What Is Her.meneutics?
The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
books we're reading
Parenthood: Moving Beyond Facebook Envy to Reality
What we see online is only a part of the larger—and better—picture.
Over Christmas break, I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted another baby even though my soul knew this to be untrue.
I did not want another baby, but I'd read a blog that made me think I did. On the blog, a woman had described her birth story as an experience so spiritual it bordered on holy. A process that strengthened the bonds between herself, her husband, and God.
And here sat I, knowing full well that birth for me had never strengthened my bond to anyone but my anesthesiologist and Preparation H.
Her idealized description of giving birth had confused me so much that it led me to believe I wanted things that I didn't actually want.
In short, it made me jealous.
It wasn't an isolated occurrence. Countless times I've logged onto Facebook, Twitter, or my favorite blogs only to see vintage-filtered vignettes of other people's seemingly perfect lives. There are my friends, on tropical vacation (again). There are my favorite bloggers, wearing artsy duds, sitting in their homes that look like exact replications of the Anthropologie catalog. And there are their children, perpetually glossy-haired and rosy-cheeked and smiling.
Meanwhile, here I sit in my untidy home in the cold of January, wearing an old college t-shirt. My kids are fighting in the background. Reading these blogs, seeing these profiles, often feels like browsing a fashion magazine. It's fun to look at, but afterward I feel inferior and inadequate and ugly and fat.
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Why I Let My Kids Cry It Out: A Response
So much Christian parenting advice neglects the importance of self-care for women.
After reading Elrena Evans’s thoughtful Her.meneutics post, “Should You Let Your Baby ‘Cry It Out’? A Christian Response,” it was clear that Evans and I absolutely agree on one thing: unfortunately the so-called “Mommy Wars” are alive and well. I firmly support Evans’s decision to parent the way that works best for her family. But in a spirit of peace rather than war, I want to offer a different perspective on the cry-it-out controversy.
There are two camps that use the term “crying it out,” and it’s essential to distinguish between the two. One approach imposes a strict parent-driven feeding and sleeping schedule upon very young infants. The medical community by and large opposes this approach, due to the risk of stress and malnourishment for infants (see American Academy of Pediatrics abstract and article) and because of the profound discouragement it creates for many new moms. So let me be clear: When I’m talking about “crying it out,” I’m not referring to this approach.
But there’s a second approach to letting kids “cry it out” that’s worked well for my family. The AAP advises that a parent “respond promptly to your infant whenever she cries during the first few months.” When an infant younger than 4 months is crying, it’s usually because she needs something. Parents ought to always do their best to respond to these cries. However, around the 4-month mark, parents can discern between a cry expressing real need (“I’m hurt! I’m hungry! I need to be changed!”) and a cry of protest (“I don’t want to be in this bed! I want your constant attention!”). I believe there’s some latitude in how we respond to protest cries.
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Marriage: Creating a Partnership, Not Reeling in a Catch
The old traditions of luring in a spouse still linger today.
To all the single ladies:
Last week Groupon offered a ticket to lasting love (at a 76% discount!) by way of your own personal “boudoir photo shoot.” The ad proclaims:
The great Romantic painters had the same goal—to craft an image so beautiful that it would come to life and marry them. Increase your chances of turning images into love using the modern version of painting, photography . . .
The sample photo suggests that the way to transform “images into love” to is throw on some kitschy lingerie, splay yourself in the most awkward position imaginable on a bed, and fork over $95.00 for the picture.
The image might have gone from G-rated to R-rated, but the sentiment in this marketing campaign is strikingly similar to those of the conduct books popular around the eighteenth century. Such literature offered young ladies not only moral and domestic instruction, but also tips on how to attract the best husband. If you’ve read any Jane Austen, then you’ve encountered her satirical treatment of these works: priggish Mr. Collins reads passages from one popular conduct book to the captive Bennet girls, and the heroine of Emma tries to make a love-match by painting an “enhanced” portrait of her friend in hopes a gentleman will fall in love with the woman in the painting.
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Should You Let Your Baby 'Cry It Out'? A Christian Response
My "attachment parenting" is rooted less in outcome-based goals and more in God's example.
When Psychology Today ran an article titled “Dangers of ‘Crying it Out,’” my response was, perhaps predictably, jaded. I read the article, then clicked over to one of my “Birth Clubs” on BabyCenter to watch the ensuing fun while I nursed my seven-month-old. It took a while for the drama to start—when I landed on the page, everyone was up in arms about extended-rear-facing versus forward-facing car seats—but before my daughter had finished nursing, someone had linked to the Psychology Today article. And the insults and name-calling began.
In case anyone is curious, the Mommy Wars are alive and well.
“Dangers of ‘Crying it Out’ ” didn't cover any earth-shattering territory. Written by Notre Dame psychologist Darcia Narvaez, the article described the psychological harm done by leaving an infant to cry to teach “self-soothing.” Mommy War veterans will recognize many of Narvaez's points as reminiscent of Penelope Leach's headline-making arguments of 2010, and William Sears's headline-making arguments that date back a lot longer. Their conclusion: Leaving a baby to “cry it out” increases their stress hormone cortisol, which can be toxic to the developing neurons in baby's brain. “Crying it out” can also undermine trust, impair self-regulation, and threaten lifelong health.
Narvaez credits behaviorist John Watson with launching the “crusade against affection” in his 1928 book Psychological Care of Infant and Child. So far-reaching were Watson's anti-affection endeavors that a government pamphlet from that time instructed new mothers to “stop [holding the baby] immediately if her arms feel tired,” as “the baby is never to inconvenience the adult.”
(As the mother of four, I find the idea of a baby never inconveniencing an adult hilarious.)
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The Untapped Potential of the At-Home Mom
With the right schedule, mothers can raise a family and pursue their career, too.
Recently a friend of mine plopped down on the couch next to me and asked the question I get asked more than any other these days: “How’s it been since you’ve been back to work?”
Like always, I answered in two parts. First, from the part of me that spent eight years as an at-home mom, the part that has reemerged from under diapers and Sippy cups and found new life: “Good. It’s been really good.”
And second, from the part of me that has yet to figure out how to successfully manage my job, two elementary-age children, a full-time pastor husband who’s also in graduate school, life-giving friendships, and a sanity-keeping exercise routine without having an emotional breakdown over the fact that we haven’t had milk in two days or that no one has clean socks—the part that’s exhausted and overwhelmed: “But hard. It’s been really hard.”
The balance between “good” and “hard” is difficult for any woman, and downright daunting for women who have chosen to set aside our careers for a season to focus on our children, but who are now reentering the workforce. We long for the “good”—to use our gifts outside the home in a meaningful way (while contributing financially to the household). But we’re terrified of the “hard,” wondering if going back to work means forsaking the same family we gladly gave up work for to begin with.
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How We Can Harness the New Domesticity Without Diminishing Women
Keeping house is part of God's work, too.
In a recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, Emily Matchar, who writes regularly on the phenomenon frequently called the ‘new domesticity,’ wonders whether the resurgence of interest in canning, knitting, and generally DIY-spirited homekeeping is not, in fact, regressive--a ‘step back’ for women. Homekeeping, and all the domestic arts, are a minefield in our culture, often thought of--and treated as--degrading and menial work. The more creative domestic arts--sewing clothes, preserving food--are enjoying renewed popularity, and while Matchar concedes the pleasure to be found in making for yourself that which you’d otherwise purchase, she’s suspicious: after all, domestic work is unpaid work, and in a culture where women still earn, on average, less than their male counterparts, celebrating the domestic arts as creative, liberating fun is, for her, potentially dangerous:
“If history is any lesson, my just-for-fun jar of jam could turn into my daughter’s chore, and eventually into my granddaughter’s “liberating” lobster strudel.”
For many within evangelicalism, the issue is further complicated by the ongoing debate on gender roles. Recently, this blog hosted a exchange between Owen Strachan and Laura Ortberg Turner on the respective roles of men and women in the home as a follow-up to Strachan’scontroversial blog post in which he declared “Dad Moms” (stay-at-home dads) a “man fail.” Many Christian resources on homemaking assign domestic work virtually exclusively to women; this, proponents of the view insist, is profoundly counter-cultural but is certainly “God’s way.” Proverbs 31 is frequently cited, with the emphasis heavy on the home crafts and light on the real-estate dealings. As Nancy Wilson writes in Praise Her in the Gates:
“Christian wives and mothers must see domesticity as their duty and calling, not as an option. Whether we turn to Proverbs 31 or [to Titus 2] it is clear in Scripture that domesticity is what women are called to and equipped for since creation.”
But what if a Christian perspective on domesticity is counter-cultural in a different way?
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The Kate Middleton Baby Watch, and Why We Shouldn't Participate
Well-meaning inquiries about pregnancies can cause more harm than good.
If last year was the year of the Royal Wedding, this year is definitely set to be the year of the Royal Baby Watch. Virtually every tabloid is plastered with some variation of the news that the former Kate Middleton is pregnant, soon-to-be-pregnant, or unable to get pregnant. From speculation about her weight to rumors of pressure from the Queen to continue the royal line, everyone is on high alert to find out when Will and Kate will start their family. And with Middleton having just celebrated her 30th birthday, some royal-baby watchers are saying one of the most popular news items of 2012 will be the Duchess of Cambridge’s uterus.
The hype around a royal heir is carryover from the hype about the royal wedding—it just comes with the territory. But I feel for the girl. She can’t step outside without the media wondering if her slightly billowy shirt is disguising a growing belly, when in fact it’s probably comfortable attire perfect for running errands in. But is the obsession over Will and Kate’s hoped-for baby—and the general hype over celebrity babies— something we, as Christians, should be concerned about? Or, is it actually a bigger example of smaller, everyday conversations we have in our own churches?
It’s probably both.
Not long after a Christian couple gets married, questions about baby-making begin pouring in. I had been married a few weeks when I was asked, “So, when are you going to have a baby?” If you have been married for a few years, the questions get more direct: “You’ve been married a few years now. Isn’t it about time you started a family?” Or, “Don’t you just love your little nephew? I bet you can’t wait to have one of your own. . . .” If you already have kids, you might face a different set of statements, such as, “I bet Johnny can’t wait to have another little brother or sister”—before you’ve left the hospital with your newest addition.
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'But He Never Hit Me': A Christian Primer on Emotional Abuse
To answer the question, Christians must first understand the problem.
Deb* still has a hard time saying she was abused. Her husband knew the Bible well and proclaimed his Christian faith boldly. They studied Scripture together, prayed together, and hosted Bible studies in their home. But a domineering nature lurked behind his confident, God-fearing front. He spent years tearing down Deb’s sense of security and self-worth.
“I had things broken around me, threats made to me, emotional games played on me—a knife held to my throat, a gun held to my head,” Deb says. “The Bible itself was even used as a weapon against me—always out of context, mind you, but used nonetheless.”
He blamed his outbursts on Deb, and for years she bought the lie that she was partially responsible. “I had to have been doing something wrong if things weren’t going well in a relationship that included God, right? I tried so hard to be godly . . . and the Bible told me to submit to my husband. Maybe God just wanted me to suffer a bit, to make me more holy. Besides, it wasn’t that bad—he never hit me.”
But it was bad, enough that their marriage disintegrated under the strain, leaving Deb brokenhearted, fearful, and ashamed.
Deb’s story is not unusual. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four American women experiences domestic abuse in her lifetime, with emotional abuse present in the majority of cases. The numbers are no better among churchgoers (a fact supported by research, studies, and statistics in No Place for Abuse: Biblical and Practical Resources to Counteract Domestic Violence, by Nancy Nason-Clark and the late theologian Catherine Clark Kroeger). In fact, the difference seems to be that Christian women are less likely to seek help, because many believe the Bible says they must submit to their husband regardless of his behavior. When they do seek help, it is their churches they go to first.
