Why Women Are Obsessed with Pinterest

The spirituality of the booming online "self-expression engine."

Laura Leonard

“Men are more visual than women.” It’s a refrain we’ve all heard to explain the differences between men's and women's sexuality. If you want proof of the contrary, look no further than Pinterest.

What is Pinterest? TechCrunch describes it as a “self-expression engine” along the lines of Twitter and Facebook. Users can create virtual “mood boards” or “vision boards" on which they can collect images. Users can create separate boards for any kind of interest--fashion, art, books, decor, crafts, recipes, workout ideas, inspirational quotes--and “pin” to those boards images that reflect their style and tastes. Users can share these curated collections with friends or inspired strangers. The community is a large part of the draw--users can browse and search the entire network, which now includes over 1.5 million actives users (the majority of whom are women).

I am one of them. I first heard of the site a few months ago. A friend insisted I had to join and rapturously boasted she’d “wasted so many hours” poring over pages of pins (she assured me this was a good thing, and after a few minutes on the site I would realize she was right on both counts). I now have six different boards to which I regularly post. They’re mostly of clothes I can’t afford but like to look at, and a few home decor ideas I’ll never try but would like to think I could. As of right now, I follow 65 people: mostly friends, but a few I don’t know but have decided have excellent (read: similar) taste. And 65 people follow me, including more than a few I have never met. And I have spent many hours scrolling through page after page of recipes, hair styles, incredible home libraries, and vintage cookware, looking for inspiration. What I thought would be a mindless time waster has become an active pursuit, and I tend to my boards as one might a garden. Whenever I get an e-mail that someone new is following my boards, I feel validated in my tastes, and, in some small way, in myself.

So what does all this say about the ways in which women are visual? Why do so many women spend so much time seeking out images to pin? Some users simply want a place to track things they don’t want to forget. Wedding planning seems to be a popular theme, as do crafting, cooking, and decorating. Many items are accompanied by comments like “I want this!” or “I need to try this!” Workouts, recipes, and “thinspiration” images motivate users to get in shape, and DIY crafting and home improvement ideas inspire project ideas. “Research has shown that making a ‘vision board’ with pictures of things that inspire you to live healthier are more effective than writing goals on a piece of paper or just resolving to do them in your mind,” says a Shape article entitled, “Can Pinterest Change Your Life?” And the site proves that women can be visual in exactly the same ways as men--I’ve seen more than enough images of shirtless men to confirm this hypothesis. Pinterest seems to be a forum for building up “innocent” fantasies--dream closets, dream homes, dream men--and in this way encouraging consumer tendencies. These fantasies engage both a visual and emotional fantasy that is often disconnected from reality. By collecting and displaying these images, we are laying ourselves and our desire out for all to see.

Pinterest is at heart a social platform. In August, Time named it one of the 50 best websites of 2011. In a Wall Street Journal column, Emily Rosman identifies Pinterest as one of the technologies that is “holding her marriage together.” She said the site has become “an affectionate way of communicating” for her and her husband, as he surprises her with gifts and craft supplies inspired by her pins, and she posts images she knows he will like. But Rosman also taps into the risk of any social media: self-expression can all too quickly become self-definition. In other words: you are what you pin. On Pinterest, users gain social capital by acquiring new followers and getting their images liked or reposted. A pinboard can function like a Facebook profile--a proclamation of who you are, communicated through what you like. We love beautiful things, and want others to associate us with those beautiful things.

Beauty is a good thing, and God created us to enjoy it. This is a truth that explains the fascination with Pinterest, which connects the visual with the emotional, as well as the visual component of male sexuality, which connects the visual with the physical. And it is true, for both men and women (and both can be and are visual in both ways). But just as the visual aspects of sexuality can easily lead to habits that feed the visual and physical appetite without engaging the object of beauty, so too can this form of visual stimulus feed the visual and emotional appetite and lead to mindless and harmful consumption.

How many hours spent on Pinterest are rooted in discontent? As I scroll through the pages, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I will never have enough: enough money, to own all the beautiful things I want; enough time, to cook all the tempting recipes; enough skill, to attempt all the crafting projects; enough beauty, to have that hair or to pull off that dress. To what extent can we simply enjoy beauty without lusting after the objects (and people) we find beautiful?

I believe it can be done. I own a few things I consider really beautiful, and my tea set is one of them. From time to time, especially on leisurely Saturday mornings, I break it out and make a pot of tea. I call it my simple pleasure, and in it I enjoy not just the tea but the beauty of the teapot, the cup, the sugar bowl. But while this little ritual engages only itself, Pinterest keeps us looking for the next thing, keeps us wanting more. Even if I purchased or attempted to make every single thing on my board, even on every existing board, there will always be a new pin waiting to appear.

Pinterest isn’t evil. It can be fun, and is a simple way to express creativity and share it with others. But it makes it so easy to exploit this natural and healthy appreciation of beauty and lead us to its basest expressions. An image won’t define us, and neither will the possession of the object it represents. A pin is just a pin, after all.

Should Christians Take Antidepressants?

Medication can help, but it can also hinder our reliance on Christ.

Monica Selby, guest blogger

This month, the pharmacy services company Medco reported that in 2010, one in five American adults took a mental health prescription drug, a 22 percent increase since 2001. Antidepressant use by men is on the rise, but women still take more antidepressants than men, with 21 percent of women taking at least one antidepressant in 2010. I was one of those women.

When my twins were born four years ago, it didn’t take long for us to realize I was struggling. Post-partum depression hits many women during the first year after childbirth. With the natural hormone swings after giving birth, it can be difficult to tell if a new mother is trying to adjust to new demands and sleep schedules or is clinically depressed. When my mother found me crying while running a bath for our oldest boy, it became obvious that I was struggling with the latter.

All it took was a quick visit to the ob-gyn. I remember being grateful I didn’t have to work out psychiatrist appointments or introduce a new doctor to the problems. Instead, the ob-gyn wrote the prescription as we talked. It was so easy.

Getting off the drugs proved to be a bit more difficult. Each year I went to my check-up, determined that I would get a plan to step down. Each year, the doctor encouraged me to stay on the meds. Each year he said, “It’s a really benign drug, there are no side effects. It helps take the edge off.”

He wasn’t quite accurate. Zoloft’s website lists plenty of physical and psychological side effects. Besides the warnings, Zoloft was also made to treat a range of personality and depressive disorders, but post-partum depression is not on the list.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are the most common antidepressants prescribed today. They work on the theory that depression is caused by the absorption of serotonin in the cells of the brain, leaving the synapses free of the needed chemical. The SSRI keeps serotonin from being reabsorbed, and the increase of that chemical in the body causes the mood to lift.

The use of antidepressants is not without controversy in the Christian community and beyond. Our knowledge of the brain has grown significantly in the past 20 years, but we still have a lot to learn. The theory on which these medicines are based could be completely misguided, and because the earliest SSRI, Paxil, is only 23 years old, we can’t be completely sure of its long-term effects. Add to this the fact that primary care physicians—not licensed psychiatrists—are the main prescribers of these medicines, and the case against them gets stronger.

The past three years of my life, during which I have taken an SSRI, are a little fuzzy. Perhaps they would have been anyway, with three boys born 19 months apart. But I often wonder if the little blue pill I swallowed every night contributed to the fuzziness. The irritations, frustrations, and struggles may have been blunted, but so were the joys and the triumphs.

In a 2010 Revive Our Hearts radio interview, Reformed writer Elyse Fitzpatrick, author of Will Medicine Stop the Pain? (Moody), said:

It's so important for us just to remember that yes, perhaps the anti-depressants are making it so that we're not feeling those raw, painful emotions. But those emotions are given to us by God to drive us to himself and then to force us to ask questions about our faith and about the way that we're living and thinking and responding to things.

Should Christians avoid taking antidepressants, instead “letting go and letting God” lead us through the ups and downs of life? I’m not sure. After all, depression is a real mental health issue, one more piece of evidence that our minds and bodies do not function as they were intended to in our fallen world. I’m glad that the stigma of depression is lifting; gone are the days of whispered: “She’s on medication.” What I do know is that we should resist thinking of meds and the one and only answer to depression and consider a more well-rounded response to mental health, which might include the following steps.

1. Find a true professional: a psychiatrist, psychologist, or counselor. Christian counselors especially are trained to help patients talk through problems with a view of the gospel, and that may be all we need sometimes. If there is a true need for antidepressants, a psychiatrist is easier to trust than the person who delivered your baby hours before.

2. Stay healthy. Exercise, eat whole foods full of nutrition, and get as much rest as possible.

3. Re-evaluate. Are you depressed only because life isn’t what you expected? In my case, I had an image of happy stay-at-home moms constantly thrilled with their little darlings and the messes they make. Much of my anxiety centered on not fulfilling this picture. Instead, look to Jesus, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you (1 Pet. 5:7). He can give us a much more accurate picture of what to expect in this life.

Certainly antidepressants can take the edge off the pain of living in this broken world. But is it possible that we need those edges, which so often lead us to Christ?

Monica Selby lives with her husband, three boys, and one cat in Memphis, Tennessee. A member of the Redbud Writers Guild, she blogs at In the Whisper.

Advent: Putting the Brakes on Christmas Insanity

The season of waiting reminds me that this world is not my home.

Sally Breedlove, guest blogger

Connecticut, Boston, San Jose, three trips to the Carolina mountains, Alabama, Calgary. The past six months have brought too much travel—too many planes, too many strange beds, too much of fishing clothes out of a suitcase, too many nights without my husband. I wake up in unfamiliar places and I long for the way the sun rises over the oaks in my own front yard, for the feel of my favorite mug in my hands as I enjoy that first taste of morning coffee. A North Carolina potter made the cup, and its earthy reddish tones remind me of the red clay dirt of Alabama where I grew up.

North Carolina and Alabama: the two places my soul most calls home.

By Advent, I will be home. Observing Advent, the four weeks of the Christian calendar preceding Christmas, has become part of the way I walk out my faith. I love the slowing down it calls me to, the learning to long for the coming of the Messiah as the Jewish people did for centuries. I need to be reminded that Jesus will come again, that this world won’t go on as it is forever. I love the brakes Advent puts on December, so Christmas isn’t a mounting fury of activity, food, and spending. Instead, this time becomes anticipation and growing spaciousness.

