . No one is safe in speech, who is not happy in silence.”

In his classic work Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster notes, “Willpower has no defense against the careless word, the unguarded moment.”

Given that Twitter users post as many as 3,283 tweets per second, the high frequency of tweeting increases the potential for these “unguarded moments” that Foster described. The more we talk — and the more we tweet — the more likely we are to impart a careless word. Plus, the audience is exponentially larger and so are the consequences.

That is not, of course, a reason to reject Twitter wholesale, but it should instill us with a sense of caution. Our flesh is weak, and the repercussions of such public mistakes are far-reaching.

In addition to the increased odds of mis-tweeting, there is another reason I have been slow to join Twitter. Before I sat down to write this post, I consulted with Her.meneutics editor, Katelyn Beaty, who tweets for the blog. I asked for her response to the occasional complaints and criticisms about our tweets, and her answer was both honest and humble. She confessed, “I would be the first to admit to often writing out of a desire to be clever or to provoke response rather than to edify our followers.”

I appreciate Katelyn’s honesty because her words reflect another temptation with Twitter. Even with the best intentions imaginable, the performance component of Twitter can blur our motives. Twitter can easily become a stage with an audience of hundreds, if not thousands, of followers. And as most performers do, Twitter users can find themselves driven by their audience. The desire to be liked or found interesting eclipses the desire to be godly.

In all fairness, there is a wide spectrum between transparent ministry promotion and blatant manipulation or narcissism. I know Katelyn desires to to inspire thoughtful conversation, a goal that is hard to accomplish in fewer than 140 characters. That is why our broken human nature and the limited Twitter format require an extra measure of both wisdom and grace. I may not like what another person tweets, but it is also likely that I misunderstood her.

Twitter has redemptive potential, to be sure. This simple medium has become a tool in inspiring political revolutions, so the church can undoubtedly tap its potential for the glory of God. In fact, I suspect revolution is closer to the scale of vision we should have for such technology. Perhaps our use of Twitter is far too banal. But whatever our purpose in tweeting, let us do so Christianly, weighing the frailty of our human nature against our call to honor God in all things. Tweet with care.

Sugar Daddies and Abba Father

An echo of the sugar daddy/sugar baby phenomenon may be coming to a church near you.

Courtney Reissig, guest blogger

It’s no secret that more and more college students are graduating with crushing student loan debt. And with a job market that is less than favorable to the 20-something job seeker, some college students and graduates are looking for innovative ways to tackle the high cost of education and subsequent debt.

Enter the sugar daddy.

Reporter Amanda Fairbanks recently chronicled the lives of young women who seek relationships with older, wealthy men in exchange for large sums of money. “Sugar babies” are either drowning in college debt or facing the dire prospect in the near future. So they have taken action in the form of selling a most precious commodity — themselves. A handful of websites are devoted to securing “sugar daddy/sugar baby” relationships. They promise companionship for the men and financial gain for the women, all coordinated by a man from cyberspace. Before we start to think of these as friendly arrangements for old, rich men needing someone to talk to, as Fairbanks suggests, there isn’t always a whole lot of talking going on in these relationships. While not all these young women are selling their bodies to anyone who offers, many are exchanging sex to a select few who pay a hefty price.

It used to be that women in need of financial security would simply marry up. We called them gold diggers. These ladies would prowl around looking for an unassuming rich man to buy them fine jewelry and launch them into society (think Breakfast at Tiffany’s). But sugar babies don’t seem to be after marriage. And as the saying “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” goes, the sugar daddies aren’t rushing to the altar either, though the proverbial milk isn’t exactly free. In many ways, this is simply an exchange of goods, but with far greater consequences.

There are a variety of opinions about whether these relationships do long-term damage to the women involved; some are questioning the legality of it all. But the phrase “sex sells” couldn’t be truer when you have a loan bill the size of your rent check due in seven days. For these women it’s a necessary trade.

It’s easy to condemn such practices and label sugar babies as high-priced prostitutes. But while these arrangements are not the norm for most women, Christian women can just as easily fall prey to the same tactics. Trading benefits for “pay” might look different in our more polished church circles, but many Christian women in relationships regularly face the temptation to trade commodities for physical, and even emotional, pay.

Like so many sugar babies, many Christian women (and men) are handed a mountain of debt along with their college diploma. The Christian woman facing a payback plan that spans into her 30s may feel tempted to trade something for pay as well. While it probably won’t look like selling sex, it could be something more normal — like marrying a man primarily because of his financial security. Or she might spend her single years thinking very little about her debt because she knows that Prince Charming is going to come on his white horse and sweep her off her feet and make her debt a thing of the past.

The idea of trading certain benefits for some form of payment or need is quite common in many relationships. The woman who has been in a dating relationship with the same man for five years may feel tempted to trade physical intimacy for the payment of the emotional intimacy she desperately desires, rather than holding out for a marriage covenant. When the proposal never comes, she is left wondering what she did wrong. She has given up so much, and her return is lacking what she most desired.

Consider the single woman who desperately desires marriage, but no real prospects have come along in years. She may be tempted to forgo a godly marriage in order to get the pay she thinks she needs most: companionship. As fellow blogger Gina Dalfonzo so strikingly noted in “The Good Christian Girl: A Fable,” many a woman has thrown conviction and standards to the wind in exchange for matrimonial bliss.

Regardless of their means, the women in each of these situations are seeing the desired outcome as more important than the path that led them there. Rather than seeking contentment in singleness, a plan to pay down the bills, or abstinence in a relationship, they are looking for help outside of God’s direction and provision.

Thankfully, the sugar daddy/sugar baby craze hasn’t crept into Christendom, and I highly doubt it will. But we all could learn a lesson from these college women seeking financial relief. The temptation to sell a piece of ourselves in exchange for something we desire is one that none of us can ignore.