Emotional abuse is a particularly sticky topic for Christians committed to the sanctity of marriage. While an increasing number of church leaders will suggest that a woman remove herself from a violent situation, they aren’t sure whether nonviolent forms of abuse merit anything beyond the suggestion that she “pray and submit.” The misguided advice many well-intentioned Christians give victims reveals a common misunderstanding about the problem—a misunderstanding some Christian organizations are working to correct.
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The Co-Sleeping Controversy and Enduring 'Bad Mom' Glares
If the City of Milwaukee is really concerned about protecting infants, they should use information, not shame, to inform parents.
As soon as the weather turns in Chicagoland, I know: ’Tis the season to start hearing all the dangers, illness, and strife that await my nearly 10-year-old son if he keeps refusing to wear a coat.
’Tis the season to endure the shaming glances, the “what a bad mom” nods while I shrug and offer: “He says he gets hot.”
Maybe it’s because I’m so fresh into the shaming season that I reacted so strongly to a new campaign from the City of Milwaukee that aims to curb the number of infants dying from unsafe sleeping conditions, particularly from co-sleeping—the practice of parents letting their baby sleep in their bed. The campaign includes radio ads, a Safe Sleep Summit, a “Safe Sleep Sabbath” song, and, most recently, two posters featuring sleeping babies cuddled up on piles of pillows and comforters, within reach of a butcher’s knife. The words across the top: “Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous.”
Since the campaign’s goal is nothing short of noble, you would think I’d be a huge fan.
When my kids were babies, I faced no greater fear than having them die suddenly (this is still my greatest fear). I took great precaution—no tummy-sleeping, no blankets, no pillows, no stuffed animals, no loose-fitting jammies—to make sure my babies slept as safely as possible. And since I appreciate Milwaukee’s vigor in trying to reduce the number of infants apparently dying from co-sleeping, you’d think I’d appreciate the punch of the campaign’s posters. Especially since at least nine infants have died this year from alleged co-sleeping arrangements. Further, according to the City of Milwaukee, “Between 2006 and 2009, there were 89 infant deaths related to SIDS, SUDI, or accidental suffocation. Of these, 46 (51.7 percent) infants were sleeping in an adult bed at the time of their death.”
But I’m no fan of the campaign.
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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.
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.
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.
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The Truth about Marriage and Happiness
And how the church can begin proclaiming that truth.
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.
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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.'
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.
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Yes, We Can Learn Something from the Kardashian Fiasco
Family and friends should support the couple, not pick sides.
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.
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Adoption: A Long and Winding Journey
Like our adoption into God's family, earthly adoption can be complex and costly.
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.”
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'Just' a Stay-at-Home Mom
So I’m liberated from home life. But what if I want to be there?
I am a product of second-wave feminism of the 1960s. By the time I was a child in the ’80s, movies were full of women in shoulder-padded jackets leading employees from their corporate desks. The working mom was alive and well, figuring out how to balance her professional and family responsibilities. My grandpa was picking me up after school and watching me until Mom got home from work.
So I came into my stay-at-home mom role slowly, with frequent handwringing and doubts. I was in full-time ministry before that, in a form of work that demanded loads of energy, crazy hours, and a great community of support. I had dreams for the way my career and calling would flow into my children’s lives. I wanted a home where high-school kids I ministered to could stomp in and out and eat all our tortilla chips. I wanted my boys to experience the socialization that comes from being around caring young people (my volunteer leaders). I wanted my children to know the part of me that leads 500 kids in the “Jai Ho” dance on stage, or sits with a 16-year-old girl over a cup of coffee, hearing about her family and her relationships, and letting her know she is valued.
When my husband’s job moved us across the country, the community I depended on for childcare was gone, and my job was not transferable. Instead of high-school field hockey practice and prayer meetings, my days in San Francisco became centered on the playground and story time at the library.
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We're Just Friends. No, Really
Our culture - and church's - obsession with romance has crowded out the chance for real friendship between men and women.
I was sitting at my friend Andrew’s dining table in the mid afternoon. I had stopped by to pick up a book I needed for a writing project and decided to stay and work with him a while. It was quiet and peaceful and he was bent intently over his work. I slipped slowly into the silence and wiggled my way into its corners. After a short spell I looked up at him from across our computer screens and said, “Tell me there’s nothing wrong with me.” I cupped one side of my face in my hand, smudging vulnerability like a shoddy makeup job.
“What do you mean?” he asked cautiously but tenderly.
“I mean, with Sam, not wanting... Tell me…”
He interrupted softly, “…that you’re not inadequate?”
I nodded and looked down at the keyboard where I knew the slow but open tears would soon land.
He spoke slowly. “I think you are beautiful. And I think you love people fiercely. That is an amazing gift.” I was both surprised and grateful that he hadn’t repeated his usual praise about my intellectual and creative gifts. Somehow he heard me speaking from that shier crevice of my heart, the one easily layered with “shoulds” and “ought tos,” the one whose fragile fractures are habitually hidden.
“I. Think. You. Are. Beautiful,” he repeated.
I nodded rapidly, still looking away as the tears came. “I know, I know,” I whispered. “I know.” I could feel his caramel colored eyes trying to stare these truths into my heart. I could feel how quickly I wanted to bypass his words because some part of me still struggled to hear it.
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Go Marry, Young Man!
Ted Cunningham argues that marrying young has its benefits.
In his recent book, Young and in Love: Challenging the Unnecessary Delay of Marriage (Cook) pastor Ted Cunningham joins a conversation that hit the media spotlight a few years ago with Christianity Today’s cover story “The Case for Early Marriage,” which I responded to on Her.meneutics. This February, sociologist Mark Regnerus, author of the cover story, broached the subject again in an interview with Katelyn Beaty, where he discusses his new book on Premarital Sex in America (Oxford).
Cunningham adds insight from his own experience pastoring Woodland Hills Family Church in Branson, Missouri Cunningham, coauthor with Gary Smalley of Great Parents: Lousy Lovers (Tyndale), encourages couples to not let youth inhibit marriage. Couples considering rushing into marriage against the advice of godly parents and friends, while dating new believers, or while in high school should be cautious, Cunningham says; yet if you’re considering delaying to, say, finish a college degree, he says, “Why wait?”
Her.meneutics’ Ruth Moon talked with Cunningham about his pro-marriage philosophy.
What was the impetus for this book?
It was based on our marriage ministry at Woodland Hills. The more I started meeting with 20-somethings, it made me realize you guys just need somebody to picture a special future for you. Your parents didn’t do it; your colleges didn’t do it; the churches you grew up in didn’t do it. They didn’t tell you that marriage is a great thing, something to look forward to, and something you’re going to enjoy. You’re delaying it because you’re doing exactly what you were modeled and taught, so I want to give you a different perspective.
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Taking a Break from Your Spouse
Research and experience confirm that time away from one's spouse actually strengthens the marital bond.
If the mathematics of marriage is two becoming one, how do you factor in couples that have decided that some temporary division improves the odds of their relationship’s longevity?
A recent Slate piece highlighted one of the findings from Iris Krasnow’s recent book, The Secret Lives of Women: Women Share What It Really Take to Stay Married: Strategic absences can make spouse’s hearts grow fonder.
Krasnow discovered that spending the month of July apart from her husband of 23 years so each could pursue their own interests strengthened their relationship. This was not a Hall Pass-style break, but rather an intentional choice by both partners to devote time and resources to personal growth. Krasnow currently uses her July marriage sabbatical for writing time on one coast, while her husband focuses on building his furniture business on the other. Krasnow notes that when August rolls around, the two are "hot to see each other, high on our personal accomplishments, and purged of the inevitable resentments that arise in the grind of the ordinary that long marriage becomes."
Krasnow interviewed more than 200 women who’d been married 15 years or more. Wives who were married to spouses who were gone for extended periods of time, such as fisherman and truckers, reported that the separations honed their communication skills, matured their sense of self, and encouraged them to develop their own toolkit of practical skills. A broken toilet in a busy household can’t wait for a husband away on a business trip.
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John Ortberg Is My Dad, But Don't Call Me a PK
My siblings and I managed to avoid the perils that come with having famous Christian parents.
I’ve always hated the term “PK.” All my life, people have felt total license to use it with my siblings and me — a knowing glance, a faked camaraderie. “You’re a PK, too? Isn’t it the worst/best?”
Well, yes. And no. And why are we having this conversation in the first place? We never, after all, refer to a dentist’s child as a DK or the child of a homemaker as an HK. Why do the children of clergy get such special designations — and such a specific template into which they must fit?
We PKs have two choices, according to television and popular belief. Either we grow up sanctimonious, carrying the mantle of our fathers — in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and Franklin Graham — or, we are Katy Perry or pre-conversion Jay Bakker, tattooed and seductive and rebellious and raising hell in ways specifically contrived to reject our parents’ beliefs (call it the Pastor’s Kids Gone Wild trend, as Jon Acuff recently did).
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The Saving Grace of a Shared Meal
Recovering a lost tradition in Jesus' name.
A number of recent studies have confirmed what we’ve intuitively understood all along: Eating with others keeps us healthier, happier, and better connected to each other. Even so, shared meals — especially ones at home — have been on the decline for some time. Busy parents find it hard to gather everyone around the table, much less have people over for dinner. Take-out and drive-through are a part of many Americans' routines. And let’s face it: Having people over can be a pain. It’s hard to get the house cleaned up and prepare several courses and spend hours eating and chatting and face a mountain of dirty dishes at the end of the evening. If there are children involved, things are that much messier; you face the prospect of pickiness, stains on the carpet, and people who scream or tell bathroom jokes at the table.
There is an element of vulnerability in all this: we may feel that we are on display, that we will be judged by our guests and found wanting, that our cooking may come out badly or our family will embarrass us. Having people over for dinner is intimate, more intimate than most restaurant meals ever can be. Maybe that’s why we don’t do it that much. But maybe, also, that’s why we should do it. Recently, blogger David Swanson suggested that meals with friends at home, rather than in a restaurant, can be a sign of “our confidence in a hospitable God,” as meals out avoid the sometimes-complicated and uncomfortable roles of host and guest.
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Coming Home after Hurricane Irene
The place where our family played, worked, and fell in love for nearly 100 years was destroyed. So it's not "just a house."
For New York City, Hurricane Irene was largely a non-event, an unnecessary nuisance with unprecedented action. For me and my extended family, Hurricane Irene was a life-changing storm. Sure, there were power outages and phone lines down and flooding and roads closed. But the impact I'm writing about was to two old summer cottages that have been in our family for nearly 100 years.
My great-grandfather bought Shohola, a rambling cottage on the point of a small beach at the end of a dirt road in Madison, Connecticut, in 1922. He had four children, three of whom are still living, and one of whom is my maternal grandmother, Frances. We call her Nana. Nana was 1 when she first spent her summer in Shohola.
Soon enough, my great-grandfather decided to build a smaller cottage on the property for his wife's sister and her family to use. And then a family bought the house next door, and the kids spent their summers together — swimming out to a raft and burning in the sunlight and scraping their knees on the rocks and playing cards on rainy days. As it turns out, that family in the house next door was the home of my paternal grandmother. My great-grandparents on both sides of the family were friends with each other, neighbors. My grandmothers grew up together. And so my parents met one summer and fell in love.
By the time I was born, my great-aunt who never married stayed in Shohola all summer long. The other families divvied it up into three parts. My parents usually brought me and my three sisters for two weeks. Two weeks of learning how to sail on a Sunfish made from a kit by my grandfather. Two weeks of walking to the Red House and getting stuck in the muck of the marsh out back and putting meat tenderizer on the jellyfish stings and competing in Sandbar Olympics and eating corn on the cob and vegetable casserole and hot dogs. Two weeks of learning how to make baskets with my aunt and playing kick-the-can with our cousins and reading book after book after book because we didn't have a television.