Advent and home are good for my soul. But I know full well that as I settle in and prepare for the arrival of family, and for a family wedding that is already brimming with gladness, my yearning for home will not be assuaged.

I will get out decorations that I have enjoyed, and then repacked, for almost 40 years. Some are older than I: a paper angel from my mother, some strangely appealing gold-sprayed-plastic-stars, and a carved wooden Swiss music box from my grandmother. Every year as I unwrap them I am reminded again. As a child I belonged to a place and to people where someone else was the “real adult.” In those moments the ache surfaces for something beyond 704 Greenwood Road, a place where someone older than I am makes the home and I simply enter in and receive.

So it’s not just about the travel. Or the places we have lived or the places we have left. This desire for home persists, regardless of geography. Advent provokes us to submit to the out-of-jointness of our souls. We are meant to ache for what is still missing. We are meant to lean into the darkening of winter toward the Light that will rise in the east.

The young family in the Advent story speaks of places that are not home and of waiting: a girl on a donkey, heading away from family just a few weeks before her baby is due. She will have no familiar faces to look into, no mother’s or sister’s hands to hold as the pain of labor drags her into its fury. No familiar room to labor in. No room at all really, just space shared with animals. I am sure she missed home.

That displacement doesn’t end once the baby arrives. The labor room of a cave-barn and then the borrowed house in Bethlehem lead not to home but to exile in Egypt before the family returns to Nazareth. Even when they return, they will live with unsettled hearts. They have a prophetic word: This child will bring both joy and sorrow. A sword will pierce Mary’s heart. Nazareth will not be home enough. Their lives have been disrupted—for good.

Mary’s child will also know the pain of not belonging. As he grows up, he speaks often of the Father who sent him, the Father to whom he will return. He asks his Father to bring those whom he loves to be with him in the house they share. He promises his friends that one day they will have a home with him and his Father. But not yet.

I need the reminder that for the rest of this life I have a choice: try to make this world enough, or receive the unsettledness of my heart as a gift. If I don’t yearn for more, I will miss the One who both entered time and lives beyond it. It is hard to learn patience. But good waiting clears the air; it helps me find out what I really, really desire. When I learn to wait for the truest things, endurance moves past a grit-my-teeth trial to hope and strength. Year by year I have the opportunity to live into Advent. If I listen, I will hear the truth: I’m part of the exile, a woman heading home. Advent coaches me to wish for, to long, and finally to expect and even glimpse what lies ahead.

Sally Breedlove lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she works alongside her husband and closest friend Steve, the rector of All Saints Church. She is the author of Choosing Rest and one of the authors of The Shame Exchange. In 2007, she and a friend developed a monthly small group spiritual companioning ministry called JourneyMates, which now has chapters meeting in five communities. Her life overflows with five children and their spouses, eight grandchildren, and a home that serves often as a guest house for friends, extended family and ministry partners. Her work as a spiritual director gives space and rhythm to her soul; and gardening, arranging flowers, long walks, and writing poetry add peace to her days.

Stop Turning Thanksgiving into a Facebook Like

Biblical gratitude is far more than an attitude.

Michelle Van Loon

What do toilet paper, long bike rides down sun-dappled autumn roads, Diet Coke, and Justin Bieber have in common?

Answer: #Thanksgiving, internet style. I’ve seen expressions of appreciation for each show up on Facebook and Twitter this month. I’ve certainly populated the social media universe myself with mentions of the gifts I’m grateful for, among them family, friends, health, food, and employment. Other expressions of gratitude I’ve seen have hit similar themes.

I’ve seen many other gratitude lists that are simply inventories of coveted, then acquired consumer products: big-screen TVs, cute new sweaters, Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Thanks, then, is reduced to consuming or buying stuff. Ironically, the kinds of things that are on these shopping lists are hardwired into a deeper frustration that things aren’t the way they are supposed to be in our society. Both the Tea Party and Occupy movements are grassroots responses to our floundering economy. We are in a down market for true gratitude if giving thanks is primarily linked to our purchasing power.

Gratitude is big business in our culture. Oprah regularly urged her viewers to keep a gratitude journal. With nearly 1,000 listings for “gratitude journals” on Amazon.com, it would appear that there are bucks to be made from the counting of blessings. Researchers tell us that giving thanks benefits the one doing the thanking. I can celebrate the positive effects that gratitude has in our lives. And I can’t deny that this month’s expressions of thanksgiving add a splash of warm ‘n fuzzy sentiment to the atmosphere around the internet and in our culture, even those I don’t fully understand. (See Bieber, above.)

But thanksgiving, by definition, is supposed to be about someone other than the one doing the thanking. Author Ann Voskamp’s 1000 Gifts: Dare To Live Fully Right Where You Are hit bestseller lists this year with a poetic, biblically anchored message about gratitude’s power to transform both the way we live our lives and the way we relate to God. (See Her.meneutics’ two reviews of the book.) Voskamp’s book has inspired tens of thousands of readers to offer their thanks to the Giver for the ordinary moments of their days, a welcome redirect from Oprah’s “Say thank you to the universe!” message.

I may sound a bit Scrooge-like, but I confess that I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with Twinkie-sweet emotion that strips away purpose from gratitude. In my estimation, gratitude has morphed into a feel-good trending topic instead of what it really is according to Scripture: a costly expression of worship.

The Bible presents a remarkably unsentimental portrait of gratitude. The emotions we may experience are wonderful byproducts of our obedience and worship. The pages of Scripture remove us from the visceral smells and sounds of animal sacrifice, but those offerings were a bleating, bleeding centerpiece of expressed thanksgiving in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Paul connects the sacrificial giving by the congregation at Corinth to the expressions of gratitude by the recipients of these financial gifts. Thanksgiving is a costly act.

That cost is perhaps seen most poignantly in Job’s stripped-bare words after he had lost everything, when he didn’t have anything to offer except himself: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (Job 1:20).

True biblical gratitude has God as its object. He cherishes the offerings of thanks that flow from our hearts toward him, because these words flow out of relationship. The thanks we offer to him is always a response to the blessing of what he gives to us without reservation - himself.

Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes’s words have helped me connect with the real meaning of thanksgiving this year:

Being thankful is not telling God you appreciate the fact that your life is not in shambles. If that is the basis of your gratitude, you are on slippery ground. Every day of your life you face the possibility that a blessing in your life may be taken away. But blessings are only signs of God's love. The real blessing, of course, is the love itself. Whenever we get too attached to the sign, we lose our grasp on the God who gave it to us. Churches are filled with widows who can explain this to you. We are not ultimately grateful that we are still holding our blessings. We are grateful that we are held by God even when the blessings are slipping through our fingers.

This Thanksgiving, I will thank God for his abundant blessings. I will offer myself to him, extending my empty hands in prayer while acknowledging the losses I’ve experienced this year. And then I will sit in silence for a while, grateful to be held by God.

The Bible, Gender, and ‘Dad-Mom’ Debate Continues

Owen Strachan offers a rejoinder to Laura Ortberg Turner’s critique.

Owen Strachan, guest blogger

Laura, thank you for your remarks. You took me aback with your confession! I'm glad to be in conversation with you. There are many points worth careful consideration in your thoughtful post. Now, this self-professed “Dad Dad” will respond.

First, let me say that I have no problem doing dishes and helping my wife in different ways. An example: For nearly three years my wife and I had no dishwasher at our Highland Park rental. Loving my wife in a Christocentric, self-sacrificial way meant rolling up my sleeves multiple times a week to attack hard-bitten lasagna pans and ramekins formerly consecrated to delicious ends. I would venture that I do a good sight more of this kind of work than did my grandfather. Manhood must not be determined by the culture, but it does look a bit different in diverse times and places. That's not biblically problematic in my view.

The question, though, is whether I am to take on the burden of such work as a man. My read of numerous scriptural texts is that I am not. I try to help out where I can, but I am called of God to break my back to provide for my family so that my wife can care for my children and also my home in order that they and it might flourish. The pattern for such a life comes from texts both obvious and less expected. Genesis 3:16 shows that the Fall brings the curse to bear on the woman's sphere of cultivation: children. Verse 18 shows that the Fall brings the curse to bear on the man's sphere of cultivation: provision, whether located in the four walls of the house or outside it. We are redeemed from the curse, but not from God's wise plan—and childbearing and provision are not effects of the Fall.

It is men who are out in the fields and tending the sheep in the Old Testament, not women; that seems so plain as to be obvious. The proverbial husband is outside the home in Proverbs 31, providing and leading, while the proverbial wife cares for and nourishes the home and family. Titus 2:5 upholds exactly this kind of arrangement. Women, not men, are to work at home.

God’s design is simple, sensible, and honoring to himself. It is coded into the very physical and compositional form of men and women. Men cannot nourish children naturally; women can. Men are generally stronger; women are more emotionally attuned. This is why Christians have practiced these gender roles for millennia. The Industrial Revolution came many years after the Reformers, the Puritans, and the Edwardseans all practiced and preached what is called "complementarianism," as Stephen Ozment, Elizabeth Dodds, Leland Ryken, and others have shown. I've heard the IR argument several times since I posted on "Dad Moms," and I wish to gently but firmly suggest that it is a historical pot that does not hold water.

God gives gifts to all his children. But those gifts must be stewarded in accordance with his design according to texts like 1 Timothy 2:11–12. A woman is not hindered by the domestic call; she is set free to pour out her talents for the flourishing of her children and home. The gospel frees us to serve. My tiny 3-year-old girl is far better served by the loving, wise care of my wife than anyone else. Too often in this discussion, we ignore one of the most crucial matters: the health of our kids. My wife and I used to live across the street from a daycare and were always sad observing the overwhelmed worker trying to care for several screaming babies at once. God's plan is better than this. He has gifted my wife to lavish love and thoughtful attention on my two kids. This work requires sacrifice and is often hard, but it is powerfully calibrated to bless my children and strengthen our home.