What are you willing to sell for relational or economic needs? It’s a question I asked myself over and over again in my single days. Sometimes the answer surprised me most when I was tempted to give a little in order to get what I wanted. This sort of arrangement is so far from the heart of God, who offers us abundant grace freely despite the fact that we give him nothing in return. This payment — this debt removal — is what all of us, from the sugar baby in Manhattan to the church single’s-group regular in the Midwest, need more than any seemingly overwhelming financial or emotional crisis.

Courtney Reissig is a pastor's wife and freelance writer/blogger. She has written for the Gospel Coalition's book review site, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. She blogs regularly at In View of God's Mercy. She reviewed Give Them Grace (Crossway) for Her.meneutics last month.

Why Dogs Should Be Sent to Court

Examining the case of Rosie, a golden retriever who sat beside a 15-year-old raped by her father.

Elrena Evans
When a 15-year-old rape victim from Poughkeepsie, New York, took the stand to testify against her father last summer, she wasn't alone. In the witness box, at her feet, sat Rosie, a golden retriever, who snuggled up close to the girl as she reported how her father had molested and impregnated her, The New York Times reported this week, and when the girl hesitated, Rosie pushed her gently with her nose and encouraged her to keep talking.

The father was eventually convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. But his team of lawyers are launching an appeal that could send this case all the way to New York's highest court. Their reason for the appeal? Rosie.

Citing “prosecutorial misconduct,” the defense's lawyers say that allowing the dog into the courtroom was emotionally manipulative. “Every time she stroked the dog,” defense lawyer David S. Martin told The New York Times, “it sent an unconscious message to the jury that she was under stress because she was telling the truth.” Having a dog on the stand in this case, Martin feels, prejudiced the jury to side with the prosecution and compromised his client's constitutional right to a fair trial.
District Attorney Kristine Hawlk, who handled the case, says that's nonsense. And “testimony enablers” such as therapy dogs are becoming more common, according to the advocacy group Courthouse Dogs, which claims that the presence of a trained therapy dog not only can help bring comfort to child victims, but can humanize the courthouse process overall. Comforting child victims through the emotionally fraught process of testifying in court is not without precedent; in 1994, a New York appeals court ruled that a young child could take a teddy bear along to the witness stand.

Reading through the article, I noted the repetition of the word comfort. “Rosie is a golden retriever therapy dog who specializes in comforting people”; she “comforts traumatized children”; some prosecution lawyers argue that “courtroom dogs can be a crucial comfort to those enduring the ordeal of testifying, especially children.” Perhaps because I recently attended a worship planning meeting and am thus already thinking about Advent and Christmas, I have had John Ferguson's anthem “Comfort, Comfort Ye My People” playing through my mind all day. Humming the song and re-reading the article, it seems as if Rosie and therapy dogs like her are standing in some very dark places as symbols of the comfort God longs to bring to his children.

But what happens when bringing someone comfort violates another person's rights? Our Founding Fathers believed that the rights they wrote into the Declaration of Independence were scriptural: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If someone's comfort is on one side of the scale and someone else's unalienable rights on the other, and you ask me which way the scale should tip, I think I'd go with unalienable rights just about every time.

Make those “unalienable rights” the rights of a father who raped his teenage daughter, and the “comfort” a furry, four-footed therapy dog helping a young girl through unspeakable trauma, and all of a sudden I feel a whole lot differently.

I'm not swayed by the dog. If anything, should I happen to be on a jury where a comfort dog is present in the courtroom, I'd have to watch that I wasn't influenced against the prosecution, as I'm not fond of dogs. I know I'm in the minority here, but a dog on the witness stand would have me tucking my feet under my chair and scootching just a bit further away. I recognize that the average juror doesn't share my aversion, though, and I see how having a dog on the witness stand could sway the trial.

But I can't get John Ferguson's setting of Isaiah 40 out of my head.

The State of New York will have to decide if Rosie's presence in the courtroom during the rape trial violated the defendant's constitutional rights, and the outcome of that decision will be precedent-setting. I'll be watching the news to see what happens. In the meantime, I'll keep singing Isaiah 40.

Watching 'The Help' as an African American Woman

The new movie powerfully demonstrates that racial reconciliation happens not primarily through speeches and "diversity training" but through everyday friendships.

Natasha Robinson, guest blogger

“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it doesn’t disturb anyone else.”

That’s the writing advice given to Skeeter, the only single white female and college graduate among her well-to-do white girlfriends who are all married with children. In the small town of Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, Skeeter reaches out to the African American maids of her so-called friends to speak her truth.

The truth is, one of Skeeter’s best friends, Hilly (a professing Christian and wife of a politician), is a high-minded and demoralizing individual who thinks it is perfectly normal to host a fundraiser for the “Poor Starving Children of Africa” and yet draft an initiative to require that all white families build separate bathrooms for their “help”; in Hilly’s words, “They have separate diseases than we do, and I’m just trying to protect our children.”

The help of which Hilly speaks are the African American maids and lead characters Aibileen and Minny, who spend their entire lives cooking food for white families, cleaning their homes, and looking after their white babies. Hilly is the one who spews the venom of lies and hatred that causes racism to persist. Skeeter and the rejected “white trash” Celia Foote are the bridge builders who take the risk to enter into relationships with the maids and get to know them as people.

Like many other African American women, I was a little apprehensive about reading a book and then going to yet another movie where black people are depicted as victims who need rescuing from the good white folk. Hollywood has followed that tag line with movies like The Blind Side, Save the Last Dance, Amistad, and Radio to name a few. Of course, African American women are equally unexcited about Hollywood’s depiction of yet another maid or “mammy” role.

But this story is different. The Help, Kathryn Stockett's bestseller, which just debuted in theaters yesterday, is a story about truth, courage, and forgiveness. This is a story about womanhood, friendship, and love.

The truth is those times were hard. That’s what I understand, not from what I have seen in a movie or read in a book, but from the stories of my own mother, the women in my family, my godmothers, and countless mentors who lived during that time. Racism is ugly. Racism is sinful and still plagues our society. It takes courage to admit and then wrestle with that statement.