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Why Singles Need Married Friends
Instead of looking to celebrity couples to uphold our marital ideals, we should look to real couples in our midst.
I breathed a sigh of relief upon finding out the rumors of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's separation were false.
In Touch magazine first reported the couple’s split, after 13 years of marriage. Rumors of infidelity quickly followed, and later it seems Pinkett Smith was spotted without her wedding ring. It seems that was all it took.
Not them too! I thought, genuinely upset, when I first read the headline.
Why is that?
There’s something about a capsized marriage that bothers people who are on the outside looking in. These days, after all, it starts to seem like every marriage is just a divorce waiting to happen. We live in a culture that is in perpetual doubt about marriage. How can we not be? The national divorce rate, according to the Census Bureau, is 9.2 for men and 9.7 for women.
In response to our poor marriage rates, some have glorified divorce — ”it's not so bad, kids!” — while others have embraced the idea of avoiding marriage all together, settling instead for serial monogamy or cohabitation.
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How to Avoid Marrying the Wrong Christian
Why "he's a really great, godly guy" is not enough.
What do you do if you’re engaged but have serious misgivings about your decision, red flags popping up left and right? Do you a) get married, since you’ve set a date, sent out the invitations, spent a boatload of money, are too embarrassed to back out, and believe that most people get cold feet anyway? Or b) call the whole thing off until further notice? I think most of us would choose the latter, and would recommend thus to any friend or family member having serious doubts. But in practice, it isn’t what we many of us do, and understandably so: Calling the whole thing off is difficult, painful, and risky.
Jennifer Gauvain, a licensed social worker and coauthor of How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy, recently reported in the Huffington Post’s “Divorce” section that 30 percent of the nearly 1,000 divorced women she surveyed admitted to marrying despite serious doubts they had about their relationships long before the wedding day. According to reporter Katherine Bindley, the website IndieBride.com now hosts 33,000 conversation threads just about the urge to bolt.
I did.
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The War on Chores: Who Should Do More?
How husbands and wives can think about divvying up the responsibilities.
Inevitably, it happens a few times throughout the year, always when we’re exhausted, feeling overworked and as if everyone wants a piece of us. It’s our recurring major fight (most couples have one). It’s the fight over who does more housework and who is slacking off. It is motivated when, yet again, I’ve had it with being responsible for what is in my mind the majority of childcare and household chores. I am a stay-at-home mom who works full time during the academic year overseeing a dorm of 154 female college students. My husband is a philosophy professor. When school starts, we both have very full schedules. So when I am bound and determined to renegotiate our responsibilities, to set things straight, I am ashamed to say, I’m usually the one guilty of firing off the first volleys.
During the course of those volleys, I spout off anecdotal evidence from other working women who complain they do the lion's share of the housework and child rearing. I even cite studies that seem to legitimize those complaints. I point out that men appear to get a pass on housework. And so my diatribe proceeds.
Sharing household responsibilities is no trivial issue. The stakes here are high. Indeed, a British study suggests that divorce is twice as likely when husbands neglect helping out around the house. Marriages are on the line. Consequently, it is urgent that men start pulling their own weight around the house.
But maybe they are, if we are to believe the results of the latest study featured in Time magazine’s cover article entitled: “Chore Wars" by Ruth Davis Konigsberg. The article depletes my arsenal of arguments by highlighting a significant study suggesting that the workload has evened out for men and women; more men are contributing their share. In addition, Davis Konigsberg notes, “…new research on working fathers indicates that they’re the ones experiencing the most pressure” because “increasing job demands are conflicting with more exacting parenting norms.”
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The Female Friendship Crisis
Friends are an indispensable part of growing in Christ. So why do many of us have so few?
Women drive me nuts.
Some years ago, following an act of civil disobedience, I spent several days in a makeshift jail with hundreds of women protesters. Before long, a couple of them approached me where I lay on a hard Army cot, trying to get comfortable enough to read the copy of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa my husband had managed to deliver. What better opportunity than jail time would I ever have to read the longest novel in the English language?
It was not to be. Instead I was asked to step up as a leader to address the squabbles and discontent arising among so many women of diverse personalities in such cramped conditions. Suck it up, ladies! I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. As requested, I played the role of diplomat.
I emerged from jail with greater gratitude for God’s creation of two sexes than I’d ever had before or since. To this day, I avoid to just this side of causing offense nearly any event preceded by the label women’s: conferences, Bible Studies, retreats, Home Interior parties. I was even a bit skeptical at first about writing for a women’s blog.
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My Father Was a Porn Addict
The Playboys lying on the coffee table were the tip of the iceberg in our home.
My father taught me how to ride a bike, the value of a great punchline, and what a woman was supposed to look and act like.
My dad was a great guy with a bad habit.
When we consider relationships negatively impacted by a pornography addiction, most of us first consider the addict’s spouse or girl/boyfriend. It is not just the adult partner who is affected by a porn habit. Even if the addict believes he or she has the habit under wraps, porn’s toxicity leaks into other relationships in an addict’s life.
When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, porn made its way into our home in the form of Playboy magazines on our coffee table, next to copies of my mom’s Redbook and Ladies Home Journal. My parents had come of age in the Mad Men era, when Hugh Hefner’s magazine was a signpost of cool in the same way that other sophisticates of their generation smoked cigarettes in the doctor’s office, slow-danced to Sinatra, and imbibed a dirty martini before dinner.
The coffee table reading was only the tip of the iceberg in our home. I can still remember the shock waves that hit me when I discovered the cheaply printed hard-core erotica stashed in my parents’ bedroom. I was 11 or 12 when I discovered a stash of the stuff in my dad’s dresser drawer and nightstand. Whenever my parents left the house, I pored over each plain-wrapped volume. I didn’t fully understand what I had read, but I knew that I’d been initiated into the world of adulthood at an age when I barely understood the mechanics of how babies were made.
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Why We Don't Use Natural Family Planning
The method works wonders for many Christian couples, but shouldn't be elevated to one-size-fits-all heights.
Because I write often about reproductive ethics, I knew Bethany Patchin’s story long before Mark Oppenheimer wrote about it in last weekend’s New York Times. Bethany and Sam Torode divorced in 2009 after nine years of marriage, during which they had four children. Early in their marriage, the couple wrote a book called Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception, in which they argued that natural family planning (NFP) is the healthiest, most spiritually enriching contraceptive approach for Christians.
NFP, the only contraceptive method approved by the Catholic Church, requires couples to track the woman’s fertility by detailed observation of body temperature and cervical mucus. Couples can then avoid intercourse on the wife’s fertile days if they wish to avoid pregnancy, and plan intercourse if they want to become pregnant.
The Torodes, as other NFP supporters do, argued in their book and here at Christianity Today that not only is NFP as effective as medical forms of birth control when done correctly (which admittedly requires knowledge and practice), but also makes for healthier marriages that more closely align with God’s purposes for husbands and wives. They believe NFP honors our God-given bodies and fertility cycles rather than manipulating them to suit our preferences. It makes each act of intercourse truly open to God’s procreative purpose for marriage. It allows spouses to fully embrace each other, body and soul, without any barrier. It enhances marital intimacy and interdependence by teaching couples to constrain their sexual urges in service to a greater goal.
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Thoughts on Afghanistan from a Marine Wife
The 'drawdown' announced last month gives me another opportunity to be sore afraid — or to trust God.
Less than three weeks ago, I watched as my husband, Nathan, became the commanding officer of a U.S. Marine Corps infantry company. About 160 men, most of them barely adults, stood at attention in their camouflage and combat boots and waited as he became their leader. Moments earlier, some of the troops had curbed their cursing and offered startled greetings — “Afternoon, Ma’am” — when they saw me standing there in my dress and heels. It was a Friday.
The following Tuesday, I watched via televised address as my President announced a plan to dramatically decrease the number of troops in Afghanistan. The network-worthy news that evening was that we will be reducing our forces from the current 100,000 to about 67,000 by next summer. That’s a quick decrease of nearly a third — “a drawdown,” President Obama called it, which in many ways sounded altogether promising.
War-weary like everybody is, as a military wife I have perhaps more reasons to be overjoyed at prospects: Another war over! We’re getting out of there, finally! But my response to the announcement was instead lit by the light of the week before, by my husband and 160 other living, breathing men lined up in a dusty military gym. By how much he means to me and by my fears of what could happen to any one of them. In many respects, the concerns I have are not unfounded; in fact, I justify them by the fact that they are bona fide news stories.
For instance, it was reported only months ago that the number of troops killed by IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices — roadside bombs) in Afghanistan rose by 60 percent last year, while the number of troops wounded by them tripled. Ask any 19-year-old deploying to Afghanistan, and he’s not worried about the Taliban so much as he’s worried about some guy who took a lucrative job rigging trip wire and fertilizer, blowing up U.S. convoys.
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An Open Letter to Donald Miller on Your Engagement
First, congratulations. Second, let's talk about that list of qualities we should want in a spouse.
Dear Donald,
First of all, I’m a fan. I’ll admit I’m not young enough or hip enough to have discovered you on my own, but the college students I teach help me to keep up with the times, and they introduced me to your work some years ago. I love it all, especially A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I wish I’d had your books when I was languishing in youth group hell many years ago.
I’m thrilled to learn of your recent engagement. As someone who’s been married for 26 years—to the same man, no less—I can fully rejoice with you and Paige in your anticipation of the blessings, challenges, joys, pains, and memories this covenant relationship will bring.
In addition to two and a half decades of marriage, I bring the second-hand experiences of a fair number of hook-ups, break-ups, engagements, broken engagements, marriages, searching, longing, and questioning on matters of love and marriage: when you work with college students, you get to live through a lot of this with them. I’ve had the chance to watch a lot of young people make good decisions and bad. (And I made a few of each in my day.)
So when I heard about your recent post, “What are You Looking for in a Spouse? Why not Create a List?”— I was intrigued. It’s a good thing to know one’s self well enough before entering a lifelong partnership to be able to identify in a potential mate a handful of deal-breakers. For the Christian, of course, the first of these non-negotiables is being equally yoked. There are likely a few qualities that are essential to one’s being and therefore non-negotiable. One such non-negotiable for me would be a love of animals. Not an abstract kind of love, but the kind that turns pets into family members who share the furniture with the humans. A spouse who didn’t share this value would doom one or the other, and therefore both, to perpetual misery. I encourage my students to identify such non-negotiables when they seek my advice, as they often do.
But upon reading your post—which includes a list of qualities that your fiancée, Paige, sought in the man of her dreams long before she had met her future husband—my intrigue grew into concern.
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How to Talk about Having Children
Maybe God intended babies to mess with our well-planned lives.
For all the ways reality television star and Hollywood socialite Kim Kardashian and I differ from each other, we do share one striking commonality: We both turned 30 this year. And for both of us, our entry into this new decade sounded an alarm on our biological clocks. It is ticking ever so loudly, which means we are both thinking more and more about babies.
Kardashian recently shared her thoughts on the future with gossip magazine US Weekly, saying that she would like to try for kids in the next year. Kardashian explained, “Well, I won't have [a baby] by the end of the year, but maybe we'll start trying by the end of the year. After the wedding [to NBA player Kris Humphries]."
Although US Weekly’s interview with Kardashian was a relatively benign, feel-good piece, it incited frustration in blogger (and onetime Christianity Today columnist) Mollie Ziegler Hemingway. Responding to the interview at Mommyish, Hemingway wrote,
“I guess what annoys me is the general idea that we can effectively plan when to have our children. I mean, it is true that you can take actions to prevent conception…But just because you want to have children doesn’t mean they will come… “…Kardashian is saying nothing that different from what I hear many men and women say. But should we treat babies as a consumer good? I mean, the last time I said I was hoping for something and hoping I’d get it by the end of the year, it was an iPad. Babies are no iPads. They are not consumer goods to be acquired. They are blessings granted to couples. Our language should reflect that.”