I appreciate the dialogue, Laura. Now, if you will excuse me, I must be off. I have a full day ahead: from 9-5 I need to provide, from 5-8:30 I must plug in with my wife as a Christ-shaped, self-sacrificial leader, and then I must rest in order to, if I may steal the words of Tide, be awesome, if only in the most gospel-driven sense.

Read Laura Ortberg Turner's critique here.

The Bible, Gender, and the ‘Dad-Mom’ Debate

Laura Ortberg Turner and Owen Strachan discuss whether Scripture dictates that women work inside the home.

Laura Ortberg Turner, guest blogger

Editor's Note: Owen Strachan, professor of theology and church history at Boyce College in Louisville, recently wrote a post critiquing a Tide commercial on "Dad Moms" as one more indication that our culture denigrates true masculinity. His post elicited strong responses from Her.meneutics writers. Amid a flurry of tweets, Strachan offered to engage Laura Ortberg Turner in a point-counterpoint. Here is Laura's response.

First, a confession:

I really don’t want to like you, Owen.

And I’m disappointed in (although not entirely surprised by) myself for having that reaction first. This is an issue that gets my blood boiling more quickly than almost any other, and after reading your blog post about “Dad Men” and the cultural decline of masculinity, my first response was toward division, away from unity, and toward a mentality that says that if you don’t agree with me, you must be wrong. I am sorry for that.

To be clear, I still think you are wrong on this particular issue. But the far more important thing than who is vindicated by a jury of our peers—because we will both have our supporters and detractors—is that you are my brother in Christ, and that no amount of ambiguous biblical interpretation can do anything to that truth. So with that confession, an apology to you, and a commitment to treat you with love and repentance when I fail.

To the issue at hand, a few important areas of disagreement and discussion:

First, the distinction between working “at home” and “outside the home” (as you make in referring to Titus 2:5) is mostly a false one in that it reads the Industrial Revolution into the ancient texts. We find both men and women at work throughout the Bible, but in those times, work (largely agrarian) was not something that people left home to do. Being busy at home also meant being busy at work.

First Corinthians 12 reminds us that we are all of us given spiritual gifts by our God for the purpose of building up his kingdom. How is a woman, relegated to the world of the home, able to discover and pursue her spiritual gifts when she is told that because of her gender she must run the household with, as you mentioned, only occasional help from her husband with the dishes? When we assign roles to any person strictly on account of gender, we miss out on an abundance of gifts that person could bring to the table by first paying attention to their giftedness. If a woman chooses freely to stay home with her children, wonderful! But first she should know the “manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” that she, uniquely, possesses. She will so quickly lose herself and her ability to contribute to the kingdom if she has no choice in her vocation. Rebekah Lyons wrote about this beautifully in her Q Ideas article, “Why Are All the Women Fading?”: “This displacement of a mother's purpose (beyond child-rearing) becomes a huge loss to our communities. If women aren't empowered to cultivate their uniqueness, we all suffer the loss of beauty, creativity and resourcefulness they were meant to contribute to the world.”

My two biggest disagreements with you, though, lie in your reading of Genesis 3 and your insistence on protecting a view of masculine dignity. To the first issue, if Genesis 3:16 is to be read normatively to say that the husband ought to rule over his wife, then you may as well say that Genesis 3:19 establishes that the man’s place is in the grave. The point of the curse is not that it ushers in a new way of living in God’s kingdom. The point of the curse is that it is something from which we are to be redeemed. And that redemption doesn’t wait for another life or another time, it starts now. When Jesus prayed that the Father’s will be done on earth as in heaven, this is what he was talking about. Any attempt to say that the curse reflects the way things should be for us is not only damaging to both men and women, it is heretical.

More even than that, however, is the notion that Jesus would have insisted on maintaining a masculine image that would have kept him far from the laundry room, the kitchen, and anything that might smack of femaleness. It is hard to imagine the Jesus who washed his disciples’ feet and cooked them breakfast and said that slaves were the model of greatness turning up his nose at laundry as something beneath his masculine dignity. We can imagine many figures in the ancient world who would have ferociously guarded their masculine dignity—Samson, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus. Jesus, it seems to me, would be at the bottom of that particular list.

Stay tuned for Owen Strachan's rejoinder.

Why Every Workplace Needs Feminine Bosses

Just because I'm in a position of authority doesn't mean I should try to act like a man.

Margarita Mooney, guest blogger

Do women have to act like men when they enter the professions?

The person who has most helped me to ponder this question is Edith Stein: an intellectual and a woman of deep faith who worked in philosophy and education. Stein was raised Jewish in Germany, became atheist, converted to Christianity and became a Carmelite nun, then was killed in WWII for her Jewish heritage. She was canonized a saint in 1998.

Stein points out that women’s temperament will likely lead them in greater proportion to certain professions like art, history, and the humanities. But she insisted that some women will also shine in physics, medicine, politics, and diplomacy. Stein is right on when she says “there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman” (Woman, p. 47).

But beyond saying that women can shine in every profession, Stein calls women to exercise their professions as women: “The participation of women in the most diverse professional disciplines could be a blessing for the entire society, private or public, precisely if the specifically feminine ethos would be preserved” (Woman, p. 49). What does this mean?

In a summary of Stein’s life and teachings, Laura Garcia writes:

[Stein] did not argue that biology is destiny, but that the physical differences between men and women profoundly mark their personalities. The woman’s body stamps her soul with particular qualities that are common to all women but different from distinctively masculine traits. Stein saw these differences as complementary and not hierarchical in value, and so they should be recognized and celebrated rather than minimized and deplored. There are two ways of being human, as man or as woman.

Some recoil at assertions about biologically based differences between men and women, and understandably so. Such claims have been used to limit women’s public roles (i.e., “a woman’s place is in the home”) and to excuse men’s behavior (i.e., “boys will be boys”). Put in the proper context, however, it’s important to talk about differences in how men and women carry out their professional work. In particular for women who are not yet married or who may not get married, it’s important to point out that being a woman, even a good Christian woman, is not only about relationships with men and children—we relate to everyone with our specific gifts as women.

Unlike some feminists of her time and today, Stein did not try to liberate women from motherhood. Rather, Garcia explains, Stein believed that “motherhood is a universal calling for women, and so not simply a task to be exercised with one’s biological children.” Stein herself was never a biological mother, but she was an educator and later a nun. As a sociologist and demographer, I know that, compared to previous generations, many more American women will never be biological mothers.

Although Stein points out that motherhood may be rooted in biology, she adds that women can live out their call to motherhood in myriad ways: mentoring, advising, caring, and inspiring. Stein went so far as to say that women should not give up their feminine ethos when they enter male-dominated professions; to do so would leave them profoundly unfulfilled.

Please note that not only women are called to mentor and care for others. Men are certainly often wonderful mentors and very caring, but women feel a greater loneliness if the relational aspect is missing from their daily work. Women can do their work as well as any man, and they can still live out their femininity—and here, feminine does not mean high heels and high voices, but the spirit of caring for the whole person, as a mother would.

There are many ways I try to live out my vocation as a female professor. One particular way is with undergraduate students. When I find a well-intentioned undergraduate student performing poorly in class, I ask why. Often they share deep personal problems, which gives me the chance to refer them to campus resources that can help—such as the dean of academic affairs or the mental health clinic. This semester alone, four undergraduate women have told me that they suffer clinical depression.

In other cases, disgruntled students (mostly young men) often challenge my authority in disrespectful ways. After one such unpleasant encounter, I commented to a very respectful male graduate student, “You know, I just don’t think my students treat me like a 65-year-old white male.” He responded with a loud laugh. “Obviously not!” Perhaps the fact that this particular student comes from a society with much more traditional male-female roles than the U.S. helped him to see the naiveté of my comment; yet his respectful behavior also shows male students from any home or national culture can learn to respect professional women.

His laughter also made me stop and think: Why would I not expect students to notice my age and sex? Is it not the same thing—their sense that I’ll listen to them and try to help—that leads some students to disrespect me and leads others to trust me? Can I establish my authority with those disrespectful students while not shutting out those who need my advice?

Yes, I can and I should, because being caring and open does not mean surrendering a position of proper authority in the workplace.

Stein’s life and work can help women in all walks of life reclaim a feminine ethos without saying that biology is destiny, or asserting that women can only be fulfilled as biological mothers and companions to men, or claiming that to earn respect women have to act like men twice their age. Relationships with men and children may be vitally important to most women, but women also have a role to play in society. In every profession there is, society needs women’s gifts for helping, serving, listening, and instructing. Our female and male colleagues and students need our example as professionals who know our dignity as women. That is my vocation.

Margarita Mooney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. She writes for the Patheos blog Black, White and Gray, where this post originally appeared.

Why Teens Drift Away from Faith

It may have to do something with their marginally Christian parents.

Amy Julia Becker

Every week after Sunday School, I try to figure out if our kids have learned anything. Do they understand the stories they heard? Do they know the characters? Do they know God’s love for them? Do they understand anything about sin or forgiveness or praise? Usually, I get reports about coloring and friends and blank stares when it comes to the Bible. My ears perked up last week when Penny, who is almost 6, mentioned Jacob. I was all set to get the picture Bible and review the story from Genesis when it came out that Jacob was a kid in her class.

There’s a part of me that wants to outsource our children’s spiritual education to our church. My once-daily habit of “quiet time” has mostly fallen by the wayside due to the incessant demands of getting our whole family ready to walk out the door at 8. I stumble when I try to explain forgiveness or sin in terms our children might understand. We do pray before meals and before bed. We do talk about God and Jesus. We don’t do “family devotions,” though we do sing “church songs” in the car. But I worry that as my kids grow up and become more independent, they will fall away from the tenuous connections I’ve offered to God.

And so when I saw the book Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids (Zondervan), by Kara E. Powell and Chap Clark (both at Fuller Youth Institute), I immediately wanted to read it. It is less directly applicable to parents of young children than I had hoped, yet it still offers both a big picture foundation for passing along faith that will “stick” with our children and many practical suggestions for how to do so. Powell and Clark combine their personal experience as parents, anecdotal evidence from conversations with college students from Christian homes, and analytical research about what makes faith last to offer a comprehensive and very readable book that both encourages and challenges parents as we attempt to pass along our faith to our children.