You see, many evangelicals desire to reach across the aisle and talk racial reconciliation. I truly want to see racial reconciliation lived more consistently in my lifetime, for I believe that the gospel is the message and ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–21). True reconciliation means restoring our relationship with God and each other. If 11 o’clock Sunday morning continues to be “the most segregated hour in America,” we are deceiving ourselves that we are living this reality.

Sure, we have come a long way, but in some circumstances, we are still hindered by folks like Hilly who make assumptions, ask questions but don’t listen, and then draw conclusions based on the small bubble in which they live. Instead of following Hilly’s arrogant lead of asking superficial questions like, “Aibileen, you like your separate bathroom in the garage, don’t you?” we can take Skeeter’s lead and go visit Aibileen’s house. It is at the kitchen table in a home when both of you are vulnerable and uncomfortable that the truth is shared.

That’s what I loved about The Help. It sends a powerful message that reconciliation does not happen primarily through speeches, books, diversity initiatives, or training and it should send a clear message to the church that reconciliation cannot happen with programs, goals, “special” services, and activities. Reconciliation is the result of intentionally building intimate relationships, one day at a time, with one person at a time.

I challenge readers to start here: take a look at your phone contact list and e-mail contacts. How many people are from a race or ethnicity different from your own? What kind of people have you invited to your dinner table over the past year?

We have a long turbulent history of racial injustice in this country, but I believe the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said that “what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up.” God calls us to be other-centered. The love of Jesus is other-centered, which is why he engaged the Samaritan woman, allowed Mary of Bethany (a woman) to sit and learn at his feet, and ate with the tax collectors and sinners.

The gospel says that we all need help. The help that God provides gives us courage to tell the truth, love our enemies, offer forgiveness, and be the image bearers that he created us to be. That’s what Minny and Celia, Skeeter and Aibileen share with us. That’s a story of hope.

Natasha Robinson is a member of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a full-time student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She enjoyed both the book and the movie. Check out her blog, A Sista's Journey where she featured a post entitled I Go to Church With White People. Also find her on Twitter @asistasjourney. She has written for Her.meneutics about Beyonce’s Wrong Message of Girl Empowerment and Modesty in the Church.

Camerin Courtney reviewed the film version of The Help for sister site CT Movies. Sarah Pulliam Bailey reviewed the book for Her.meneutics last spring.

Kids' Diets: Why We Need Immovable Love, Not ‘Let’s Move’

Where Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign falls short.

Caryn Rivadeneira

The first time my daughter grabbed a box of cookies out of the pantry, flipped the package round and round, and asked me how many calories were in each one, I laughed it off.  

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

The second time she asked — while reaching for another square of our regular Friday night pizza — an alarm went off.  This time she added, “I don’t want to get fat. That’s bad.”

Even as I told her that she didn’t need to pay any attention to calories, that they were good things, that we needed them for energy to run and play, I seethed. After all, I had a new enemy: whoever had introduced this calorie nonsense into my home and had made my healthy, vibrant 7-year-old worry about counting calories.

As it turns out, naming the enemy was more difficult than anticipated. Even as I read a horrifying (if overblown) story about the number of 5- to 7-year-olds who are being treated for eating disorders in the UK,  I couldn’t simply blame the media, Barbie, or the uber-retouched, sickly skinny celebs on magazine covers the way the Telegraph report did. After all, how could a thin woman in a magazine cause my daughter to dread getting fat?

But I was wrong. While loading food onto the conveyor at the grocery store, I saw her. On a magazine cover. In her pretty dress and sweet cardigan, ankles crossed ladylike on a picnic table set with apples in their summer glory.

I reached for the August issue of Better Homes and Gardens. “Fresh and Healthy: Michelle Obama,” the cover read. At last I had found the culprit: one of the world’s most beautiful, powerful, and intelligent women. Great.

If you don’t know, Michelle Obama’s major initiative during her husband’s presidency has been the Let’s Move campaign, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation by encouraging healthier eating and activity “during their earliest months and years.”

While well-intentioned to be sure, something about it strikes me as insidious.

Perhaps because even as Let’s Move seeks to “raise a generation of healthier kids,” it’s a government program that targets kids: namely, fat ones. As the message of Let’s Move and other programs like it has trickled down through layers of government bureaucracy into U.S. schools and schoolyards, the dangerous sides of its do-gooder message seep into our homes. It creates problems where there were once none.

My daughter now faces demons she shouldn’t have to face. Not at age 7 at least. Instead of being able to shovel her Mac and Cheese, to slurp down a juice box with abandon before running back out to the swings, she now stops to consider the “costs.”

Instead of greeting her food with gratitude, thanking God (or even me) for the energy it gives her to run outside and ride her scooter, she’s asking questions about why fat people are so unhealthy. Why they are “bad.”

Certainly 7-year-old girls asked their mothers about calories before anyone knew Michelle Obama’s name, but programs like hers only validate all the retouched, dying-to-be thin images we see in visual media every day. It reinforces the wrong-headed belief that overweight people are less worthy, that their lives mean less than thin ones, that they should be eradicated for the public cost they create for the country.

As Paul Campos noted in the Daily Beast, “Fat kids have enough problems without government-approved pseudo-scientific garbage about how they could be thin if they just ate their vegetables and played outside more often.”

Thin kids do too.

Don’t get me wrong: I want both kids and parents to know where food comes from and to understand serving sizes. I want people to feel their hearts pound, their muscles burns when we engage in life that lifts us out of our desk chairs or off our sofas. I want people—children, especially—to be healthy and fit.

And I understand the dangers and complexity of childhood obesity. I just worry about the dangers presented in our desire to eradicate it. About what these efforts communicate to all kids, no matter their Body Mass Index. Specifically, I worry that kids understand that our fight against childhood obesity is less about being healthy and more about not being fat.

I worry, as a recent AP story warned, that we are making overweight kids even more of a social pariah than they already are. We are, after all, seeking to make them extinct. Looking at it this way, my daughter’s newfound concern for calories makes perfect sense. It’s simply self-preservation.