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Searching for Abba on Father's Day
What Daddy said to me, a 'love child,' that changed my life.
The year Diana Ross’s hit song "Love Child" hit the top of the pop charts, I was born to a single mother who was unable to care for me. At three weeks, I was adopted into a family who raised me in an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. The view from the curb was that we were the perfect family, in the perfect home, in the perfect town.
On the inside of those stately brick walls, though, my home life was shaped by alcoholism and domestic violence. My parents divorced when I was 6. My mother remarried another alcoholic, and my father, who’d moved away, also remarried. By the time I was 15, both of those marriages had ended. What I learned about trust people was that they went away. What I learned about myself was that I wasn’t worth loving.
None of the adults in my life had a clue I was suffering. My broad smile fooled them and even me. It disguised the protective shell around my vulnerable heart meant to keep me from being be hurt again. As I moved into adulthood, though, that girl-size armor, pinching, chafing, began to fail.
In college, my roommate — single — became pregnant. That she decided to raise her child instead of placing him up for adoption created the first crack in my cardiac shell. Nine months later, holding her precious son in my arms, five hundred more fissures rippled around my guarded heart. Baby Isaiah’s blessed arrival, as well as his familiar origins, unleashed a deep wondering about my own.
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Raising Yeshua-Followers in the West Bank
Ariella, a Messianic Jew, raises four children amid violence in the Holy Land.
“It’s ironic, but I feel that my kids are safer here than living in the U.S.,” said Ariella B. I met Ariella nearly two decades ago when we were attending the same Chicago-area congregation. Recently I had a chance to visit her on a recent trip to Israel. She is now a vivacious 40-something wife and mother of four elementary-aged children living in the West Bank.
“Safe” is probably not the word that comes to mind when most of us think about raising a family in a Jewish settlement on the far side of the Green Line. But Ariella insists that her family’s rhythms would be familiar to most American parents: school activities, piano lessons, chores and outings shape their day-to-day life.
“We don’t have too many fears of child abduction or mugging. There are the usual safety measures - areas you know to stay away from, and where pickpockets are in the Old City. But normally, kids stay out late here with no problem. Everyone here is required to serve in the army, so everyone knows how to take care.”
Ariella, who emigrated to Israel from the U.S. nearly 15 years ago, is a Messianic Jew. “Our town of about 40,000 is a short distance from Jerusalem. Most living here hold to some form of religious Zionism, otherwise they would not feel comfortable living here.
“When I was 13 and had my Bat Mitzvah - my coming of age ceremony - the Torah portion for that week was Ezekiel 36:24-39. This set of verses turned out to have incredible impact for me in my 20s as I came to faith in Yeshua (Jesus), and again a few years later when I became part of the community of returning exiles.” She married another Jewish believer she met after moving to Israel.
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Lessons from an Expletive-Laced Picture Book
Self-sacrifice can make parents unhappy and unhealthy — or it can help cultivate the abundant life God desires for us.
Four months before its October 2011 publication date, Adam Mansbach’s for-adults-only picture book, Go the [Expletive] to Sleep, is already a bestseller and viral hit on Amazon. Looking through the preview pages online, I immediately understood the book’s appeal. With soothing rhymes and colorful illustrations at odds with its explicit language, the book captures the short-tempered weariness of parents desperate for their little ones to depart for dreamland, but thwarted by night-magnified fears and repeated requests for water, hugs, or a favorite toy.
I have friends who cherish bedtime as a chance to reconnect with their kids over a good book. Me? I just want to get it over with. I’m tired. I’m cranky. I want to climb into my own bed with my own good book. As Adam S. McHugh explored on his Introverted Church blog last week, the constant interaction of parenting can be particularly exhausting for introverts like me. God, in his infinite humor, blessed me with three extroverted children who process everything through talk (and talk and talk and talk, often while draping their bodies all over mine). By bedtime, I crave space and quiet as fiercely as a thirsty person craves water.
To state the obvious, being a parent is both a great gift and really, really hard. The sacrifices of parenthood take a measurable toll on parents' happiness and health. A study in the journal Pediatrics found that young mothers, so focused on their children’s incessant needs, get less exercise, eat less-healthy diets, and have higher body mass indexes than childless peers. And last year a popular New York magazine article summarized research revealing that parents tend to be less happy than adults without children.
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For Those Grieving on Mother's Day
How Christ meets women during a holiday that's often marked by unmet desires.
Mother's Day is a tricky holiday. Like any holiday, it is sweet for some and bitter for others. For some, it’s both.
I remember feeling on the outside looking in on Mother’s Day, first as a single woman and then after I miscarried our first. Our church had an entrance near the nursery called the Family Entrance. Could I use it? Were we a family? I finally used it regardless, almost as an act of defiance. Now, as the mother of a 4- and 6-year-old, I can deeply appreciate someone setting aside parking near an entrance that kept me from having to walk my toddlers across a busy intersection. But at the time I was dealing with emotions that weren’t swayed by practical realities. I just wanted to be a mom. And that sign at the church entrance reminded me I wasn’t.
It is an age-old conundrum in humanity in general and Christianity in particular: How do you honor someone who has something good that you want too? How do you applaud the sacrifices of one without minimizing the suffering of the other? I don’t know exactly, but I do think there is an overarching principle that's helpful.
Motherhood is not the greatest good for the Christian woman. Whether you are a mom or not, don’t get caught up in sentimentalism that sets it up as some saintly role. The greatest good is being conformed to the image of Christ. Now, motherhood is certainly one of God’s primary tools in his arsenal for this purpose for women. But it is not the end itself. Being a mom doesn’t make you saintly. Believe me. Being a mom exposes all the ways you are a sinner, not a saint. Not being a mom and wanting to be one does too.
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Confessions of a Breadwinner Wife
Most American women still want to 'marry up' on the socioeconomic scale. How I hit the jackpot on a totally different scale.
I married up.
While I am impatient for the traffic light to change, the summer to arrive, and the bottle to drop from the soda machine, my husband is the most patient person I know. While I am cynical and sarcastic, my husband is the epitome of kindness. While I have to stop, literally, to figure out my left from my right, my husband could move a mountain aided only by a pulley and a lever. He can build a house, play the guitar, repair a car, win at golf, change the dog’s bandage, cook up a storm, arrange flowers, sing on key, sketch a design, and operate a backhoe. I can read books and talk about them. Write a little. And run long distances, very slowly.
So when a report like this one comes out, expressing doubt that even in these modern times most young women will “marry down,” I don’t know whether to snicker or snort.
For one thing, the number of women earning a college degree has been surpassing that of men since 1996, and a report based on the most recent Census shows that women now outnumber men in obtaining graduate degrees too. Statistically speaking, then, the pool of men with equal or greater education than any particular woman is shrinking and has been for some time.
Compound this fact with that of the decreasing presence of mature, single men in the church, and the situation looks even starker for single Christian women who are old enough to have earned advanced degrees and want to marry a Christian man. If the experiences of my single female friends are any indicator, satisfying that requirement alone is difficult enough, even before considering equality in education and income.
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Why I Let My Son Wear Pink
The real trouble with the J. Crew ad controversy is not a gay/transgender agenda but our culture's sexualization of children.
In case you missed the news story that Jon Stewart has named "Toemageddon," here are the facts: Retailer J. Crew sent out an online ad last week in which creative director Jenna Lyons appears in a photo with her 5-year-old son, Beckett. A quote from Jenna reads, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.” In her hand, she cups her son’s foot, done up with bright pink nail polish.
Well.
Out came pundits accusing J. Crew of pushing a liberal agenda in which gender distinctions no longer matter, glamorizing a transgendered lifestyle, and, according to Erin Brown of the Culture and Media Institute, “targeting a new demographic — mothers of gender-confused young boys.” Fox News blogger Keith Ablow accused J. Crew of being “hostile to the gender distinctions that actually are part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race.” Ablow put nail-polish-wearing boys on a spectrum of disturbing behavior, including boys in sundresses and people coloring or bleaching their skin so they could appear to be of a different race.
I didn’t want to write about this brouhaha for the same reason I felt compelled to: my 5-year-old son. Until recently, my son’s favorite color was pink. He says it no longer is, which is fine, although I’m sad that the major reason is that some boys at school (sweet, lovely little boys) told him that only girls like pink. Until then, he didn’t seem to know that his love of pink, occasional wearing of nail polish, and devotion to Dora the Explorer (as opposed to her male cousin, Diego, who is marketed to boys) mattered one way or the other.
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Liberty U. Students on Interracial Marriage Trends
I asked five female alumni whether their marriages mirrored recent sociological data on mixed-race marriages in the South. Here's what they told me.
Some moons ago, my first official “date” was with a black boy. (I am white, by the way.) Technically he was half-black, but in the remote Maine community where I grew up, it didn’t make much difference either way. There was one black family in town; they had only one child around my age, so he was the only black kid in my school. We didn’t think of him as “black” or “half-black” or “mulatto,” though. We thought of him as Jeff. That experience has largely defined race relations for me.
Not so, of course, for much of our nation’s history and many of our nation’s people.
But interesting new trends are emerging from the 2010 U.S. Census, particularly in race dynamics. One finding is that a more general population shift to the southern states now includes an increased number of African Americans who, for the past century, have lived in higher concentrations in the Northeast. Perhaps related to this trend are reports that in the Deep South, inter-racial marriages are gaining wider acceptance.
The New York Times recently reported based on Census data that of all the states, Mississippi saw the greatest increase in mixed-race marriages. The couples profiled in the story, despite minor tensions over their inter-racial status, report smooth sailing in a state once home to some of the country’s most volatile racial conflicts.
We’ve come a long way, and that’s good news.
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Prayers for Japan's Unborn Children
As the country quells a nuclear crisis, I'm reminded that even the best-intentioned parents can't fully protect their children.
My microwave avoidance seems silly today, as I read about the potentially dire effects of radiation exposure on pregnant women and their fetuses in Japan’s earthquake-devastated north, where damage to a nuclear reactor has caused an ongoing crisis. Experts warn that unborn fetuses are particularly vulnerable to the effects of radiation, which their mothers can breathe in or ingest through tainted food. Radiation levels that do not pose major threats to adults can be devastating to babies in utero, particularly during vital periods of development. According to The Daily Beast,
Should the worst-case scenario become a reality, it could lead to a generation of children born with all manner of maladies, from congenital malformation to mental retardation. Even at radiation levels too low to make a mother-to-be sick, health consequences for a fetus can be severe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fetal exposure to radiation is particularly damaging during the stage of organogenesis (9-42 days), a period of gestation crucial to the development of the heart, lungs, and brain . . .
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Christian Dating Do-Over
If a new website and college event are any indication, a better "Define the Relationship" talk is afoot among young evangelicals.
I work with Christian college students who are in the throes of dating or of wanting to be dating. Nearly every week during the school year, I am asked questions (mostly by ladies) about the ins-and-outs of the dating process. Questions like, “What’s the biblical model for dating?” “Is it okay for girls to pursue guys?” and, “Do you believe there is one person out there for me?” I am even asked to arrange dates.
Yet when it comes to directing them to resources about relationships, often I’m uncomfortable recommending many of the Christian resources available. While no doubt the purveyors of these resources mean well, I find that many of the resources lack significant social and theological acuity.