On the practical side, Powell and Clark offer suggestions like incorporating children into faith-based family decisions such as giving money away. They recommend praying deliberately and consistently for your children, emphasizing character over achievement, and talking openly and honestly about faith with your child, giving room for their doubts and questions as “students who feel the freedom and have opportunities to express their doubts tend to have more Sticky Faith.” And they emphasize the role not only of parents but of the church at large; they advise finding mentors for your child and call upon the entire church to better involve and include youth in the life of the congregation.

Powell and Clark also acknowledge the difficulty inherent in passing along the faith: “40-50 percent of kids who graduate from a church or youth group will fail to stick with their faith in college.” And while they hope their suggestions will change those numbers, they are also quick to recognize, “There is no simple list of steps you can take to give your kids a faith that lasts. Part of what makes parenting so demanding is that easy answers are rare.” Throughout the book, they return to the theme of trusting God with our children even when they seem far away from him.

But at the end of the day, one of the biggest measures of whether our children will know Jesus is whether they have watched us know Jesus. That doesn’t mean we need to be perfect Christians who never lose our tempers and always demonstrate patience and love. It means we need to be transparent about our humanity and our salvation in our habits, our attitudes, our actions towards our kids, and our actions towards others. Their findings reminded me of a study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts about reading habits in America in 2007. The study showed that the highest predictor of reading habits came not from whether or not parents read to their children (though that was a key factor), but whether or not parents themselves read in the presence of their children. In Powell and Clark’s words, “It’s who you are that shapes your kid.” When it comes to faith, our kids need to see us doing it—reading the Bible, praying, going to church, forgiving other people, and living lives of love and service to God.

Sticky Faith is ideal for parents of kids in late-elementary and middle school, although it is applicable for parents with children of all ages. Much of the advice Powell and Clark offer could also apply to “spiritual parents.” I hope there are many teenagers coming to know Christ even if they aren’t meeting him via their biological parents, and their leaders could benefit from the words in these pages.

I’d like to read Sticky Faith again in a few years so that I can put some of the recommendations into practice. For now, I’m grateful for the exhortation to follow Jesus in ways my kids can see and touch and understand every day. I’ll keep peppering them with questions when they come home from Sunday School. But I will also try to make my own faith more visible to them. Kara Powell dedicates this book to her mother, “who modeled Sticky Faith for me every morning, coffee cup in one hand and Bible in the other.” I hope one day I can have kids who say the same of me.

Sticky Faith is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

Success, Honor, and the Legacy of Joe Paterno

Why the world should never forget the football coach after the sex abuse scandal at Penn State.

Marian V. Liautaud

“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.” Joe Paterno

I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to make sense of child sexual abuse. In 1978, 26 sets of boys’ bones were exhumed from serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s crawl space. Three other bodies were found elsewhere on his Chicago property. I have been haunted ever since by the reality that a sick, dangerous man did unthinkable things to boys while I played hopscotch on my driveway just minutes away.

A couple of years after Gacy was found out, clergy abuse in the Catholic Church surfaced. Although I, nor anyone I knew in our local church and school where I grew up, experienced sexual abuse by the priests in our parish, evil seemed to strike dangerously close to home again. Was there nowhere a child could be safe?

Last week when the Penn State scandal broke and the Grand Jury report released graphic details of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged rape of a young boy and other incidents of abuse, memories of Gacy I’d fought to suppress reemerged. And learning about the cover-up by college officials reminded me anew of the double-injury inflicted when our trusted institutions fail in their duty to report allegations of child sexual abuse.

Paterno’s unseasoned dish

When Penn State’s legendary (now former) head football coach Joe Paterno set out to conduct what has become known as his “grand experiment”—dubbed “Success with Honor”— his goal was to challenge his players to success both on the field and in the classroom. The program became the hallmark of Penn State’s football program, as well as its entire athletics department: “Success with Honor is a daily, active goal, not an end result, and achieving that goal is defined not solely by how much you win, but moreover how you win.”

If success is measured by Paterno’s original rubric, his experiment was a grand success. In 2010, the Nittany Lions posted an 89 percent graduation rate, the highest of any team ranked in the final AP Top 25. Additionally, Paterno led his Lions through 46 seasons, most of which were winning ones. Until last week’s game against Nebraska, Penn State was on track for an undefeated season in 2011. This is the stuff legacies are made of.

But today Paterno knows better than anyone how bad success without honor tastes. For all of his wins on the field and good performances in the classroom with his student-players, the one grand experiment that mattered most—his own ability to live up to success with honor—has failed.

As details have emerged over the past week, 84-year-old Paterno has gone from revered head coach to accomplice in a cover-up that led to the tragic abuses of at least eight young boys. When presented with information that Sandusky had been caught sexually abusing a boy while in Penn State’s locker room, Paterno ran the information up the chain. When nothing resulted from his reporting, he failed to follow through to ensure that Sandusky would never have access to young boys again. This was Paterno’s game-changing moment—the moment he could have stopped the clock and taken Sandusky out.

Last week, years after his decision not to protect innocent boys was revealed, Paterno said he regretted this decision. "This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more."

Not doing more will be his legacy. The wins on the field will mean little compared to this one big loss. The meal of a lifetime will fail to satisfy this man hungry for success with honor.

Ironically, because Paterno will be remembered for what he didn’t do—adequately report child abuse—his “great sorrow” may do more to change the world than his entire 46-year record as Penn State’s head football coach. Because of his reputation, the world will always remember Paterno as the man who failed to report child abuse. For the 33 victims of Gacy and those who escaped with their lives, and the thousands of children who have been victims of clergy abuse and those who continue to suffer in silence, and the millions of children who have been abused and the millions more who will be, Penn State’s scandal is a moment in history that has changed everything.

Because of Paterno, we all now know that we have an obligation to protect kids by speaking up to legal authorities when we learn—or even suspect—that abuse has occurred. Speaking to students at Penn State’s chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, Tom Henderson called Paterno and his colleagues’ failure to intervene a deficiency of love. Now they’re paying a career price for their silence. Perhaps their lesson will spare the rest of us from keeping quiet if we see a child in harm’s way.

This week, the Big Ten announced that it was taking Paterno’s name off the trophy for the conference champion. The statue on Penn State’s campus may come down too, and some day they will probably remove his name from the library.

Even without all these visual reminders of who JoePa was, his is a legacy worth remembering.

Marian V. Liautaud is author of “Sex Offenders in the Pew,” (CT, 2010) and editor of Reducing the Risk: Keeping Your Ministry Safe from Child Sexual Abuse. She serves as editor of church management resources and GiftedforLeadership.com at Christianity Today.

The Truth about Marriage and Happiness

And how the church can begin proclaiming that truth.

Natasha Robinson, guest blogger

There is a great need for the church to stop lying to people. That is a critical first step to resolving some of the marital illusions and the rising divorce rate even among Christians. Christian Sunday School instructions to girls—even if only implicit—go something like this: go to school, get a good education, get married, have children, and live happily ever after. You can do all things through Christ, and you will remain happily married until death separates you. We subconsciously assume there will be no physical or emotional pain because we will die at the same time as our spouses, spending our final moments holding hands together like the elderly couple in The Notebook. (By the way, I love that movie!)

The problem with the lessons, of course, is the formula rarely works. As Her.meneutics writers have noted, some women don’t find their mate. Some wait longer to get married, while others don’t get married at all (and yes, we need to remind those women that singleness, too, is a gift from the Lord). Some women can’t have children. If the statistics are true, most women will become widows later in life and will deliberately choose to live the remainder of their lives happily ever after without a life partner.

I observe and regularly pray for the challenges that consistently threaten Christian marriages. Reflecting on Elisabeth K. Corcoran’s recent article series entitled “The Unraveling of a Christian Marriage,” I was brought to a place of sadness, compassion, and grace. I wonder, how many Christian marriages unravel before they even begin because the bride and groom have blindly bought into mixed messages? I think we need to revamp our lessons to include a bit more truth telling on these points.

For starters, we need to ask ourselves, “Why would anybody want to get married in the first place?” Most of the time, young people talk about how happy they are in their current relationships. Young engaged couples are often so happy. So the premise is that folks get married because they are happy and they expect to always remain happy together. It is on this principle that they seek to take their relationship to the next level. If they are wise, they will first seek premarital counseling.

Unfortunately, far too many churches lack the time, resources, or proper training to provide nouthetic counseling. Therefore, church leaders fail to ask an important question, and the subtitle of Gary Thomas’s most popular book: “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”

Thomas believes that God uses marriage to draw us closer to him and to grow our Christian character. Therein lies the truth: Marriage is a ministry that requires us to daily consider our decisions for holiness and happiness. Allow me be to very clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that we cannot, should not, or will not be happy in marriage. In seven years of marriage, I can attest that there is happiness. Marriage does have its benefits and blessings. What I am saying is that happiness is not an end to be sought in marriage. God has a bigger plan and higher purpose for marriage, and that is for our holiness. And the chief end of holiness is happiness, if we are happy to please to Lord.

If happiness is what a young single woman seeks in a groom, I would tell her not to get married. It would be better to gather a group of single girlfriends, buy some popcorn and sodas, and rent a PG-13 romantic comedy. In the movie, the knight in shining armor will come, a beautiful wedding will ensue, the movie will end, and then you can spend the rest of the night dreaming about them living happily ever after. Get the thrill over with; there is no need to destroy your life or the life of another with those unrealistic expectations.

Married people know that marriage can sometimes be difficult. Sometimes we get tired, sometimes we speak when we should be quiet or are silent when we should speak. At times there are irreconcilable differences and that’s okay. There will be valleys. So what do you do when you get into those tight spots? Do you cry out to God? Do you feel safe to reach out to other married couples in your family, church, or friend circle for help—preferably those who have been married 35 years or more? (If you are married and don’t have these people in your circle, you should. They are like life rafts when in troubled waters.) Or do you smile and keep going along, all the while pretending like you don’t have problems?

Herein lies the problem: When we fail to tell people the truth, they become bitter and untrusting, so they don’t reach out to us for help when they need it. After all, the church has lied to them, told them that they would be happy in marriage and that marriage would be easy. Therefore, they suffer in silence. They cheat. They separate from each other spiritually and emotionally. They consider divorce. Why? Because they don’t believe you have the answer to help them through their problems.