As a Christian, I certainly don’t want my kids’ response to food to be one of gluttony or comfort-seeking. But nor do I want food of any kind to be met with panic. I want my kids to care about their health, but not cross over into obsessive control over it. I don’t want my 7-year-old daughter — who has a lifetime to fret over her figure — to start now. And I don’t want anyone looking at overweight or obese kids as anything lesser, as people to be gotten rid of.

I want my kids to know that food is a gift. I want all our kids to be grateful to God and to parents for the provision they receive, even if it is at times less than perfectly healthy. And I want them to know that they are loved by a God whose body was broken for us: no matter how they look or what they weigh.

The Newest U.S. Mission Field: Women

In order to reach educated and professional women, Christian women must be able to articulate what they believe and why. Is the church equipping them?

Sharon Hodde Miller

For centuries, women have been the oft-silent underpinnings of church ministry. Mostly volunteers, these female church members made up a behind-the-scenes force that not only greased the gears of the local church but also functioned as the gears themselves. Even today, roughly 57 percent of church volunteers in the U.S. are women, leading everything from prayer groups to Sunday school classes.

But this dynamic might be changing. According to a longitudinal survey released by the Barna Group last week, the numbers of both men and women attending church may have dropped in the past 20 years. Although the sample size is too small to draw any firm conclusions, the research indicates that the greatest amount of decline in church attendance has been among women. Barna found that since 1991, the overall number of women attending church dropped 11 percentage points, down to 44 percent. Bible reading among women also declined by 10 percentage points, Sunday school involvement by 7 percentage points, and volunteer activity in churches by 9 percentage points (the latter representing a 31 percent reduction in the non-paid female work force at churches).

The study added that the “only religious behavior that increased among women in the last 20 years was becoming unchurched. That rose a startling 17 percentage points — among the largest drops in church attachment identified in the research.” Here it is also important to note that the number of unchurched men also increased, but only by 9 percentage points.

George Barna summarized these findings by noting that “while the genders are far from a state of convergence, the frightening reality for churches is that the people they have relied upon as the backbone of the church can no longer be assumed to be available and willing when needed, as they were in days past.”

This data emerged on the heels of two decades worth of church efforts to gather men back into the church, efforts that were not always accompanied by similar female initiatives. For all the discipleship-oriented women’s ministers out there — Beth Moore, Kay Arthur, and Anne Graham Lotz, to name a few — the church has placed considerably less emphasis on equipping women for outreach. In fact, some evangelical leaders have decried the overly feminine style of worship and leadership in our churches. An absence of women was never the problem.

The reasons behind these gender fluctuations are almost impossibly complex. They warrant the time and space of an entire book, so I will not use this short format to propose simplistic answers that ignore nuances. What we can conclude from studies like Barna’s is that our culture is shifting and churches are still adjusting.

As an example of these changing cultural tides, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported in 2008 that 16 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, and that percentage is largely composed of younger generations. Thirty-one percent of unaffiliated Americans are under the age of 30, and 71 percent are under the age 50. These numbers predict a shift in American church involvement, as well as an increasing population of women who is altogether unfamiliar with Christian language and worldview.

Add to this the changes occurring in the academy and the workforce. According to the Census Bureau, women have now surpassed the number of men obtaining advanced educational degrees. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Labor also reported that 59.5 percent of women were in the labor force, a percentage that has steadily increased since the 1970s.

These changes have real consequences for how Christians reach out to their communities, which means we need to be asking ourselves some evaluative questions. For instance, in order to communicate with increasingly educated and professional women, Christian women must be able to articulate what they believe and why. How is the church equipping women for this? Are Christian women able to answer the basic theological questions of their neighbors, coworkers, and friends? And as more American women populate the workplace, how is the church supporting the Christian women in their midst? Are churches training women as effective missionaries in their fields of expertise?

Finally, is the church a welcome place to this new generation of educated, professional women? How might a newly converted, female CEO find her gifts expressed in an evangelical church? How might a woman with financial savvy or her own law practice be able to serve her local congregation? Will these women be welcomed as resources, or ignored and untapped? Churches have the choice between investing or burying the talents of these capable sisters; women are less likely to attend a church in which the latter is the norm.

Barna’s findings are discouraging, but the knowledge has the potential to reform our thinking about evangelism. The decline of one gender in the church should not be the catalyst that launches concerted outreach. Even when thousands are coming to Christ, there are still countless men and women to reach with the Good News. The call is always upon us. These recent statistics only remind us of that truth.

Women have long served as the backbone of local churches, attending faithfully and without much compulsion from church authorities. While we do not fully understand the reasons behind the unbalanced gender ratio in churches, we do know this: It is not because women are more spiritual, more prone to seek God, or less sinful. Romans 3:23 tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, men and women alike. Every woman needs Jesus just as much as the man next to her.

Why Gratitude Is Not Enough

Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts threatens to turn thanksgiving into the key to our salvation.

Rachel Stone

I spend most of my time on domestic chores and child care, and I’m inclined to see those tasks in a sacramental light, looking for moments to reflect on with gratitude. Also, I cherish the seemingly small. My son’s dimples, my tomato plants grown from seed, and wild animals and flowers call me to spontaneous thanks and praise of my Creator. Thanking God is both biblical and psychologically beneficial, a correct creaturely response to his goodness. So for all these reasons, I was intrigued by Ann Voskamp’s new book, One Thousand Gifts, and its growing popularity. Its subtitle — "A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are" — and Voskamp’s challenge to list 1,000 things to be grateful for seemed to me to hold promise.