Rules and regulations (mostly geared toward women) like, “Do not call or text him,” “Never ask a guy out, let him pursue you, let him initiate,” “Do not pray together,” and “Only go on group dates” are often touted as inviolable and sacrosanct, as if they are dating principles derivable straight from the Bible. Really, most are cultural preferences, and are often one-sided and narrow in their approach. We need a greater vision — a more holistic way of thinking and speaking that contextualizes these admonitions.
For example, I believe we have conflated a unilateral campaign for sexual abstinence with deep, robust theological reflection on human relationships and sexuality. It’s one thing to teach that God wants us to remain pure (which is, by the way, about more than not having sex). It’s another thing to sabotage what might otherwise be sexually pure, healthy, male-female relationships with an inordinately long list of do’s and don’ts. (I touched on this subject in another Her.meneutics post.)
Yet the Christian conversation about dating is making a turn for the better, if a new website and Christian college event are any indication.
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Are Single Women Too Picky?
That’s the central claim of Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him, now out in paperback and being marketed to Christian women.
Are single women single because they are too picky? Lori Gottlieb argues this is precisely the case, and she uses herself as the prime example. When asked to list the qualities she wants in a husband, the then-41-year-old journalist came up with 60 items — just off the top of her head — ranging from “kind” to “has a full head of hair (wavy and dark would be nice—no blonds).” But the most important thing she was looking for couldn’t be quantified on a list. She wanted a man with a certain je ne sais quoi. She wanted fireworks on the first date. She wanted to know she had finally found “The One.”
Newly released in paperback and being marketed to Christian women in time for Valentine’s Day, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough details Gottlieb’s journey from picky singleton to enlightened woman who is willing to date a bald, bow-tie-wearing man named Sheldon. The book's title, based on Gottlieb's 2008 essay in The Atlantic, brings to mind desperate women who are willing to marry anyone simply to avoid being single, but that is not what Gottlieb means when she encourages women to settle for “Mr. Good Enough.” She does not advocate resigning yourself to a life of misery with a man you find unpleasant, but rather, adjusting your expectations and being happy with a more realistic version of Mr. Right.
According to Gottlieb, the problem is that women are no longer satisfied with companionship, security, and stability. Instead, we believe we deserve it all, and that includes a soul mate who is exciting, passionate, masculine, and has the same emotions women do. To make matters worse, we start to believe that no matter how great a guy is, there must be someone better out there. She argues that we should throw away our lists and focus on inner qualities and essential values rather than outward qualities such as clothes, height, job, or education. Rather than asking ourselves, “What’s wrong with him?” we should ask ourselves, “What values and goals do we share?”
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What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?
Not much, if Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla's wedding announcement in The New York Times "Vows" section means anything.
The “Vows” section of The New York Times typically features romantic, heartfelt, and sweet wedding stories. At first glance, the story of Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla appears to fit the bill: beautiful bride, handsome groom, lots of hugging. The adorable little children gathered around made the scene look “part Brady Bunch,” wrote Times reporter Devan Sipher.
And then he added, “. . . and part The Scarlet Letter.” Love had come, wrote Sipher, “at the wrong time” for Partilla and Riddell, who were already married to other people when they met, with five kids between the two couples. Partilla and Riddell met, actually, at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's Episcopal Day School in Manhattan, where their children attended:
. . . [I]t was hard to ignore their easy rapport. They got each other’s jokes and finished each other’s sentences. They shared a similar rhythm in the way they talked and moved. The very things one hopes to find in another person, but not when you’re married to someone else. Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”
Whether “someone” threw Partilla in her path or not, Riddell finally decided that she could have him after all, as the two left their families for each other. Partilla’s take on the situation: “I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could.”
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The Untold Story of Donor-Conceived Children
The next reproductive-technology issue coming to a church near you.
The featured article on the new website AnonymousUs.org is about a bad breakup. A middle-aged woman discovers that her boyfriend is accused of incest. What does she do? She has herself artificially inseminated by an anonymous sperm donor, but then regrets the decision and has an abortion, which she equally regrets. As her biological clock continues ticking, she ponders another artificial insemination. Welcome to the wonders of “reproductive choice.”
The AnonymousUs Project is the brainchild of Alana Stewart, a 24-year-old musician whose mother conceived her using a sperm donor. Stewart is now trying to find her biological father, and she's set out to give those involved in assisted reproductive technologies the opportunity to tell their stories uncensored. An estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born every year in the U.S. through the use of sperm donation. While the fertility industry makes $3.3 billion annually, little is known about the experiences of these children. Stewart's website says, “Though anonymity in reproduction hides the truth, anonymity in story-telling will help reveal it.”
According to Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values and editor of FamilyScholars.org, half of young adults who are conceived by sperm donation are "disturbed about the circumstances of their conception." "Overall, compared to those who are raised by their biological parents, they are more likely to struggle with mental illness or substance abuse or depression," Marquardt told NPR last summer.
Yet not every story on AnonymousUs is as dysfunctional as the one above. Other narratives thoughtfully explore the complex realities that reproductive technologies make possible. For example, one storyteller writes,
As an adoptee, it makes me sad to read about the grief many adoptees and sperm donor children are feeling. The saddest part about it is that I think a lot of it is self induced. I know that growing up, there were times that I felt like my parents didn't understand me and that my ‘real’ parents would have. But, the truth is, every kid feels misunderstood growing up. The difference is, adoptees/donees have a fantasy world that they can retreat to where everything would be easier if they were with their ‘real’ parents.”
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Why I Don’t Want to Be a Chinese Mother
I don't want to be an American mother, for that matter.
Amy Chua’s essay for The Wall Street Journal, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” sprinted across media outlets and the blogosphere, prompting responses at Motherlode, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Slate, among many others.
The essay spawned an interview on the Diane Rehm Show, not to mention nearly 5,500 reader comments on The Wall Street Journal’s website and over 100,000 comments on Facebook. Many of the comments — from Caucasian and Asian American readers alike — express criticism or dismay. Why the uproar?
Chua makes extreme statements about her parenting style throughout the essay (an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). She begins with a list of things her two daughters were “never allowed to do,” including “have a playdate,” “watch TV or play computer games,” and “get any grade less than an A.” She describes calling her daughter “garbage . . . when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me.” Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, explains, “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.”
Chua’s statements and the anecdotes from her parenting experience come across as harsh and extreme. She couches her approach in the language of love and belief in her children’s abilities. But she includes stories such as losing her voice from shouting at her 7-year-old daughter until she can play a piano piece correctly.
Chua’s approach comes across as demeaning and unhelpful at best. In a follow-up interview for The Wall Street Journal, Chua tempers some of her statements. She discusses the value of a parenting environment that includes both love and structure. She admits that she backed off from the more extreme version of “Chinese parenting” as her kids got older. She expresses her gratitude for her close relationship with her daughters now. But, at the end of the day, she remarks, “If I had to do it all over, I would do basically the same thing, with some adjustments.”
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Blessed Are Those with Alzheimer's
Discovering God’s image in a nursing home called “The Beatitudes.”
Americans are living longer and longer. For many individuals, this comes as good news, and yet for the larger culture, it brings social change, significant increases in health-care costs, and a higher prevalence of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 5.3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s, but the disease impacts an even greater swath of the population. Nearly 11 million unpaid caregivers (many of them women) often work around the clock to try to understand and deal with the impact of dementia on family members.
Recently Pam Belleck reported on a novel approach to Alzheimer’s care in the New York Times. Her article “Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate,” focused on a nursing home in Phoenix, Arizona. This nursing home has served elderly men and women with dementia for decades, and in recent years the staff implemented a series of measures to care for their patients more effectively. At first glance, their approach appears indulgent, even potentially harmful. As Belleck writes, patients “are allowed practically anything that brings comfort, even an alcoholic ‘nip at night.’” They eat whenever they want and whatever they want—chocolate, bacon, and so forth. The state of Arizona resisted, and even tried to regulate, many of The Beatitudes unconventional methods. But over time, this small facility, with only 30 patients, has become a model for individual caregivers and institutions alike.
The New York Times’ article did not mention the origins of The Beatitudes and their ethos, but the name alone suggests the Christian roots of the institution. “The Beatitudes,” of course, refers to Matthew 5, the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he proclaims God’s blessing upon “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” and “the meek” (among others). According to The Beatitudes’ website, the facility began in the 1960’s as the response of a church congregation to the need for a welcoming retirement community. In fact, “the young church congregation decided to build the Campus before they built the church sanctuary because the need was so great for comfortable, caring, and affordable retirement living to meet the needs of seniors with modest economic means.” The Mission Statement of The Beatitudes refers to a “heritage of Christian hospitality” and “a model of wellness that promotes soundness of mind, spirit, and body.”
Their approach goes far beyond indulging the desires of patients.
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Troubled by the Twiblings?
Melanie Thernstrom's NYT Magazine article about her unconventional method of having children left me unsettled — but not for the reasons you think.
What do you call two siblings, with the same genetic parents, gestated by two different women, born five days apart, raised by a father with whom they share genes, and a mother with whom they do not?
Twiblings, who were featured in last week’s New York Times Magazine, in a story written by their mother, Melanie Thernstrom, about “how four women (and one man) conspired to make two babies.” Melanie was 41 when she met her husband, Michael. She went through six unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization before heeding a doctor’s advice that, if her goal was to have a healthy baby rather than experience pregnancy, she should find a surrogate and an egg donor.
When Michael suggested that they implant embryos (created with his sperm and eggs from a donor) simultaneously into two surrogates, thus completing their family in one fell swoop, Melanie called the idea “crazy.” But after finding an egg donor (whom Melanie dubbed “the Fairy Goddonor”) and two gestational surrogates, Melanie and Michael did just that. The result was the twiblings, a boy and a girl.
In the article, Melanie and Michael come across as thoughtful people who adore their babies. The surrogates and “Fairy Goddonor” appear to be genuinely gratified by their part in creating a new family. Barring catastrophe, the twiblings will grow up in a solid family, with the ongoing ministrations of their surrogates (both of whom have provided breast milk via nursing and pumping) merely adding to their sense of being abundantly loved.
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A Tarnished Silver Anniversary
What is destroying marriage in the West — and what has sustained my husband and me through several potentially marriage-destroying events.
A silver anniversary isn’t what it used to be. I know this from experience, having celebrated mine last month, but the data speaks for itself. According to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report, only 33 percent of us reached the milestone 10 years ago, whereas 70 percent of those who married in the late 1950s did. For previous generations, a 25th wedding anniversary was as much a simple consequence of time as it was cause to celebrate. Surrounded by as many divorcing and non-marrying loved ones as I am, I was a little embarrassed to draw attention to our special day. And like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son, I harbored some resentment about this fact.
My husband and I have been through a series of potentially marriage-destroying events in recent years, and I would have appreciated some salutations acknowledging our accomplishment. On Facebook, where I shared photos from our wedding day to mark the occasion, only a few long-married female friends and one never-married person posted well wishes. We received one card in the mail, from my parents. Perhaps we should have thrown a party, but that would have been insensitive given that two of our siblings finalized divorces in 2009. Of the 15 middle-aged siblings and step-siblings in our combined families, only 4 of us are currently married.
A recent Pew Research Center / Time magazine study indicated that over the past 50 years, “a sharp decline in marriage and a rise of new family forms have been shaped by attitudes and behaviors that differ by class, age and race,” with lower levels of income and education correlating with lower marriage rates.
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What Is the Stay-at-Home Daughters Movement?
What the branch of the Christian Patriarchy Movement believes about family and young women.
The blogosphere has been agog recently over one feminist journal’s feature-length article, “House Proud: The Troubling Rise of Stay-at-Home Daughters.” If you are like me and hadn’t heard of the stay-at-home daughters (SAHD) movement, here’s a primer.