Somewhere along the line, we have missed too many opportunities to tell them the truth, that marriage is a holistic earthly reflection of Christ’s love for his church. Marriage is a union of sacrifice, the laying down of self to the glory of God and for the honor of his name. Marriage is a powerful witness of what Jesus has done and continues to do for us. It transforms us into his very image.

In what other relationship can you continuously choose to love another? Where else can you offer forgiveness for someone who sees you for who you are, denies you, crucifies you, and then gives you the opportunity to say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34)”? The truth is: the pursuit of marriage produces holiness in our lives. Holy living should bring our hearts joy and make us happy. This is truth, and we need to start telling it.

Natasha S. Robinson serves as codirector of the Women’s Mentoring Ministry at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is the founder, writer, and speaker for His Glory On Earth Ministries, a member of the Redbud Writers Guild, and a full-time student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. Connect with Natasha through her blog, A Sista's Journey or Twitter @asistasjourney.

Saving Men from Their Own Sex Slavery

According to Daniel Walker, author of God in a Brothel, it's not just children who need rescuing from the global sex trade.

Interview by Elissa Cooper

“When I was a boy listening to an invitation to adventure, I had no idea it would be so painful," writes Daniel Walker in God in a Brothel: An Undercover Journey into Sex Trafficking and Rescue (InterVarsity, 2011). "But I also failed to understand why it was that this grace was so amazing and how it could be that this unlikely gift would ultimately triumph over my fear and shame.”

In his heartbreaking yet hopeful story, Walker recounts his own experiences as an undercover detective, reminding the church to engage modern-day slavery. “Slavery is an inherent part of our Christian heritage, going back to the Garden of Eden where humanity was enslaved, right through to the greatest abolitionist, Jesus, who sets us free [and] seeks us out as free beings to set others free,” Walker told me on a recent visit to Christianity Today.

Walker talked to me about his book (which is being sponsored by Compassion International and Hagar International as part of the Anti-Trafficking Tour) and how he came to see that Christians are "bearers of the most wild, dangerous, untamed force for good in the world."

One of the things I appreciated about your book is that you humanized men who purchased sex, noting that they too are enslaved.

There are books from people doing undercover work who say, “These are despicable, disgusting lowlifes.” And they are. But it’s easy to forget that we were all slaves and we’re set free. They’re enslaved by something that’s much more visible.

What are ways to help men escape this form of slavery?

[In my former detective work,] we were holding people accountable for the evil they did, which ultimately we believe sets them free. By bringing them face to face with the injustice they perpetuated, they have two choices: they come to a point where they confess and accept their penalty as the way to freedom, or they go down the path of denial and deeper forms of slavery.

I wanted to make it clear in talking to these guys—like the guy who said, “You know, I hate my life and I hate what I do”—that he is powerless in his enslavement to the desires he’s fed through pornography and other means.

So many men within the church are enslaved to that and other vices because they haven’t heard, “There’s a far greater adventure, there is far greater pleasure than you’ll ever find in the imitations that you’re looking in. And it’s to use your masculine strength on behalf of the millions of little girls and desperate women who are waiting for you to show up. That’s the adventure that you’re called to.” Because we’re not doing that, they are trying to find an imitation that fills their need for risk and for danger and for adventure.

At the end of the book, you introduce “Nvader,” which encourages and equips churches to investigate, rescue, and prosecute trafficking. What are your hopes for the new organization?

Detective work is expensive because of the security issues involved and the care of the staff, because it is putting people into potentially dangerous situations and face to face with the very worst kind of trauma, abuse, and exploitation. It’s a $32 billion rape-for-profit industry and you’re putting people right up against it, so Nvader is about fulfilling the dream of doing it properly.

It’s also about empowering churches. To defend and to protect against the big bad world, we live in this bubble, and being a Christian means we don’t read Harry Potter or let our kids do Halloween. By doing so, we trivialize the real nature of evil. We should be teaching our young people that they’re bearers of the most wild, dangerous, untamed force for good in the world, and that they are the ones who are dangerous. In fact, the world needs to fear them.

How have you brushed up against real evil?

In the book I tell the story of being in a brothel with a prostitute named Maria. I hadn’t been doing the work long and I was afraid of my personal sin—I didn’t know what would happen in this brothel as a good Christian boy from New Zealand. I was afraid of the bad guys with guns—and there were bad guys with guns—and I was afraid of evil. This was a place where the demonic reigned.

The tables turned when suddenly I saw this prostitute not as a threat to my purity or professionalism, but as a child of God whom he greatly loved. [I was] filled with this all-consuming, holy hatred for the way evil had ensnared her small life, and holy anger in a world that allows its children to be sold as playthings for the lusts of men. I captured on my covert camera enough evidence to put the bad guys in in jail and to facilitate the rescue of Maria and the other women. If anyone was dangerous in that place, it was me.

You talk about loving adventure and excitement, and you’re good at it. Now that you’re not doing the undercover work, what is your adventure?

First, sharing the nightmare of what I saw so that other people might share the burden that I felt. Both how horrifically evil and dark it was, but also how relatively easy it was to do something about it. I wanted people to see the nightmare but the dream as well, and the call that God gave them.

Having said that, I also needed time to be restored and healed. I don’t want to pretend that I’ve come out doing that work and now am just so excited about this. Like the women and children, I had to choose not to let shame define me. [SPOILER AHEAD]

It’s a decision, a choice to not let shame define me for what happened in Jamaica and to be authentic about that and actually take God at his word that if I confess my sin, he is faithful and just and will clean me. And that I am not contaminated or disqualified from being used by him, and that he does make all things new.

Why My Kids (Mostly) Don't Watch TV

Children need to interact with creation, not just observe it.

Rachel Stone

When my boys (now 3.5 and 6) were very small, they rarely watched videos. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged parents not to allow any screen time for children under age 2. Last month, the academy reaffirmed its statement, supporting it with additional research findings. The report (you can read it in full for free here) explains that children younger than 2 aren’t developmentally capable of learning anything from events on a video—contrary to what the marketers of “learning DVDs” for babies would have us believe. There simply is no evidence that children this young can learn from watching videos.

The report also noted that “secondhand television”—programming in the background but not necessarily directed at children—distracts parents from their children and children from their play, with possible long-term effects on children’s attention, memory, and reading comprehension. The article went on to cite other frightening statistics, suggesting that TV watching displaces developmentally valuable playtime, reduces literacy, and is associated with negative health effects.

Not surprisingly, the AAP report makes plenty of parents uneasy. After all, popping in a DVD can keep the kids quiet and out of trouble for a while, and who wants to feel guilty about that, especially since, as Rhiana Maidenberg points out at the Huffington Post, we parents spend, on average, much more time playing creatively with their kids than they did 30 years ago? “With the ever-increasing expectations placed on parents," she writes, "maybe we also need to allow for some latitude when it comes to giving parents the occasional break [by letting kids watch TV].”

Maidenberg doesn’t say how old her kids are, but based on the activities she mentions doing with them, it sounds like they’re over 2. So in her family’s case, the AAP’s recommendation of “no screen time” doesn’t really apply. And the uses of video she describes—relaxing with a half-hour of kid-appropriate TV after some busy playtime, using a 30-minute video to take a shower in peace, and getting kids through an airplane flight without meltdowns—are clearly not the kinds of uses that has the AAP concerned about kids and media.

But not all screen time is created equal, as another recent study suggested. Children watching a fast-paced, random, and unpredictable cartoon (SpongeBob) did measurably worse—twice as poorly—on certain attention-based and problem-solving tasks than children who spent the time watching a slow-paced educational program. Researchers noted that the problem wasn’t specific to SpongeBob but applies to any show wherein “there are a lot of things happening that can’t happen in real life... and happen in fast succession.” The children in the study were 4 but apparently were still developmentally unable to assimilate all that was going on in a way that made sense in the real world. Children do some of their best learning by interacting with the “real world” through play and exploration, so it’s no surprise that a show that disrupts their sense of the world inhibits their ability to solve problems in real life, with real materials. In fact, schools that emphasize learning that’s “focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks,” are increasingly popular among parents who work for places like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. Computers can wait, say these high-tech parents, because the creativity needed to design the technology of the future is nurtured away from the screen—not in front of it.

It sure seems like God designed us to get to know our physical environments—and everything in them, including and especially people—and creatively interact with them before we can meaningfully assimilate information that comes to us through screens. The AAP’s recommendations aren’t aimed at parents who pop in a WeeSing DVD so she can shower. Safeguarding our children’s God-given need to exercise all their senses is important; making time for play, especially play outside, and time for talking and laughing and making a mess with fingerpaints and Playdough—these things are more educationally valuable than any “learning” DVD. And a beautiful thing about kids is that a lot of the learning they’ll do—in the sandbox, on the playground, with their blocks or LEGO—they do for themselves. In time, they’ll bring that creative learning to their experience of technology, and be in a better position to use it creatively—not merely consumptively.

My kids watch shows like Calliou, Dinosaur Train, and, of course, Thomas, but we generally reserve them for "treats" or for sick days. They spend hours each day pretending, fighting, creating, and building. I’m not worried about them. The kids I worry about are the ones for whom TV is the best babysitter they have. Those born to less-educated parents, those living in poverty, and those who live in "dangerous" neighborhoods spend more time in front of the TV than middle-class kids of well-educated parents. But God created all children—not just well-off ones—to live, learn, play, grow, and create in this delicious, fragrant, messy, beautiful world. To this end, ensuring that all children get the creative stimulation they need is connected to a Christian's call to serve the poor and work for their and their families' comprehensive flourishing. How can we work together to make sure all kids get the screen-free time they need?

What the Herman Cain Case Reveals about Harassment

How Christians can respond to sexual harassment allegations in their own communities.

Gina Dalfonzo

When sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain began to leak out, my reaction was skeptical. I’ve been observing the political process long enough to know that many people consider sexual accusations—real or imaginary—a fantastic way to bring down a candidate they don’t like.