The book, following the popularity of Voskamp’s blog, loosely chronicles Voskamp’s journey from doubting God’s goodness to a deep commitment to practicing gratitude. Early in childhood, Voskamp’s family lived through something unspeakably tragic: the accidental death of her younger sister when she herself was a preschooler. The death cast a long shadow of fear over Voskamp’s life, bringing up the age-old problem of pain and the questions that plague the very depressed: Why delight in anything or anyone at all if nothing lasts? When a friend jokingly challenged Voskamp to list 1,000 things for which she was grateful, Voskamp took up the challenge, and began seeing gratitude’s importance confirmed everywhere she looked.

Voskamp’s holy grail is eucharisteo: joyful thanksgiving, gratitude. And why not? Who can forget Corrie and Betsie ten Boom thanking God for their fleas even before they knew that the tiny tormentors would keep guards out of their barracks so they could hold a prayer meeting? It’s a beautiful example of gratitude under the harshest conditions. But one major weakness of One Thousand Gifts is that it threatens to flatten all of Scripture to fit Voskamp’s eucharisteo vision: “A Greek word that might make meaning of everything,” a concept that’s “necessary to live the whole, well, fullest life.” The fall of Adam and Eve, for Voskamp, is called “non-eucharisteo” — ingratitude, and salvation is “intimately related to eucharisteo.” “Do I really want to be saved?” she writes.

I get nervous when any concept — even a biblical one — is offered as the key that opens all locks. Scripture is far too deep and broad to be placed under a single heading. There’s the risk of stretching all passages on the rack of our concept until they confess what we want them to say. I get it that gratitude has been transformative for Voskamp, who once struggled mightily with anxiety, pessimism, and agoraphobia. But in this book she preaches eucharisteo in a way that seems to make the concept a new law, a practice necessary to live a truly Christian life.

Further, at the risk of sounding exactly like the former English teacher that I am, I found Voskamp’s ungrammatical, free associative, and impressionistic style almost unreadable. Any lover of words knows that the rules of language are by no means unbreakable. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English poet who, like Voskamp, wrote about God’s grandeur displayed in the ordinary, broke rules all the time: “the just man justices;/Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;/Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Christ.” But Hopkins was restrained in his trespasses and put them sparingly into poems, not books. All 240 pages of Voskamp’s book feature adjectives in place of adverbs, tack adjectives on after nouns, overuse the passive voice (“pages of the gratitude journal fill endlessly”), and seem to have an odd aversion to possessive pronouns: “the hand” and “the eye” when she means her hand, her eye. The overall effect was to me distracting and confusing rather than poetic. It’s written entirely in the present tense, apparently to drive home one of her main points: that the present is where God is. (Which is also kind of questionable when you consider that the Passover and the Lord’s Supper were instituted to remember God’s past faithfulness, and that looking to that faithfulness calls us to present worship and trust; see Psalm 78.)

Further, Voskamp’s stream-of-consciousness wrestling to be grateful for everything strikes me as not necessarily biblical. When one of her children throws toast in his brother’s face, Voskamp sees the problem as lying not with her child but with herself for feeling anger instead of in-the-moment calm and gratitude. Ditto when another child breaks a glass cabinet. It is important to learn to keep one's cool and stay in the moment even when the moment is rough. But Jesus did tip over some tables in his day, and crying out and complaining to God in the midst of suffering (not merely accepting it with gratitude) has a long and venerable history. Job pleaded his case before God; Jesus did say, “not my will, but yours be done,” but after (not before) he asked for that cup to be taken from him. And as he was dying, he spoke from Psalm 22, which hardly evinced the Zen-like acceptance Voskamp appears to advocate.

Is gratitude toward God transformative? Absolutely. Is life better when I remember to give thanks? Definitely. Is practicing the presence of God — doing “our common business wholly for the love of him” — a worthy goal? A biblical one? Certainly. But is it the key to our salvation, the only way to the kingdom of God? By God’s grace, shown most gloriously in Christ, it is not. By his grace, there is love and beauty and redemption that surpasses our failures, our ingratitude, and the dullness of our senses to perceive the thousands of daily gifts all around us.

The War on Chores: Who Should Do More?

How husbands and wives can think about divvying up the responsibilities.

Marlena Graves

Inevitably, it happens a few times throughout the year, always when we’re exhausted, feeling overworked and as if everyone wants a piece of us. It’s our recurring major fight (most couples have one). It’s the fight over who does more housework and who is slacking off. It is motivated when, yet again, I’ve had it with being responsible for what is in my mind the majority of childcare and household chores. I am a stay-at-home mom who works full time during the academic year overseeing a dorm of 154 female college students. My husband is a philosophy professor. When school starts, we both have very full schedules. So when I am bound and determined to renegotiate our responsibilities, to set things straight, I am ashamed to say, I’m usually the one guilty of firing off the first volleys.

During the course of those volleys, I spout off anecdotal evidence from other working women who complain they do the lion's share of the housework and child rearing. I even cite studies that seem to legitimize those complaints. I point out that men appear to get a pass on housework. And so my diatribe proceeds.

Sharing household responsibilities is no trivial issue. The stakes here are high. Indeed, a British study suggests that divorce is twice as likely when husbands neglect helping out around the house. Marriages are on the line. Consequently, it is urgent that men start pulling their own weight around the house.

But  maybe they are, if we are to believe the results of  the latest study featured in Time magazine’s cover article entitled: “Chore Wars" by Ruth Davis Konigsberg. The article depletes my arsenal of arguments by highlighting a significant study suggesting that the workload has evened out for men and women; more men are contributing their share. In addition, Davis Konigsberg notes, “…new research on working fathers indicates that they’re the ones experiencing the most pressure” because “increasing job demands are conflicting with more exacting parenting norms.”

Even before this study my husband would contend that we share our responsibilities. And if the truth be told, he’s right. When I devolve into a mentality of score-keeping during these semi to thrice annual arguments, I take on a “tit for tat posture”. Bitterness takes root and then sucks the grace right out of us. It’s a ruinous posture that has me seeing the specks in my husband’s eye while blind to the gargantuan logs in my own. As of late, I’ve found that thinking of household duties in terms of blessing and cursing defuses my inclination to keep a detailed score. When I am frustrated, I am trying, in the strength of the Holy Spirit, to refresh (and so bless) Shawn and Iliana with my attitude and my behavior instead of wearing them out (cursing them).