SAHD is connected to what detractors call the “Christian Patriarchy Movement,” a phrase popularized by Kathryn Joyce's 2009 book, Quiverfull. In it she examines the lifestyles of a group of evangelical Christians who reject birth control and adhere to rigid gender roles they believe are scripturally based. The locus of these teachings, along with the SAHD philosophy that stems from them, is Vision Forum Ministries.
When a movement is said to be "rising" yet is essentially tied to a single organization, albeit one of considerable influence in some circles, perhaps the aforementioned journal doth protest too much. It seems that reports of the Christian Patriarchy Movement are greatly exaggerated — as are the rise, “troubling” or not, of stay-at-home daughters.
Nevertheless, the concept is intriguing. In all fairness, some might argue that having a woman who is a university administrator and professor (and childless to boot) analyze stay-at-home daughters is something like asking the fox to critique the henhouse. But I’ll do my best to be fair.
Essentially, adherents of SAHD believe daughters should never leave the covering of their fathers until and unless they are married. One SAHD father writes:
While they are preparing to be keepers of their own homes one day, until our daughters are married, they should serve as keepers at home in the house of their father. They are to be helpers to their mother and blessings to our entire family, as well as to our local church and community. Our daughters are to be busy preparing themselves to be helpers to their own husbands by developing their skills, continuing their education, enhancing their talents, and glorifying God right here where He has them – at home.
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When Mom and Dad Move In
Dispatches from a member of the half-a-sandwich generation.
I knew my parents were coming, and not to visit — which was often, though living on the opposite coast, not often enough — but coming to live. Forever.
To understand what a great adjustment this would mean, it helps to know that I haven’t lived within 1,000 miles of my parents since I left for college at age 18. And since being married 25 years ago, I haven’t lived with anyone besides my husband — not counting the occasional house guest, various dogs, horses, and a cat named Chaucer. Such a life has made me self-directed, increasingly set in my ways, and easily irritated by the slightest upset of my routine.
So although I love my parents immensely, and like them a great deal besides, I approached the impending convergence of our lives as I do most things: with a sense of duty and a smidgen of anxiety. I just didn’t think about it more than necessary. Of course, my lifestyle and occupation (an English professor and department chair) don’t permit much time for a lot of extra thinking. But when the long-expected call came, on day four of their five-day trek from Washington State to our home in Virginia — their new home — and my Dad said, “We’re 400 miles away, we’ll be there sometime tomorrow,” I began to think.
“Tomorrow” had been a couple of years in the making. Many families find the conversation required to plan for aging and death difficult to broach, but my father has never been one to let anything be left to chance. So a few years ago, when he retired for the final time (having worked three consecutive careers), Dad sat Mom down to plan their future — more precisely, Mom’s future in the statistically likely event that he would “go” first, as my mother puts it.
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Social Media Addict Seeks Connection, Escape
Lessons from the story of the young mom who killed her baby for interrupting her Farmville game.
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Facebook’s Farmville app, but I never thought it would become an accessory to murder.
The online game, which allows players to plow, plant, and grow virtual crops, seems to turn otherwise sane people into chronic status updaters desperate to get their hands on, say, a virtual shovel.
Seeing serious adults get sucked into role-playing games usually amuses me in the same way seeing businessmen and soccer moms playing with a Fisher Price farm set might. But occasionally my cynicism gets the best of me, and I roll my eyes at people’s devotion to such menial endeavors.
The story of Alexandra Tobias and her 3-month-old baby, though, made me freeze mid-eyeroll. To some people, I note, Farmville may not be menial at all. Online networks might be a part of a larger search for belonging and significance — one that can go terribly wrong.
Florida resident Tobias, 22, was slaving away on her virtual farm when her son, Dylan, started crying excessively. Frustrated with the interruptions, Tobias told police that she shook the infant to make him stop. Then, she said, she smoked a cigarette to compose herself, before shaking him some more. She pled guilty to second-degree murder last month and will be sentenced in December.
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Abortion Case: Womb vs. Egg
Ethical issues abound in case of British Columbia couple who wanted surrogate mom to terminate pregnancy after baby was found to have Down Syndrome.
A British Columbia couple creates an embryo using in vitro fertilization (IVF). They contractually hire a surrogate mother to carry the child. Then they discover, through prenatal screening, that the baby has Down syndrome. The couple asks the surrogate mother to terminate the pregnancy. The surrogate disagrees with their decision. According to their agreement, the surrogate can continue the pregnancy, but she will become responsible for raising the child. Then, the surrogate mother, citing problems it would create for her own two children if she kept the baby, goes ahead with the termination.
I know about this story because I receive an e-mail every day from Google about news related to the key words “Down syndrome.” Our daughter Penny, who is four, has Down syndrome. Any given day offers me heartwarming stories about the accomplishments of a young adult with Down syndrome. Most days bring up some questions about genetic testing and prenatal screening. And every so often a story appears, like this one, that raises a host of ethical and legal questions.
Had the couple and surrogate mom gone to court, the scenario would have pushed the limits of abortion law. Whose baby was it? According to the Canadian and U.S. court systems, the legal right to an abortion is not dependent on biological parenthood but on the privacy rights of the woman carrying the baby. As a result, a father of a child has no legal right to prevent (or insist upon) abortion. Similarly, the surrogate mother retains the right of choice, even though the parents who created the baby had entered into a contractual agreement with her.
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Why There's No Narnia in Our Home
Forget Slaughterhouse Five — there's enough bloodshed in some of the best children's literature to raise my parenting fears.
Banned Books Week got off to a rousing start this year with the publication of a letter from Wesley Scroggins, Missouri State University professor of management, in The Springfield News-Leader. The letter, “Filthy books demeaning to Republic education,” listed books on Scroggins’s hit list, including Speak, Slaughterhouse Five, and Twenty Boy Summer, all of which are on the syllabus at the local public high school or recommended reading in the school library. Scroggins enumerated some of the books' offensive material, imploring parents and taxpayers to ask if this was how they wanted to spend their money and educate their children.
If nothing else, Scroggins’s letter shows that we’re still pretty divided on the subject of banned books, especially about what is and is not appropriate material for children.
Last year, in her Her.meneutics post about Banned Books Week, Ruth Moon concluded, “If we are going to get up in arms (rightly, I would argue) about banning things that are offensive to others, we at times have to be willing to take criticism and swallow offense ourselves. If all truth really is God’s truth, well, the truth can set us free, if we let it.” I spent some time thinking about truth and its role in literature — specifically children’s literature — last week, as I examined some of my own book-banning practices.
I shocked myself by becoming a book-banner the week I learned I was pregnant with my first child. At the time, I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in children’s literature, and some of the books subsequently adorning my shelves I didn’t think suitable for my coming child. I wanted to have an open-shelf policy in our household of a thousand or so books, so any children’s book I didn't want a young child to read, I simply put in a box. Just for now.
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Why Parenting May Be Your 'Highest' Calling
Researchers re-vamp Maslow's famed hierarchy of needs, replacing "self-actualization" with something more self-giving.
I’ve been following the comments on Amy Julia Becker’s latest Her.meneutics post with some interest. When the time came for my husband and I to make and act on a decision regarding the schooling of our eldest (a decision-making process that began long before said child was even conceived), I made a mental list of friends and acquaintances who were going to criticize our decision, no matter what choices we made. If we public school, these people will criticize; if we private school, those people will criticize; if we homeschool, still others will criticize. I didn’t make the list in order to sway our decision one way or the other, simply to be ready for the inevitable backlash we would — did — face.
Reading the comments on Amy Julia’s post, I’m saddened at some of the replies. Why is it that so many people, perhaps especially parents, feel the need to justify their own decisions by criticizing the decisions of others? At the risk of sounding like all I want is to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya," why can’t we all decide to support each other, acknowledging that every family is different and that God has different plans for our lives? Imagine if we could spend half the time we currently invest in criticizing other Christian families asking, instead, how we might best support them in the choices they have made, as their brothers and sisters in Christ?
It’s interesting that this conversation should take place at a time when psychologists are considering a shift to famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Long a fixture in the training of educators and workforce managers, Maslow’s pyramid argues that humans’ basic needs (food, water, air, sleep) must be met before they can begin to seek other, “higher” fulfillments. It makes sense: bereft of basic needs, people can’t concentrate on bigger goals. I saw this pyramid again and again when in college, minoring in education, used to stress that a child who feels hungry, tired, and unsafe is really not going to care about learning algebra, and with good reason.
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An Argument against 'Settling Down'
Instead of chastising young adults for being noncommittal, the church might encourage 20-somethings to seek what God wants them to commit to.
“What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Robin Marantz Henig asked recently in The New York Times Magazine. Young American adults are taking longer than previous generations to grow up. They are faced with more possibilities, and their idealism runs rampant. Therefore, they are left wallowing in indecision and uncommitted lifestyles, which makes them “emerging adults,” a term coined by psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett.
Emerging adults’ most distinct trait is an inability to settle down. Henig notes that “the traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes . . . forestalling the beginning of adult life.” In other words, to quote Mark Edmundson’s excellent Chronicle of Higher Education essay “Dwelling in Possibilities,” young people are “possibility junkies” and “enemies of closure.”
The point of all the recent scholarly discussion about 20-somethings isn’t to complain about their habits, but first, as Henig says, to figure out “whether the prolongation of this unsettled time of life is a good thing or a bad thing.”
However, I think many Christians have already concluded that emerging adulthood is a bad thing. The voices who have noted the trend have immediately begun grasping for a solution, which, in many cases, is marriage. This is essentially what Mark Regnerus argued in his Christianity Today cover story, “The Case for Early Marriage.” If young adults have not gotten married, or are still wandering the world, they are not serious adults, he suggest: “. . . the focus of 20-somethings has become less about building mature relationships and fulfilling responsibilities, and more about enjoying oneself, traveling, and trying on identities and relationships. After all the fun, it will be time to settle down and get serious.”
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Anorexia and the Body of Christ
Harriet Brown's success story using family based treatment for her daughter's eating disorder suggests we all could stand to share meals.
Harriet Brown’s new memoir, Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia, challenges popular beliefs about eating disorders. Many psychologists and nutritionists say that getting anorexics to eat won’t work until “underlying psychological issues” are dealt with, yet many anorexics die before that can happen. The deadliest of all psychological disorders, anorexia has an abysmal recovery rate: 30 to 40 percent recover completely; 20 percent die; the rest cycle in and out of hospitals and treatment programs.
When Brown’s 14-year-old daughter, Kitty, became anorexic, the author voraciously read up on the disorder. Dissatisfied with traditional explanations and terrified by the recovery rates, she encountered a lesser-known option: Family Based Treatment (FBT), or the Maudsley Approach. It sounds simple enough: Phase 1: Restore the patient’s weight. Phase 2: Return control over eating to the patient. Phase 3: Resume normal development. It’s done at home, with Mom and Dad sitting with the anorexic child at every meal, packing them with the calories needed for recovery.
Absurdly simple, or simply absurd? Amazingly, patients treated with FBT have close to a 90 percent recovery rate, more than twice the rate of patients treated with traditional methods. FBT seems so revolutionary because it has been assumed that no one — least of all, parents — should make anorexics eat. It’s wonderfully sensible that in FBT, parents (guided by professional therapists and doctors) manage their children’s care. Brown is careful to note that she and her family have their faults, but she comes across as a dedicated mother, one who admits that sending Kitty to a residential treatment facility would be in some ways easier, but who nonetheless, with her husband, faces down the “demon” of anorexia (as she calls it). She gives many reasons for why her family chose this path; perhaps the most persuasive is this:
We have something no one else in the world has: we love Kitty best. No one else in the world can possibly want her to get better as much as we do. No one else loves her as fiercely, as nonjudgmentally, as unconditionally as we do.
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A Course in Dying 101
What Christians can teach our death-denying culture.