It’s not that I don’t believe sexual harassment is a problem. On the contrary, it’s a real issue that many women have had to deal with. Including myself.

I was 14 when a boy at my Christian school started insinuating himself next to me every morning, on the gym bleachers where we all waited for classes to begin, and saying filthy things to me in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. For weeks this went on, because I didn’t tell anyone. I simply could not bring myself to speak the words. I was too grossed out, ashamed, embarrassed, disgusted—you name the unpleasant and unwanted emotion, I felt it. All I could manage to do was to distance myself mentally from the whole thing and pretend it wasn’t happening. It was more than 20 years before I told my mother about it.

Of course, not all harassment is as clear-cut. Many a woman, in the office, at church, and elsewhere, has had moments of wondering, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” or “He didn’t mean it that way—did he?” What comes across as a flirtatious remark or gesture could be exactly that. But it could also be the result of a man’s cultural background, or what he was used to hearing in the era when he grew up, or just a thoughtless moment. Some remarks and gestures are simply too ambiguous to interpret without being able to crawl inside the mind of the person who made them.

As I write this, details in the Cain case are still slowly emerging, and many things are unclear. The accusations that have been made so far run the gamut—from what seems like a perfectly innocent remark about a woman’s height; to a “Darling, do you mind doctoring my tea?”; to an alleged invitation to Cain’s hotel room. The worst one came out Monday, when Sharon Bialek, the first accuser to reveal her name, accused Cain of groping her. We don’t yet know which of these accusations, if any, are factual and need to be addressed by the candidate and considered by the electorate. Even so, some women's groups on both the Right and the Left are calling for Cain to come forth with more details.

But however things turn out for Cain, this is a good moment for us to reflect on how we as Christians tend to respond to sexual harassment. Too often, driven by a number of complex factors, we offer only a knee-jerk response. Depending on what we have or haven’t experienced in our own lives, or where our sympathies lie, we instantly assume guilt or innocence, as I did on Twitter. Some of us scoff at the very idea, or opine that the women involved are invariably making a big deal out of nothing.

In politics, particularly, it becomes all too easy to make a game out of the whole thing. As I’ve already mentioned, sexual harassment allegations can be a weapon unjustly used to take down a candidate whose views the accusers just don’t like. On the other hand, they can be dismissed out of hand by those who have a vested interest in a candidate’s success. And they can almost always be used to fuel charges of hypocrisy. If the candidate’s a Republican, people snicker, “So much for family values!” If a Democrat, “Gee, what happened to the party of feminists?” There’s a grain of truth in both remarks, but leaving the matter there doesn’t help much. (As a friend of mine observed, when you consider that we recently had a President who was not only an acknowledged adulterer but also faced allegations of rape, you have to ask yourself how seriously the public really takes any of this.) We need to go beyond glib reactions to ask: How should we think about sexual harassment?

I’ve made the case that pretending it doesn’t exist, as some writers do, doesn’t work, for the simple reason that it does exist. But incessantly sniffing it out in every interaction between a man and a woman, or assuming a man guilty until proven innocent, doesn’t help either; it only creates a culture of paranoia. If too many women know the fear of inappropriate and intimidating behavior, too many men have come to know the fear of being disciplined for an innocent remark that was taken the wrong way.

This is where Christians have a model to offer, if only we’re willing to step up and put it into practice. We serve a Master whose interactions with both sexes were conducted with respect and grace. As Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in the book Are Women Human?:

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.

Decades after Sayers wrote that essay, we still see too much of the ugly attitudes she described. But imagine if interactions between Christians of both sexes were seasoned with that same respect and grace that she pointed out in Jesus Christ. Imagine if the church taught men and women, from childhood on up, that kind of attitude. My guess is, we would see more men treating women as equals in every way, and taking their concerns and feelings seriously. We might also see more women willing to give the benefit of the doubt in moments of ambiguity, especially in cases where the men had always shown themselves to be of good character. Probably there would be fewer moments of ambiguity in the first place. And in making these changes, we could show our society a higher standard and a goal to aspire to.

And that would be good for everyone, from the political candidate fighting to be heard, to the teenager unable to speak.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog, and author of ‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin. She wrote "The Good Christian Girl: A Fable,” “The Lost Virtue of Courtesy,” and “Abstinence Is Not Rocket Science” "God Loves a Good Romance" for CT online, and “Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women,” “Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, NOW Responds,” “The Social Network’s Women Problem,” "Facebook Envy on Valentine's Day," "What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?" "Why Sex Ruins TV Romances," and "Don't Think Pink" for Her.meneutics.

Perfection Obsession: What It Looks Like to Accept Limitations

Amy Julia Becker finds perfection in her daughter’s limitations in her award-winning book, 'A Good and Perfect Gift.'

Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

A Good and Perfect Gift, the memoir by fellow Her.meneutics writer Amy Julia Becker, is, on the surface, about a young, first-time mother learning to accept and embrace her daughter Penny’s Down syndrome diagnosis. Amy Julia’s beautiful and moving writing was just named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2011 and received a starred review from them as well.   

But Amy Julia’s struggles with disappointment, anger at God, and fully embracing the “good and perfect gift” of her daughter reflect struggles most believers undergo. For this reason, the book speaks to a far wider audience than parents of children with special needs. In fact, it speaks to all who strive to replace perfectionism with, as Amy Julia writes, “our telos”: the fulfillment of our purpose, “our true perfection.”

To that end, I asked Amy Julia about the temptation to idolize the intellect, responding to people who are insensitive about disability, and the beauty of being a limited, finite creature under God’s care.

So much of your story about raising a child with learning disabilities is, ironically, about your own learning: learning to trust God, learning to forgive offenses, learning to accept life’s imbalances, and, quite simply, learning to parent. Most of these are lessons we all need. Which lesson has refined your character the most?

During the first year of Penny’s life, I came face to face with the fact that I idolized intelligence. Not only did I take pride in my own intellectual ability, I also valued other people based on their intellectual abilities and educational backgrounds. Having a daughter with Down syndrome not only helped me to tear down this idol, but also to open my eyes to the beauty and significance of people with intellectual disabilities. It was a paradigm shift that has helped me participate more fully in the body of Christ and recognize and receive the gifts each person offers.

The tendency to compare—specifically, Penny’s development to that of other children—was at the root of much of your struggle. On the other hand, some readers of your book have used comparison in an opposite way, expressing the erroneous idea that your story counts less because Penny’s condition is not as severe as many other children’s. Can you offer any insights into overcoming this impulse most of us seem to possess to constantly compare ourselves with others?

Sometimes comparisons serve a good purpose: when they enable us to ask one another for help, or when they foster community by helping us realize we aren’t alone. But when comparisons form the basis of our identity (I am a “good” mother because I do x better than my friends, I am a “bad” mother because my friends do x better than me), they inevitably foster alienation, because they lead to jealousy or judgment. Both jealousy and judgment destroy friendships and families, which is one reason comparisons can be so insidious.

You write about the struggle not to take offense when, for example, people say things out of insensitivity or ignorance. However, in dealing with matters of disability or special needs, are there occasions for righteous anger?

Absolutely. Most of the hurtful comments I relate in the book were thoughtless or careless, but they weren’t mean-spirited. I hope people will take more thought and care with comments and language, but I also know that most individuals are not intentionally discriminating against people with disabilities. I save my righteous anger for people in positions of power and the cultural forces at work that discriminate against people with disabilities.

For example, Congress recently unanimously passed a bill (the Kennedy-Brownback bill) recommending that all women with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome receive accurate and up-to-date information. Despite the support for the bill, it has gone unfunded. The prenatal testing industry, on the other hand, has received millions of dollars in federal funding. The vast majority of women with a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome terminate the pregnancy.

One of the most powerful parts of your story is when you realize that the question “Who are you?” is more important than “What can you do?,” not only in the context of child development, but in all our lives. Is the tendency to focus on achievement why so much prenatal medical attention to Down syndrome is directed toward a general expectation of pregnancy termination?

I am inclined to believe the illusion of control prompts most parents to terminate these pregnancies. When given a choice, most people opt against uncertainty, and Down syndrome brings with it uncertainty about almost every aspect of development. Of course, it not only brings unexpected challenges but also unexpected joy, because Down syndrome always and only comes through a person and through that person’s whole life story. Clinical terms reduce human life to a list of potential problems in the future. My calling as a writer is to try to talk about Down syndrome in the context of the story of our family, with all our limitations and possibilities intertwined.

You realize at some point that “who” Penny is is inextricably tied to the physical and biological reality of the extra chromosome in the cells of her body: without that extra chromosome, she wouldn’t be Penny. What implications of this incarnational understanding of Penny’s condition, of the human condition, does this have for the church body?

It took me a long time to realize that our limitations—physical, emotional, even spiritual—are part of our God-given humanity. Brokenness entered the world with sin, but limitations were there from the beginning, and they will remain. Penny’s extra chromosome limits her in certain ways, just as all of us experience certain physical limitations. These limitations are not necessarily bad. In fact, to the degree that they enable us to become more vulnerable with one another, to need one another, and to serve one another, limitations enable us to become the body of Christ. 

Yes, We Can Learn Something from the Kardashian Fiasco

Family and friends should support the couple, not pick sides.

Sharon Hodde Miller

My family and friends and I have a long-running joke about the close relationship my husband and parents share. I tell people that my parents secretly like my husband more than me. For instance, my mom calls me every time my husband e-mails her (“Oh, I just received the sweetest note from Ike! He is just sooo wonderful!”), and if there were ever a dispute between the two of us, I am quite sure my parents would choose his side. Not only do my parents believe he is an absolute prince, they love him like their own son.

Of course, these jokes are mostly tongue-in-cheek. I know that my parents love us equally, and am delighted that they adore my husband. It is a gift when your parents are so close to your spouse, and it is a gift I do not take for granted.

Not every in-law relationship is that natural and easy. The whole concept of joining families in marriage can be downright awkward. When my brother first married his wife, I did not know her well and we are very different, so it was funny to have a “sister” with whom I had little relational history. Likewise, I had almost no relationship with my husband’s sister when we married. At the time, she was living on the other side of the country, so the transition probably felt clumsy to her as well.