Part of blessing and not cursing our partners and family means doing our share—and sometimes more, depending on the occasion. In “Chore Wars,” Davis Konigsberg cites a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center indicating that “62% of married adults said ‘sharing household chores’ was the third most important ingredient (after faithfulness and sex) in a successful marriage.”

But what if we find ourselves in a situation where there is a dramatic disparity in household responsibilities, and we really should renegotiate those responsibilities with our spouse? How do we breach the conversation without it escalating into bitter conflict where neither of us wins?

Fortunately there are many resources to assist us. I like the practical tool called the conflict card, found on Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott’s site, realrelationships.com. (The Parrotts have many additional resources on their site.) It is helpful in demonstrating to our partners how important a particular point of disagreement is to us. Another site that I frequent and find immensely helpful is Peacemaker Ministries. I often return to the page that discusses the “Four G’s” of conflict resolution.

Grace abounds when we forsake detailed score-keeping in our marriages. Pastor and author Paul Tripp’s recommendation that we see our spouses as a gift instead of looking at them through the lens of failure and weakness strengthens my resolve to bless Shawn in the midst of our conflict over who is and isn’t doing their share. The more my posture becomes that of a servant who seeks to bless everyone around me—including those closest to me—the more I am a disciple who looks strikingly similar to Jesus. Jesus is generous and lavish, not stingy, and I should be, too. As Proverbs 11:25 (NIV) says, “A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.”  May our refreshing generosity end the chore wars.

Modesty: Still Missing from the Church

If our motivation is to look attractive at any cost with no consideration for others, there is a heart issue to confront.

Natasha Robinson, guest blogger

“Why does she have on those hooker shoes?” That’s how one of my godmothers began our phone conversation Monday morning. She was disheartened by a woman’s church attire, and that was just one of her examples. I shared my observations concerning the responsibility of modesty and its challenges for both men and women.

My cultural background advises me to put on my “Sunday Best” when I enter God’s sanctuary, where my physical presentation to God speaks volumes about how I reverence him. If I don’t say anything about my spiritual condition, few people can confidently speak about what’s going on in my heart. Yet they can observe my emotional and physical condition, either through my smile, physique, or radiant skin (which can reveal proper hydration, rest, and minimal stress).

Whether I like it or not, people draw assumptions about me based on my physical presentation. As a Christian woman, I do not want people drawing the wrong conclusions about my focus. I believe that modesty is a major issue in our churches. While I cannot take ownership of someone else’s sin, I do accept the responsibility for being my brother’s keeper.

Do Christian women know when they are not being modest?

Some suggest that most Christian women know that modesty is a problem in the church, that we need to be more conscientious of our clothing choices, and that our physical presentation has the ability to negatively influence men. Yet if we are aware of these issues, why don’t we do something about it?

When discussing modesty, the major concern is the sin of lust in its various forms that has infiltrated our churches. Lust is often a sin that is poorly addressed among Christian men and women, and rarely is modesty addressed as a gateway to our declining moral standards concerning lust. To be clear, I am not letting men off the hook. Pornography is an ongoing problem with many Christian men (and a rising problem among women as well). If that is an unconfessed sin of a brother or sister, anything can “trigger” them spiraling down the wrong road.

On the other hand, spiritual maturity requires that I evaluate my heart. A godly heart is revealed through self-sacrificing actions that esteem others above myself. A sin-sick heart is centered on what is important to me — where my rights will always determine my actions. Let’s face it: We all want to look attractive. If the motivation is to look attractive at any cost with no consideration for others, however, there is a heart issue to confront.

Here is how I personally practice modesty in church. During the fall and winter months, I frequently wear pants, and made a conscience decision to take a shawl or cardigan whenever I wear a shorter dress or skirt during the warmer months. While sitting in a circle during Sunday school class, I drape the shawl across my knees so that I am not exposed when I sit down. I don’t have to cover my knees, but I do it because I don’t want to be a stumbling block for a brother or sister.

Be mindful that I am not calling for a dogmatic expression of judgment toward each other concerning what is or is not modest. I am stating that outward behaviors are expressions of the spiritual war that rages in our own hearts. A changed heart leads to a changed life — and maybe even a changed wardrobe.

I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt that some women are oblivious as to when their attire is a distraction. I do not believe that most Christian single women chose their attire for the sole purpose of landing a man, or that most married women aim to grab the attention of men who are not their husbands.

With that understanding, I believe that the modesty issue is partially due to a lack of training concerning their physical appearance. Whatever happened to etiquette classes? And why are we not speaking against the deception that modesty is unattractive?

My mom educated me concerning appropriate church attire. In her words, “You don’t go to church dressed any kinda way.” During high school, I trained as a debutante, and the older women constantly reminded us, “Not all women are ladies, and ladies present themselves in a particular fashion.” I learned about modesty first in my home, then through mentoring relationships and professional development courses, and finally from the fabulous fashionistas who are my friends. While I certainly have not upheld all the instructions given me, thankfully I had a foundation on which to build as I matured into womanhood.

I realize that everybody does not receive those wonderful opportunities, and I believe that we have an obligation to create them. Is modesty now a responsibility that women’s ministries need to take on?

How can we reconsider our church attire and a new approach to the Sunday morning routine, the office, or wherever our mission field may be?

Natasha Robinson is co-director of the Women’s Mentoring Ministry at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Greensboro, NC, and founder, writer, and speaker for His Glory On Earth Ministries. She is a full-time student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and a wife and mother. She blogs at A Sista's Journey, where she wrote a post titled "Lust of the Eyes," and tweets at @asistasjourney. She has written for Her.meneutics about Beyonce’s message of female empowerment.

Photoshop, Patriarchy, and Protection of the Vulnerable

Should it be so shocking to seriously consider censoring the consumer arts?

Margot Starbuck

“That’s not real, right?”