My grandfather turned 90 last week. The past two years have been ones of declining health for him, including a botched surgery and shingles and Bell’s palsy and a broken hip. A few months ago, my mother sat down to talk with him about reaching the end of his life. She relayed the conversation to me.
“Dad, are you sad?”
He seemed puzzled. “No. I’m not sad. I’m just tired.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you’re worried?”
“No, I’m not worried.”
“Well, how are you feeling about death and the whole dying process?”
“Dying is much harder for the people around you than it is for the person dying. I’m looking forward to heaven. It should be exciting. New things always are.”
My mother doesn’t live with her parents, although she visits frequently. She and her sister (and, to a lesser extent, her two brothers who live farther away) help make decisions about their care. At age 88, my grandmother has been able to provide a great deal of support for her husband, and they hired a woman to help with his physical care once my grandmother couldn’t provide it on her own. A similar family drama is being played out across the nation. According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, women compose the majority of caregivers for the elderly and terminally ill patients.
Americans have a hard time talking about the end of life. As Atul Gawande wrote recently in The New Yorker, in “Letting Go,” the church in previous centuries offered ways for individuals and their families to prepare for death. But in a secularized culture with increasing life expectancy and medical technologies that prolong life, we have generally lost the ability to talk about an irrefutable fact: We will all die. Idolatry of life has led to a place — medically, culturally, even within the church — where death has become taboo.
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Avoiding Old Flames on Facebook
That it's only a virtual friendship is all the more reason to stay away from it.
Toward the end of spring semester, I set a box labeled “I Always Wanted to Ask” on the table at the front of my class. I invited students to write down lingering questions about sex and gender, the subject of our course at Messiah College. A panel comprising five students and me, the professor, responded to all the questions. A classic one emerged: “Can men and women be ‘just’ friends?” It elicited a classic response. “Yes,” I said, “but only by taking romantic potential into account in some way. And no, if the man and woman have been romantically involved with each other.” Most students advocated for platonic friendship and kindly pointed out that the world has changed since the dinosaur age in which I came of age.
I won’t rehearse the dialogue that ensued, but I’m slipping a related question into the box: Is it wise to “friend” old flames on Facebook?
Three old flames have flared up recently (and I only have so many, so it’s an unusually active season). I corresponded with one, a single back-and-forth. After all, I justified, he was just a flicker. Facebook offered another to me as a possible friend. I couldn’t resist peeking at his photos to see whether my kids are cuter than his (surprise — they are), and then I moved on. The third requested that we be friends, and I still need to decide how to respond.
Here’s the thing: I believe in marriage. I believe in total loyalty and lifelong commitment. At my husband’s and my wedding, we sang a hymn that begins, “Are ye able,” said the Master / “to be crucified with me?”/ “Yea,” the sturdy dreamers answered / “to the death we follow thee.” Bringing crucifixion imagery to a wedding was intentional. We expected marriage to be hard, and it has been at times, but we have stuck together. Like our trust in Jesus, we hope we are able to hold our marriage until death.
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The No-Fault-Divorce Nation
As New York becomes the last state to legalize no-fault divorce, will Americans see a new chapter in our national marriage crisis?
No-fault divorce is now legal in every state, making filing for divorce in America — whether both parties agree or not — simply a matter of getting the proper paperwork.
New York just became the last state to adopt the legislation, passing a bill in early July that was signed into law this week by Governor David Paterson.
According to New York Law Journal, the law lets mutually consenting couples divorce “within six months of stating under oath their unions are ‘irretrievably’ broken.” Proponents say such laws free couples from needing to prove that one spouse caused the divorce by adultery or abuse. But to suggest ugly divorce battles are a thing of the past would deny the devastation of divorce itself. There are plenty of reasons why making it easier to get a divorce is a bad idea. Opposition to the legislation has created unlikely allies out of the Roman Catholic Church, the New York chapter of the feminist group National Organization for Women (NOW), and the nonprofit Marriage Savers, founded by evangelical Mike McManus.
Marcia Pappas, president of New York’s NOW, echoed the Catholic concern for the potential economic inequality for women caused by sanctioning “divorce on demand”:
No-fault takes away any bargaining leverage the non-moneyed spouse has. Currently she can say, “If you want a divorce I’ll agree, but you have to work out a fair agreement.”Robin Fretwell Wilson, an alumni professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, also noted that no-fault laws erroneously overlook the fact that sometimes, one spouse is at fault:
By bypassing mutual agreement, S3890 would treat nearly all divorces alike. Under current New York law, fault matters in property distribution and alimony only in rare instances, when “so egregious” as to be “a blatant disregard” of the marriage. Beating one’s wife with a barbell until she is unrecognizable would count, but verbally abusing and striking one’s wife and child while intoxicated would not, even if the abuse required a physician’s care. Not all reasons for divorcing are equal. Often someone is at fault and that should matter if the law is to do justice.
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The Friendless, Voiceless Disney Princess
Most 'family-friendly' movies lack substantive female characters and friendships, according to the Bechdel Test. Then again, so do most movies.
Take a moment to think of the last movie you saw. Did it have:
(1) Two women with names
(2) who had a conversation
(3) about something other than a man?
If so, it passes the three-point Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who featured the concept in her cartoon strip in the 1980s (she says a friend came up with the idea).
I shared this video with my coworker and film critic for Christianity Today, Jeff Overstreet, and he noticed that many of the movies that don’t pass muster are kids’ movies. Of the top-grossing family movies in 2010, Alice in Wonderland and Despicable Me pass; Toy Story 3, Twilight: Eclipse, and Karate Kid squeak by; and How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, Iron Man 2, and The Last Airbender flat-out flunk, according to this user-generated list.
Of the feature films put out by Pixar (arguably the high cultural watermark of family films) only three out of ten — The Incredibles, A Bug’s Life, and (barely) Toy Story 3 — pass.
The Bechdel Test can’t tell you if a movie is well-made, funny, or even portrays women in a positive light. But it can tell you that substantive female characters are often absent from the movies most of us are watching. What’s more, so are depictions of substantive female friendship.
When I think back to the Disney princesses who entranced me as a kid in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Bechdel Test makes me realize how isolated the protagonists were from other women. Ariel of The Little Mermaid literally lost her ability for conversation in her encounter with the other main female character, Ursula, in a conversation about how to get a man. Would her story have been different if she’d talked over her decision with her sisters or her (nonexistent) mother? Princess Jasmine of Aladdin had only a tiger for a confidant, while Belle of Beauty and the Beast confides her troubles to a matronly talking teapot. (It’s hard to say if a teapot counts as a woman.)
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Seeking a Spouse? Lighten Up
Could ‘dating cards’ help Christians take their love lives a little less seriously?
If a recent New York Times piece is to be believed, the latest trend in dating is a spin on the calling card, delivered to attractive strangers, with instructions on where to find the bearer online. Religious communities have often adopted secular dating services and technologies — sometimes even pioneered such — but I wonder whether this trend (if it really is one) will prove as malleable for Christians’ use.
Certainly Christians are not averse to online services. I would be surprised to poll my peers at church and find many who hadn’t at least once tried online dating — whether the freewheeling Match.com and Plenty of Fish, or faith-oriented sites like eHarmony and Christian Café. But as much as these sites advise you to include a profile picture, they also generally include enough text boxes for listing interests and “must haves” to square with Jesus freaks’ ostensible search for substance.
It’s inconceivable that a dating site could succeed without allowing user photos, but Christians still have an uneasy relationship with forms and faces. Would we take to services designed to connect folks initially attracted to appearances?
I grew up in a home where someone’s looks were never mentioned without an attendant remark on the greater merits and importance of character. Even now I struggle with how concerned God is with satisfying sexual desires, though he’s been remarkably kind at fulfilling a range of other longings. Physical attraction seems such an unreliable instinct that surely, surely God could not be at work in that — even if Proverbs speaks of a man finding satisfaction in his wife’s breasts.
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News Flash: Dads Are Nurturing
More fathers want an active role in caring for their children. Will U.S. employers be able to adjust?
Boston College’s Center for Work and Family released a study last month that tracked changes in the way American fathers view themselves and their roles at home and work. The study looked at married, educated, and employed first-time fathers of children between ages 3 and 18 months, and suggests that the concept of dads as primarily breadwinners is outmoded. Today’s dads are defining good fatherhood as a relationship involving lots of time, attention, and nurturing. The study also suggested, though, that while fathers may understand their role in these terms, their employers (and others, such as extended families) do not.
In her New York Times article highlighting this and other recent studies on fatherhood, Tara Parker-Pope suggested that dads now “feel as stressed as mom,” pulled between expectations to be both a provider and nurturer. “Men are typically the primary breadwinner,” Parker-Pope notes, “but they also increasingly report a desire to spend more time with their children. To do so, they must first navigate a workplace that is often reluctant to give them time off for family reasons. And they must negotiate with a wife who may not always recognize their contributions at home.”
While the challenges women face in balancing work and family are well-chronicled (though not always understood or accepted), the conflicts working dads face are not. Fewer employers see fatherhood as an increasingly a hands-on, time-intensive role. And though most of the fathers surveyed said they had considered becoming stay-at-home dads, they said finances (dad’s salary may be higher than mom’s, or both salaries are needed to maintain a desired standard of living) and lingering social stigma prevented them from doing so.
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Parenting Imperfecta
Every mom has limitations. Mine are just easy to see.
"World's Smallest Mother Risks Life for More Babies" blared the headline. Stacey Herald, whose 2-foot 4-inch stature qualifies her for the “smallest mom” superlative, recently gave birth to her third child. Despite significant health risks associated with pregnancy, Stacey and her husband, Wil, are open to having more kids. This openness, along with the couple’s enthusiasm for parenthood and insistence that they have faith in God’s ability to care for their family, have made Stacey and Wil favorite subjects of tabloid-style media ever since their third baby was born last November.
Stacey’s short stature is due to osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), also known as brittle bone disease. I have the same condition, although in a less severe form (at 4-feet 8-inches tall, I am a giant by OI standards). OI complications include frequent broken bones, pain, mobility limitations, and respiratory problems due to spinal and rib-cage deformities. Like Stacey, I have three biological children, two girls and a boy. Like Stacey, I had to contemplate the risks of childbearing, although her more severe form of OI potentially brings more serious complications. Like Stacey’s children, my children each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting OI. One of my children did; two of hers did. Like Stacey, I made my decisions about motherhood in the context of my Christian faith.
Our similarities accounted for my growing outrage as I clicked through dozens of articles written about Stacey and her family, many of them on sites devoted to “odd” and “weird” news. Most, including the ABC News article, used hyperbolic, inaccurate language. Stacey doesn’t just have OI; she “suffers” from it. She doesn’t just use a wheelchair; she is “confined” to one. A doctor asserts that pregnancy in OI women can have “disastrous consequences.” I am privileged to know many women with OI who have had children. While some of those children also have OI, the most disastrous consequences of these mothers’ fecundity are that they can’t remember how it feels to sleep through the night yet know every word of Barney’s clean-up song. A spokesperson for the national OI Foundation provided a more accurate assessment: While women with OI face increased risks during pregnancy, those risks can often be managed.
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Grieving a Miscarriage
An excerpt from Shauna Niequist's new book, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way.
Today all I can think about is what might have been. It’s a Saturday, bitter cold and bright, harsh, splintering. We’re doing normal Saturday things, and since we recently moved into our new house, “normal” includes unpacking the remaining boxes, assembling furniture, making endless Target and Ikea lists.
Today is the day that would have been my due date, had my pregnancy been a healthy one. Nine months ago, the world was so different. I was so different. The concept of pregnancy was so different to me, so innocent. Of course I knew women who had miscarried: my mother, my cousin, my friends. But like anything, when it happens to you it’s like waking up to a conversation you’ve heard before and only now grasp, and you realize entirely anew what they were talking about, what they were trying to find the words to describe.