Marriages produce new family members who may not feel like family at all. I was reminded of this awkward dynamic upon learning of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries’s divorce. The media circus has been preoccupied with the reasons for their divorce, but I was more interested in the Kardashian family’s response. Like any good family, each member came forward to express their full support of Kim. They were behind Kim and her decisions “unconditionally.”

What I didn’t hear from any of the Kardashian family was a word of support for their son- and brother-in-law, Kris.

Although, in theory, marriage symbolizes the joining of two families, marital woes often test that unity. At the first sign of trouble, it is easy to revert back to old family allegiances.  This kind of protection is understandable when an in-law hurts your blood relative, but this natural response isn’t necessarily Christian.

For nearly every couple that divorces, there was a day when they stood before family and friends who witnessed their marital vows. In today’s culture, this congregational presence is mostly ceremonial or sentimental, but according to theologian Stanley Hauerwas, it is this community presence that makes marriage inherently Christian.

In his essay “The Radical Hope in the Annunciation: Why Both Single and Married Christians Welcome Children,” Hauerwas re-envisions the Christian family, beginning with a critique of traditional understandings of marriage. He challenges the romantic notion that “a couple falls in love and comes to the church to have their love publicly acknowledged.” The congregation is not a passive on-looker while the couple independently embarks on this new journey. Instead, the congregation of family and friends makes that journey tenable in the first place. Hauwerwas explains,

“the church rightly understands that we no more know the person we marry than we know ourselves. However, that we lack such knowledge in no way renders marriage problematic, at least not marriage between Christians; for to be married as Christians is possible because we understand that we are members of a community more determinative than marriage.

“That the church is a more determinative community than a marriage is evidenced by the fact that it requires Christian marriage vows to be made with the church as witness. This is a reminder that we as a church rightfully will hold you to promises you made when you did not and could not fully comprehend what you were promising. How could anyone know what it means to promise life-long monogamous fidelity? From the church’s perspective the question is not whether you know what you are promising; rather, the question is whether you are the kind of person who can be held to a promise you made when you did not know what you were promising. We believe, of course, that baptism creates the condition that makes possible the presumption that we might just be such a people.”

If Hauerwas is right, then the Christian response to marital trouble and tenuous family dynamics must be altogether different from the world’s. We are not about taking sides or redrawing old lines, because we, too, made a commitment on that wedding day. It’s therefore the task of every Christian family and church to help couples live out their vows. Even when in-law relationships are tough, we violate our own “marital” commitment when we choose sides.

Instances of domestic abuse are an important exception to this call, but the general principle is one of advocacy for the covenant of marriage rather than one particular spouse. As Hauerwas said, none of us truly understands what lies beyond our wedding day. If marital trouble is navigated in isolation or further irritated by partisan family members, then Christian marriages have little advantage over any other. What makes Christian marriage inherently Christian is that it is birthed out of and sustained by Christ’s body, the church.

'Sex + Money': The Domestic Side of a Global Problem

Young filmmakers journey cross-country to show film on sex trafficking in their own backyards.

Cornelia Seigneur, guest blogger

What struck me the most about the film Sex + Money: A National Search for Human Worth, which screened at Portland State University this month, is how young.

Thirteen- and fourteen-year olds, and some as young as eleven, being led into sex trafficking.

I have twin sons who just turned 14.

The PSU event was one of two Oregon screenings in the 50-state tour that the Sex + Money filmmakers are offering through December 17. The comprehensive documentary covers domestic sex trafficking and the modern-day abolitionist movement to stop it.

The screening drew 300 people in a city known for its livability, as well as its sex trafficking problem. In 2010, Diane Sawyer and Dan Rather reported on the trafficking of humans in the city. In fact, some of the footage in the Sex + Money film was shot in Portland.

Screening attendees included students, activists, social workers, and lawmakers. Jamie Broadbent, from the child welfare division at the Department of Human Services, Lynn Haxton, attorney with Youth Rights and Justice, and U.S. Attorney Kemp Strickland led a question-and-answer panel session after the film.

The seed for the film was planted in Morgan Perry, now 24, while she was a communications and mass media major at the University of the Nations, a Youth With a Mission (YWAM) educational institute in Hawaii.

She and four other students were studying under the YWAM nonprofit PhotoGenX, which uses photography and media to raise awareness on social justice issues. They traveled to 20 countries to research, write about, and photograph the issue of international sex trafficking.

After returning home, they documented their experience in the book Sex + Money: A Global Search for Human Worth, published in 2008. While writing the book, they came to realize that the issue was in their own backyard.

“I listened to a pastor from Atlanta share a story about a girl locked in a dog cage in Phoenix, and that verse in Matthew 7 about seeing a speck in another person’s eye when you have a plank in your own, came to mind,” Perry said at the screening. “I became convicted about the issue of sex trafficking in the United States and decided to use my background in film to produce the documentary.”

In 2009, she convened the same photojournalists from her overseas project to begin a researching trafficking in the United States. Perry was 21.

Two years later, they had the DVD Sex + Money: A National Search for Human Worth in hand. “We then hit the road,” said Perry, the film’s executive director. She and 16 YWAM enthusiasts are now traveling cross-country in an RV to show the film and lead discussions.

Watching the film is like being on a journey alongside the photojournalists as they interview social workers, lawyers, lawmakers, psychologists, former pimps, former buyers—including a pastor—and former child prostitutes.

The film transitions between sit-across-from-your-subject interviews to live video clips of people on the street answering questions. “What we’re trying to do in the film was like reality TV—with substance,” explained Perry.

Associate producer Isaac Gill pointed out the five points of action the film suggests: Learn, give, go, speak, and pray.

And they are practicing what they are preach: At screenings they are selling their book and other products and giving 75 percent of the proceeds to StreetLight Safe House in Phoenix, the largest restoration home for sex trafficking victims in the United States.

The goal? Raise a million dollars.

Streetlight was one of the organizations highlighted in the film. It gave viewers a sense of hope, and an example of what can tangibly be done to help victims. Sex + Money is a perfect film to use to introduce the topic to someone like myself, who knew very little about the problem. I appreciated the reality-TV production style, especially the on-the-spot interviews with random people.

Though the film is flooded with information, hope is the common thread throughout.Indeed, hope is what sets this film apart from others on the topic, said Joslyn Baker, collaboration specialist with Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice, who organized the Portland expert panel. “This one was spot-on,” she said. “Other movies stir you up; this movie moves you to action. It gives you hope. It’s a gift.”

For me, hearing pimps reveal their strategy for keeping girls in the lifestyle was distressing: “Dress ’em, feed ’em, keep ’em broke.”

Another sound bite stood out: “The only way not to find this problem is not to look.”

One of my communication studies students at Multnomah University, Kristen Leach, said, “The film was both heartbreaking and inspiring. It led to ideas a person could find if they chose to play their part.” Leach and a friend are planning a spring 2012 event they are calling the Isaiah Project, which will focus on Portland’s human-trafficking issue.

My only criticism of Sex + Money is that it didn’t differentiate between common terms; for example, I walked away still not knowing the technical difference between “trafficking” and “prostitution.”

Bailey Perryman, a PSU English major, noted that her parents, who are involved with Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans, told her to attend the film. “I like how the film offered so many action points,” she said. “I know that human trafficking is a problem in the U.S., but I wasn’t aware that it started so young for some of these girls.”

When I arrived home from the screening that night, my twins were relaxing for our Friday family movie night. I thought about the 13- and 14-year-olds not far from our safe suburban home who are not so blessed.

To learn more information about the film as well as find a screening near you, visit http://sexandmoneyfilm.com

Cornelia Seigneur is an adjunct instructor of journalism at Multnomah University and a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon.

Her.meneutics' Fall Reading List

The books our writers are currently devouring.

Katelyn Beaty and Morgan Feddes

Amid the frazzled pace of kids' soccer games, church Fest-i-Fall outreach events, and preparations for two major holidays, Her.meneutics' regular writers have managed to squeeze in some pleasure reading. We've offered summer reading lists before, but the frenetic pace of fall may just mean you're needing some "beach" reading all the more. Enjoy - and make sure to add your own reading selections in the comments section!

A special thanks to CT editorial resident Morgan Feddes, who helped compile this list, and who added a selection of her own (hint: it's the basis for a cold-war spy thriller in theaters this December).

Michelle Van Loon
Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor, Jana Riess (2011)
There has been a rash of books written with the stunt-like theme of trying something new or different for a set period of time. These authors are usually hoping for deep wisdom or fresh direction in their lives. Jana Riess’s memoir does just the opposite as she details her year immersed in auditioning spiritual disciplines, accompanied by reading of companion classics to illuminate her journey. She shares her struggles with disarming honesty and humor, and discovers that “a failed saint is still a saint.”

Ruth Moon
There but for the, Ali Smith (2011)
I'm reading this because it got a good New York Times review (original, I know), but also because I like the premise: "At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles's story is told from the points of view of four of them." There's a section for each word in the title and I'm still on "There," but so far it's witty and semi-profound, so I'm enjoying it.

Gina Dalfonzo
Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2011)
As Dickens's bicentennial year approaches, this new biography explores the thought processes of a writer who "never seems to have been sure whether he was searching for something or running away from it."

Karen Swallow Prior
Rumors of Water, L. L. Barkat (2011)
Includes reflections on the beauty and creativity of writing, parenting, and living.

Caryn Rivadeneira
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
A nice, Christian author told me about this book when she found out my husband was Cuban. "It's a little hot," she said. "But good." Especially since it won the Pulitzer in 1990, I happily gave it a go. "A little hot" is the understatement of the year! Muy caliente! I'm no prude, but I end up skipping over the smuttier segments. But still. The story of two musical Cuban brothers as they seek fame and wrestle with home- and love-sickness in America is fantastic. Great energy and a lot of fun, if you don't mind the heat.

Rachel Marie Stone
God in a Brothel, Daniel Walker (2011)
A law enforcement officer from New Zealand travels undercover to more than a dozen countries to gather evidence of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and girls, giving up everything for the sake of rescuing the "least of these."