As a friend and I walked through downtown Manhattan, a bus wrapped in an ad featuring a Victoria’s Secret model — who was at once alarmingly taut and seductively squishy in all the right places — zoomed past us.

“No sweetie,” I assured her, “it’s not real.” I confess, it was a little matronizing.

Though my intelligent friend suspected that the image had been digitally doctored and that the model likely had not eaten a carb in months, she was clearly rattled by the smooth two-dimensional Amazon beauty who had just zipped by.

Had she been walking London’s cobbled streets, she would have been afforded greater protection from the unwanted visual assault.

British activists, recognizing the negative impact of aesthetically improved photos of human faces and bodies, especially on women and girls, lobbied Parliament in 2009 for the regulation of digitally altered images. As a result, the current UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP Code) was enacted September 12, 2010. The British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates the legality, decency, and truthfulness of ad campaigns, became responsible for monitoring and penalizing advertisers employing unrealistic digital enhancements.

This week, complaints were lodged against ads for Lancome and Maybelline, ads featuring international beauties Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington. The ads were pulled by the ASA for being overly airbrushed. Parliament member Jo Swinson, of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party, which originally pushed for the legislation, was responsible for notifying the ASA about the offensive ads. Swinson told the BBC that she believes the problem is more widespread than the two beauty campaigns.

Since I am unable to find a single ad in American women’s magazines, either mainstream or Christian, that has not been retouched, I am convinced Swinson is right.

Though it was never Parliament’s intention, I believe the ASA’s ongoing work decidedly reflects the priorities of Jesus and his Father. That, in 2009, those in power recognized the correlation between the proliferation of unrealistic images and the rise of disordered eating was prophetic. That the government has chosen to respond by protecting girls and women, boys and men, from harmful images that lie about who they are resonates with the voice of Jesus, who confronted agents of the one he called “the father of lies” (on identity issues no less!). By denouncing that which dangerously diminishes personhood, the ASA bears the fragrance of the present reign of God on earth as it is in heaven that was ushered in by Jesus.

Did I just cross a weird line between religion and politics?

Yup, I believe I did. And yet James, the brother of Jesus, defines religion that God accepts as pure and faultless as this: “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27). I realize that James wasn’t thinking of Photoshop. Today, though, protecting the vulnerable and keeping one’s self from being polluted by the world describe the actions of Parliament and the ASA on both counts.

If you’re offended right now, then you’re tracking along quite nicely. Political conservatives, who generally have no interest in the government regulating one more thing, should be miffed. Simultaneously, liberals who think that “protection” of widows and orphans and girls and boys smacks a little bit of patriarchy ought, also, to be irked.

Hear me: I’m not suggesting that a big old man in the sky should prescribe what vulnerable developing girls should and should not see. Nor am I maintaining that the government bears sole responsibility to teach that every human being has infinite value because she or he is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). I am, though, suggesting, insisting, that these are the responsibility of Christians.

Though I have been deeply concerned about the media’s impact on hearts and minds, until the ASA’s action last week, I simply did not have the imagination to conceive of what they’ve been able to achieve. The work of the ASA, though, has sparked my Christian imagination. I am hopeful that the spark will catch fire among other American Christians who are passionate about denouncing untruths about the creation that God has called good. Let us dream together.

Margot Starbuck is the author of Unsqueezed: Springing Free From Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, Highlights and Stilettos (IVPress, 2010). More @ www.MargotStarbuck.com. 

The Female Friendship Crisis

Friends are an indispensable part of growing in Christ. So why do many of us have so few?

Karen Swallow Prior

Women drive me nuts.

Some years ago, following an act of civil disobedience, I spent several days in a makeshift jail with hundreds of women protesters. Before long, a couple of them approached me where I lay on a hard Army cot, trying to get comfortable enough to read the copy of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa my husband had managed to deliver. What better opportunity than jail time would I ever have to read the longest novel in the English language?

It was not to be. Instead I was asked to step up as a leader to address the squabbles and discontent arising among so many women of diverse personalities in such cramped conditions. Suck it up, ladies! I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. As requested, I played the role of diplomat.

I emerged from jail with greater gratitude for God’s creation of two sexes than I’d ever had before or since. To this day, I avoid to just this side of causing offense nearly any event preceded by the label women’s: conferences, Bible Studies, retreats, Home Interior parties. I was even a bit skeptical at first about writing for a women’s blog.

My difficulties with women go further back than this experience. Because I married young and went directly to graduate school from college, I had a hard time finding real peers. The other women in my graduate program were hostile toward Christianity, something I was ill-equipped to handle gracefully. And while my church included other young women who worked or were going to school, most of the married women did not. I spent a lot of time declining invitations to jewelry and kitchenware parties and softball games, not because I wasn’t interested in those activities, but because I felt stressed and guilty about spending time on anything besides writing papers and reading books and journal articles.

I wanted women friends, badly. I tried to find them. I prayed for God to bring me to them. And, in his time, he did.

Of course, in all fairness to God, I didn’t make it easy for him. I am pretty picky. On the other hand, in making friends, I seem naturally to follow the advice of Socrates: “Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.” I don’t form friendships quickly or often, but when I do, they stick.

Friendships come in many forms, but nothing can replace friendships with true peers. Because we are both physical and spiritual beings, I see as a true peer one with whom we share both of these aspects, physical and spiritual, of our being — in other words, people of the same sex and of the same spiritual identity and belief. While certainly one can be good friends with members of the opposite sex, or of different beliefs and values, such differences tend to be a barrier to the sort of kid-gloves-off treatment necessary for iron to sharpen iron. In fact, I’ve often noticed that those who resist deep friendships with true peers — women who say they simply “connect better” with men (well, duh!) or with people not their age or religion — tend to be avoiding the unique accountability that genuine peers offer.

Seeking out such accountability, even when it is contrary to one’s disposition, is the subject of a brave and important essay Noel Piper wrote recently.