Jennifer Grant
March, Geraldine Brooks (2005)
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, March tells the story of Peter March, husband to Marmee and father to Little Women. In Alcott's novel, March is absent after having gone to war; Brooks invents his story and it is told, in part, through his letters home. Brooks's writing is compelling, both in its rich descriptions of life in 19th-century America and its profound exploration of how suffering changes us.

Marlena Graves
Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Father Greg Boyle (2011)
Critically acclaimed by Publishers Weekly in 2010. My fourth time going through it!

Amy Julia Becker
The Shape of the Eye: Down Syndrome, Family, and the Stories We Inherit, George Estreich (2011)
I read an essay by the author at the website Bloom: Parenting Children with Disabilities and was struck by the combination of lyrical writing and deep analytical thinking about our culture. Estreich brings this beautiful yet unsentimental style to his memoir, in which he tells the story of his family.

Morgan Feddes
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carre (1974)
I have to admit, this was pushed up to the top of my “to-read” list mostly because of the upcoming movie. But regardless of the reason, I’m glad to be reading it now. Originally published in 1974, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is regarded as one of the best espionage thrillers out there (if not the best), and at this point, I think I would agree. A word of warning, though – it starts in medias res, so it takes some effort to get into it (about 30 pages for me). But I find that’s part of the appeal.

The Thin Line between Trafficking and Pornography

Trafficking survivor Jessica Richardson talks about the connection in her own life.

Interview by Katelyn Beaty and Nathan Clarke

When a pimp approached 16-year-old Jessica Richardson at the Portland diner where she was working in 1995, Jessica was primed to accept his offer. She had been sexually abused at age 5, and then her dad was murdered when she was 10. "I desperately needed to be accepted and loved. And when I didn't have my father and was already used to being sexually exploited, it just seemed to fit that all I was good for was sex," says Richardson.

Soon after meeting the "incredibly charming man," Richardson was turned out, first in Portland, then at sporting events and hotels up and down the I-5 corridor, the West Coast's track for trafficking. After 15 months of the nightmare, then an unplanned pregnancy, Richardson fled her pimp at age 18.

Now a Christian and member of City Bible Church in east Portland, she is one of the best-known survivors in the city, speaking to churches and schools to expose the lie that says anyone is only good for sex and testify to Christ's transforming love and acceptance.

On site in Portland, CT video producer Nathan Clarke and associate editor Katelyn Beaty spoke with Richardson about her story of survival, documented in a stunning short film for CT's This Is Our City project. Richardson spoke of the connection between trafficking and pornography, the multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, 89 percent of which is created in the United States. Her story impresses upon Christians the importance of treating pornography as more than a personal discipleship issue.

You experienced the sex industry from the inside out. How does that experience change the way you see it?

All around us we see this glamorized image of the sex industry. We see that it's something amazing, this "porn star lifestyle." What we're seeing is just the surface. We don't see the damage that is really happening, that the sex industry really is trafficking, that the vast majority of people that are in the sex industry as a whole are there because they were sexually abused as children, that they didn't have any other option or choice.

A pimp got to them when they were young . . . when they were a young teenager and he sexually exploited them, and they found themselves just like me, with nowhere else to go and no other hope. And you know that money is hard to come by. So instead of running to Christ, sometimes we stay in the abuse, because there is no other option and because it does appear glamorous.

Our culture has created this myth that the sex industry is appealing, that you'll be beautiful and that you're sexy and you're attractive. They don't show the horrifying nature of being raped day in and day out.

You also had experience in pornography?

I didn't do a lot of pornography, but I did some. The effects of pornography in my life were so damaging. We don't normally think of pornography as trafficking. It's so painful to me to know that those images and those pictures are out there. That we can pull a girl off the streets and I can leave the streets, but those images - once they're online, they never go away.

I had been out of the life for three years, and a Christian for one. I was in a 12-step group that was mixed-gender. I had been there for a month or so, and one night a man came up to me. He gave me that creepy smile and nodded his head backwards and looked down his nose at me, and said, "I know who you are. You wear red, don't you?" And I knew exactly what photo shoot he was talking about.
He didn't realize that I was trafficked. He didn't realize that I was being exploited. But that pornography is always available, and I will always continue to be exploited at the time of those pictures being taken.


How did you cope with that realization?

In hindsight I didn't know what was happening, but at that moment I started gaining weight, I chopped all my hair off, I started dressing differently, and it hasn't been until just in the last 8 months or so that I've been able to identify: "The reason I'm fat is because I don't want to be recognized." It's my security blanket to protect myself from this outside world. Looking back, I don't know of a single survivor who doesn't struggle with food. All of us have food problems because it's the one level of control we have over our bodies. So we either protect ourselves by overeating and gaining weight to be unattractive to people . . . or it's anorexia and bulimia, as an element of control.

Is pornography worse than prostitution?

In my mind, pornography is a lot more harmful than even prostitution, because you take a picture or video of someone, they are forever exploited at the age and time that they are, so you can take a girl off the streets, and the exploitation stops, but their photos and videos are out there forever, and people who have done extensive pornography, they have to move, hide, have facial changes, name changes, just so they're not recognized, and it's so traumatic.

It seems like one step the church could take is to help congregants avoid pornography or stop using it.

We are kidding ourselves if we think that men can just stop. It's an addiction like anything else, and with the way our world is today, pornography seeks you out. It's very common, pastors and people in the church having pornography issues. But helping them overcome the addiction is a good start.

Adoption: A Long and Winding Journey

Like our adoption into God's family, earthly adoption can be complex and costly.

Rachel Stone

A few years ago, after much research, discussion, and prayer, my husband and I sent in the preliminary applications for adopting from Ethiopia. The staff at the agency, Better Future Adoption Services (BFAS) in Minnesota, was courteous, and the fact that it was founded and directed by an Ethiopian Christian woman, Agitu Wodajo, seemed encouraging. We were nervous filling out the financial paperwork—we certainly weren’t going to be any orphan’s Daddy Warbucks—but we felt that material wealth was a less-important factor in deciding who will and will not parent well. (Recently, in researching for other writing, I discovered that less-affluent parents are actually more likely to spend more time sharing meals with their children than are wealthier parents.)

But BFAS didn’t feel the same way. We had been students the year before we applied, so our tax returns showed us to be below poverty level, and that was apparently grounds enough for delaying our application another year at least. Add to that our upcoming inter-country move (from Germany back to the United States), and BFAS decided that we’d better not start our dossier with them just yet. Too bad, because adoptive parents can wait up to two years after completing their dossier to welcome their adopted child home.

Yet getting rejected turned out to be a very good thing. It wasn’t too long before the Department of State warned that Ethiopia’s Charities and Services Agency had revoked BFAS’s license to operate in Ethiopia due to alleged “license misuse.” That’s the nice way of putting it. The less-sanitized words used in the letter from the Charities and Services agency were “child trafficking”—including falsifying documents to make children look like they were abandoned who, in fact, still had biological parents. (Under Ethiopian law, it’s illegal for a child with living parents to be adopted.) We were stunned and grateful that we hadn’t signed with the organization, as the State Department was urging parents with dossiers in progress to “seek legal aid.”

News like this has made many Westerners wary of international adoption. A few months ago, a Nation article unflatteringly described the resurgence of interest in adoptions among evangelicals as a “crusade,” inspired in large part by Russell Moore’s popular book Adopted for Life. In the article, Kathryn Joyce positions Christian adoption enthusiasts as blustering, blundering consumers who could care less about the ethical dilemmas surrounding international adoption. Yes, I’m slightly uncomfortable when Moore says that adopted kids “don’t know the flags of their home countries” but “know ‘Jesus Loves Me, ” but I’m willing to take that statement along with careful and ethically reasoned perspectives Moore and other evangelicals offer. Jedd Medefind’s response in Christianity Today was, I thought, a gracious one: Learn from the criticism. The ethical dilemmas surrounding adoption—and inter-country adoption especially—can’t be avoided by loving Jesus, loving kids, and hoping for the best. But, as Medefind, writes:

“we dare not turn from sacrifice and hard decisions and return to comfortable homes and lives simply because the cost and complexity are too great.”

Many children the world over have no parents and no one to take them in. They are vulnerable to trafficking and abuse and sex slavery and all kinds of other unspeakable horrors. In some countries, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome, and Down syndrome render children effectively orphaned to institutions woefully ill-equipped to handle their needs. Should people and nonprofits from wealthier nations help less-developed countries build the infrastructure and institutions to care for their own children? Absolutely! But meanwhile, children are growing up without parents. From time to time, I check the Reece’s Rainbow Adoption ministry page, a service that exists to pair children with disabilities with parents. I pray and cry for these children whose windows for early intervention close a little each day.

If there’s one thing I could point to in myself and my adoption hopes that seems flawed and likely to contribute to corruption within the system, it’s this: Like most people, even evangelicals, I’d love to adopt a newborn. A healthy newborn. But the fact is, children fitting that description are a small percentage of the millions of orphans worldwide. Adopting an older child, and/or one with disabilities, seems different from adopting a “perfect” newborn. But you know what? If you read adoption literature widely and deeply, you’ll see that there is no single path to a “perfect” adoptive family. (And is there one path to any kind of “perfection” in any kind of family?) Even the healthy newborn adopted on day two can end up having serious attachment problems. The older child with a disability can become the joy of a couple’s life.

Yes, adoption is expensive (easily close to $30,000, depending on the route one takes), ethically confusing, frustrating, and occasionally heartbreaking. Our adoption by God through Christ wasn’t cheap, either, and we who would adopt shouldn’t give up because it’s hard. Rather, we should wisely discern what’s truly best for all involved—even if it means opening ourselves to the potential for greater hurt.

Because who knows? It may yet be the avenue for greater joy.

Why Women Are Obsessed with Pinterest

Should Christians Take Antidepressants?

Advent: Putting the Brakes on Christmas Insanity

Stop Turning Thanksgiving into a Facebook Like

The Bible, Gender, and ‘Dad-Mom’ Debate Continues

The Bible, Gender, and the ‘Dad-Mom’ Debate

Why Every Workplace Needs Feminine Bosses

Why Teens Drift Away from Faith

Success, Honor, and the Legacy of Joe Paterno

The Truth about Marriage and Happiness