Piper’s essay was brave in baring aspects of her experience simply as a Christian woman, but even more so as the wife of a prominent pastor (John Piper). It’s much easier, as many women are tempted to do, to hide under a veneer of a seemingly perfect life and ministry. But Piper exposes the myth of what I like to call the “Shiny Happy People” version of Christianity that prevails today. For one thing, Piper discusses seeking help from a counselor, something many Christians benefit from but don’t like talking about. Yet despite our wishful thinking, sometimes more faith, more prayer, and more sacrifice aren’t enough. (If it were, then much of the New Testament need not have been written.)

But this was not even the point of the essay. Rather, Piper brings up the counseling as the catalyst that forced her — at age 60 — to seek something in her life that Scripture tells us we need and that she had been avoiding. Not more holiness, not more Bible reading, not more quiet time, but friends. Not prayer partners, or accountability partners, or team members, or coworkers — although friends can be all of these — but simply good friends.

Fellow blogger Enuma Okoro writes that friends are “essential” to “any holy enterprise.” And studies show that the benefits of friendship include longer life, increased brain health, and a lower risk of obesity. For women, particularly, friendships have proven to reduce stress and to produce natural calming effects. Even the workplace benefits from friendships there — which is a good thing since my closest circle of friends consists of women who are my colleagues, too. Whether we go out to dinner, a movie, the theater, or on one of our annual road trips, we can trust one another in sharing our joys and frustrations in the classroom and in life as well as our views about the latest news, politics, and trends. Over the years, we’ve attended weddings, funerals, and countless student performances together. We are bonded by faith and fun, and we sharpen one another.

My life would be so less rich without my girlfriends. I thank God for them.

What about you? How has your life been enriched by friends?

When God Told Us to Adopt

Amy Julia Becker talks to fellow Her.meneutics writer Jennifer Grant about her new memoir, Love You More.

Interview by Amy Julia Becker

Fellow Her.meneutics writer Jennifer Grant recently published a memoir, Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter (Thomas Nelson), that traces her and her family’s decision to adopt her youngest daughter, Mia, from Guatemala. Mia became a sister to Jennifer’s biological children, Theo, Ian, and Isabel, when she was 16 months old. I had a chance to interview Jennifer recently about the story of the Grant family, as well as the ethical and theological challenges and gifts surrounding international adoption.

How did you and your husband decide you wanted to adopt?

In Love You More, I write that “the idea of adopting a child lingered in me like a song you cannot get out of your head. I felt like someone was missing. After the miscarriage, I could not shake the feeling that my kids were meant to have another sibling. As the fourth and youngest child in my own family, I sometimes felt like I was waiting for our fourth to come home and complete our family picture.”

And then I had an experience — a mystical one that I describe in the book. It felt like God had sent me a certified letter announcing that we would adopt.

What were the greatest challenges in adopting Mia?

Once we had accepted her referral and had a name and a picture, it was miserable to have to wait to bring her home. It was an emotionally draining time, one in which I learned, at least a little bit, to let go of control, live with uncertainty, and trust God in new ways.

In your book, you anticipate a question many people ask: Why adopt internationally rather than domestically?

When my husband and I began the adoption process, I felt certain that God would nudge us toward the country, the agency, and the program that would lead us directly to our child, wherever she was. I believe if God had wanted us to adopt domestically, as several friends have done, we would have felt the pull to do so. But the daughter God matched us with happens to have been born in another country.

What is the current state of international adoption?

The international adoption system is a broken one. It’s too expensive. Children have been stolen. Birthparents have been misled. These actions are pure evil, but they are not the norm. The truth is, millions of orphans and vulnerable children need families.

The recent story of one adoptive mother who chose to return her son to Russia is kick-in-the-gut sad. Regarding this story, I wondered: Did that mother have a close, supportive community with whom she could be honest? Did she know other parents who had adopted older, formerly institutionalized children? What were her resources?

I appreciate the work of organizations such as Both Ends Burning, PEAR (Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform), and others that work to repair this broken system.

You write, “I believe God nudges us toward the people with whom we’re meant to share our lives. And, sometimes, I think God uses adoption to rip away the curtain that keeps us blind to poverty and suffering.” In what ways has Mia’s presence in your family ripped away the curtain?

Adopting Mia made me ask, Who is my child? Just the ones I gave birth to? Just the ones who share my name and live in my house? I feel very attached to all of my children, but adopting Mia has made me feel more attached to other children, both in my neighborhood and around the globe. It’s kept me from accepting the values of the cult of family and putting my own kids’ needs and potential in such a central place that the needs and potential of other kids are invisible to me.

What are the connections between our adoption as the “sons of God” and the process of adoption?

In Romans 8:14–16, Paul writes, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” We are, to use the phrase that often describes families who were formed by adoption, God’s “forever family.” My mind has flashed on those verses when I see my husband and Mia chatting or being affectionate together. She lives in the happy knowledge that her daddy really loves her.

What responsibility do you think Christians have to the world’s orphans?

Christians absolutely have a responsibility to the poor, including orphans.

It’s not optional. Having said that, I don’t think that means everyone should adopt a child. There are countless ways to obey God and care for orphans. We can sponsor children through organizations such as Save the Children, World Vision, and Chikumbuso Women and Orphans project. A great resource for individuals and churches is Kay Warren and Saddleback Church’s Orphan Care Initiative. She lists six ways every church can be involved in orphan care.

Does Mia know you’ve written a book about her?

Oh yes, she knows! I spoke at length with Mia before signing onto the project. She was pleased by the idea and said she hoped that more kids would have families because we were telling her story.

She is a girl who has a heart for orphans. For instance, for the past few years, at her request, her friends haven't brought presents to her birthday parties but instead have made donations to projects we love and support. These include Chikumbuso Women and Orphans project, and an orphanage in Haiti called Crèche De L'Enfant Jesus.

Mia has an advance copy of the book and is reading it now — interspersed with the other books she's reading: a book of Far Side cartoons, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Poppy.

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