So that’s today, the day of what might have been. Someday we might have another child. But we’ll never have a child born on January 31, 2009. The baby I found out about on Memorial Day weekend, the happy secret I shared with Aaron on the phone, standing outside the Phoenix Street Café, the baby I carried inside me to Fiji to visit Todd and Joe on the boat — that baby will never be. And it seems worth stopping for today, just for a moment.
For me, as well, the specifics of the miscarriage changed me from one kind of mother to another. It’s a broad sisterhood of women who don’t have easy conceptions and pregnancies, but to be honest, I liked being in the other group. It was so deeply moving to me that my body nurtured and nourished Henry, delivering him safely into the world, whole and healthy, and this miscarriage and its aftermath have forced me to ask some questions: Did my body fail me? Did I somehow fail it? We’ve had such a tenuous relationship in the past, my body and I; was this a breach of trust?
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How Many Kids Should We Have?
To answer the question, Christian couples need more than a few select Bible verses.
"One and Done," Lauren Sandler's Time cover story this week, offers a series of reasons why many parents in the West are choosing to have only one child. First, the economic strain: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the average child in the U.S. costs his or her parents about $286,050 — before college,” reports Sandler. There’s also the happiness and freedom that apparently come to parents with only one child. Sandler says the vast majority of married couples understand marriage as primarily about happiness and fulfillment, rather than an institution designed to facilitate the “bearing and raising of children.” And if marriage is about personal happiness, as one sociologist writes, “You should say that you’ll stop at one child to maximize your subjective well-being.” And, on a related note, “Parents who intend to have only one say they can manage the drudgery with an eye on the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Sandler also addresses some of the reasons parents traditionally have chosen to have two or more children. There’s the concern that only children will grow up to be selfish and spoiled. But current research suggests that even if only children are “highly indulged and highly protected,” they also tend to “score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement” than children from larger families. There’s also the concern that only children face an untenable burden in caring for aging parents, and will be lonely.
As the mother of two children with a third on the way, I found myself bristling at Sandler’s reporting. Her data about academic achievement seem insignificant. I want to value our children not for what they can produce but for who they are becoming. Furthermore, the data suggest that only children’s achievements are the same as first-born children and people who have only one sibling — which is to say, the majority of children in the U.S. And the concerns about aging parents and loneliness outweigh, in my mind, the economic and social freedom parents experience with only one child.
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You're Never 'Ready' to Parent
Entering the inconvenience of parenthood is indeed stressful — and full of grace.
In The Washington Post last week, Gillian E. St. Lawrence wrote about her and her husband's decision to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) and have the resulting embryos frozen for later use, essentially donating their embryos to themselves. The Washington, D.C., natives chose this path not because they are infertile, but because, at 30 and 32 years old respectively, St. Lawrence and her husband do not feel ready to become parents.
We want so badly to control the outcome of our procreation — not a new impulse, but one that has become more powerful and ubiquitous thanks to ever-expanding information about human health and well-being, reproductive technologies, as well as an online culture that allows us to discuss the intricacies of our parenting decisions. From our focus on well-timed pregnancies, optimal pregnancy nutrition, and detailed birth plans to anxious reliance on sunscreen, organic food, and brain-stimulating, body-strengthening leisure activities, we are a culture of parents who think that if we plan everything properly, then everyone will turn out okay. Not just okay, but terrific — happy, healthy, capable, productive, and self-sufficient.
St. Lawrence’s decision may be extreme, but we are all caught up in a culture that expects parents to exercise meticulous planning and control over their children, and fosters a poisonous climate of judgment surrounding every decision parents make.
Trying to orchestrate family life is not only futile (despite all our technology, having children is still a process fundamentally out of our control), but also keeps us from fully embracing the gift of children. Christians should understand this better than anyone, given that we worship a God who became incarnate in the most unpredictable, unexpected way possible — not as a triumphant king but first as a helpless newborn. Jesus was not what anyone expected or planned for, and that’s how he changed the world.
If a friend were considering “Preservation IVF” and asked my opinion about it, here is what I would say:
Whether you have babies now or later, your well-planned life will be relegated to the corner of your closet, along with your size 4 jeans. You will be so tired of little people’s hands all over you and voices constantly in your ear that many nights, you will prefer the company of HGTV to your husband's.
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Why Dads Matter
The role of fathers may be changing, but it's no less essential.
Last Sunday morning, my daughter Penny helped me make breakfast for her dad. He likes it simple: coffee, OJ, a bowl of cereal with raisins. We assembled it all on a tray, complete with the newspaper and a card: “Happy Father’s Day I love my dad” in 4-year old block letters. While I was retrieving her little brother, Penny snuck away and climbed into bed with her dad and shouted, “Wake up! I made you breakfast in bed!”
According to recent sociological studies, this scene is less usual than it used to be. One in three children in the United States live apart from their biological fathers. Moreover, according to a recent piece in The Atlantic, our Father’s Day breakfast may have been insignificant to Penny’s development. Pamela Paul asks, “Are Fathers Necessary?” She cites evidence that lesbian couples are the most effective parents, and she concludes: “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution” (my italics). Scenes such as the one described above might be subjectively essential, but apparently the data doesn’t support my sense that Penny’s relationship with her father is a crucial one. Paul isn’t suggesting that single-parent households are best for the kids. She’s just saying that fathers in particular don’t matter. My husband might just as well be replaced by another woman. Our kids would be fine.
Bruce Feiler, author of Council of Dads, responded to Paul’s article in the Washington Post: “Science can’t prove fathers matter. That doesn’t mean we don’t." He writes, “if social science has not proved that having dads present is helpful, it has demonstrated that not having them around is dreadful for the kids.” He cites a host of statistics that imply the problems kids face when their fathers are absent: crime, obesity, poverty, and trouble in school. So how do we make sense of these contrasting claims?
The data itself is not as conclusive as Paul implies. As W. Bradford Wilcox, of the University of Virginia, writes: “the vast majority of the published studies they relied upon are deeply flawed from a methodological perspective." Wilcox details some of the studies’ flaws at familyscholars.org.
But even if the statistical and sociological data did support Paul’s conclusions, we’d still have a problem. Men comprise a biological necessity for child bearing. And the majority of households with children consist either of a single-parent or a heterosexual pair. Given the prevalence of men, in other words, fathers are here to stay. And for Christians, given the biblical witness to the significance of fathers within a family unit, the fact that so many fathers are absent from their children’s lives, and this recent suggestion that fathers don’t matter, poses a spiritual problem above and beyond the sociological one.
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What a Father Remembers
Sometimes the most meaningful moments get lost in the busyness of life.
The other night my husband, Rafi, and I clicked through old photos on his laptop. He stopped on a picture of our son, who is now 8 years old but was 4 in the photograph. Rafi smiled at our son’s short hair and big smile and said, “Remember how he looked when he didn’t talk back?”
I laughed: My husband is quick to blame our son’s now-long hair for every misdeed. I tried to remind him that our short-haired boy acted plenty naughty. But Rafi didn’t hear me. He remained on that picture a few minutes longer while I tapped on the computer and then rolled my pointer finger at him. I was ready to move on; he clearly was not.
I didn’t think anything of this, really, until a friend sent me a link to “Moments When Children Grow Up,” a post at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. I appreciated (and echoed) Lisa Belkin’s admissions that she couldn’t remember many milestones from her children’s lives, that she really never paused to mark them. After all, how can you know that the last time you carry your child will be the last time?
But I was more struck by the paragraphs she included from the book, What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To and Letting Go of Their Daughters, edited by Andrea Richesin. In these paragraphs, novelist Robert Dugoni shares a simple story of what Belkin calls his 8-year-old daughter’s “pivot away from him and toward her future as a young woman.”
When I read that Dugoni cried after realizing his daughter’s need for bathroom privacy meant she was no longer the same little girl, I thought of Rafi, frozen on that photo of our son. And then I thought of my own dad and the seemingly random things he remembers from my childhood—these are the moment-markers Belkin describes.
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When a Daughter Must Parent Her Parents
A new study shows why caring for aging parents more often falls on women than on men.
A few minutes ago I got the news that my daughter’s mother-in-law has stage 4 cancer. I was still staring at the computer screen, trying to digest the information, when a friend forwarded me a report on a Canadian study with this headline: “Female Caregivers Face a Heavier Toll.”
Yes, we do. My mother died almost exactly 15 years ago, four months after my father died. Both had Alzheimer’s disease. Both were in a nursing home about five minutes from my house. I visited them at least several times a week, sometimes daily.
“We’re so glad we had a daughter,” my mother used to tell me. “It’s only the daughters who visit.” She wasn’t entirely right: Several sons joined the many women who visited regularly. Though the study said six in ten caregivers are women, in my parents’ nursing home the number must have been closer to eight in ten.
Warning: If you are a woman with a spouse, parents, or parents-in-law, you are likely to spend a number of years as a caregiver.
"In terms of society's norms, the responsibility to care for parents tends to fall on the women," said Marina Bastawrous, the author of the study, who discovered that 40 percent of female caregivers experience high-level stress. Women, she noted, are more likely than men to quit their jobs in order to care for their parents. When my parents started needing more care than I could handle along with my demanding job, I cut my hours back to 30 a week. Eventually I quit altogether. More information on the toll that caregiving takes is available from the Family Caregiver Alliance.
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Adultery: My Genes Made Me Do It
Research like the kind in For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage runs the risk of reducing people to brain chemistry and DNA.
In her new and buzzworthy book, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, The New York Times's Tara Parker-Pope examines what brain chemistry and genes have to do with happy marriages. She begins a recent Well column with a question: “Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation?” While she doesn’t come right out with an answer, she implies that the inclination toward adultery lies in our genes. Some researchers have dubbed the gene that predicts whether or not we will cheat the “fidelity gene” (though, as Parker-Pope notes, the label is a misnomer, since the study sets out to measure marital stability, not faithfulness). Her research shows that men with a variant of this gene are less likely to be in committed relationships and more likely to be in unhappy marriages.
Genetics. It’s a modern answer to an age-old question. In the past, other explanations have been proposed for immoral human behavior. First come spiritual explanations, perhaps best summed up by the phrase “the Devil made me do it.” Psychological explanations connect our behavior as adults to events that happened in our past. In recent years, biology has joined the list of reasons why humans behave badly.
Of course, none of these explanations are problematic in and of themselves. And none of them should surprise Christians. All aspects of our human nature are fallen, inclined to turn away from God’s good intentions for us. The problem comes when we reduce human behavior to any one of these explanations.
The Bible attests that we are physical, social, spiritual, emotional, and psychological beings at once. The complexity of our humanity has challenged Christians throughout church history. In the first few centuries of Christianity, some believers wanted to deny the significance of the body, claiming that our spiritual dimension was more significant and that Christ would liberate us from our bodies. Over and against this reasoning (eventually denounced as heresy) came the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and, in the fullness of time, of all of creation. The spirit matters, affirmed the early church, but only as it is integrated with the physical.
Well, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Science is today's reigning explanatory paradigm, the ultimate lens we use to understand reality and ourselves. As a result, the biological explanation for behavior can quickly become divorced from the spiritual. Instead of ignoring the physical, we reduce the human person to genes and chemical reactions. Since we can’t “prove” the existence of the Holy Spirit or the human soul using scientific means, the spiritual gets sidelined to the realm of conjecture or opinion, while the physical becomes factual, real, true.
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The Secret (Moral) Life of Babies
Does the fact that infants seem to have an innate morality suggest divine intervention?
When my baby was about nine months old, he started giving out hugs with his own unique twist: He’d wrap his chubby arms around whomever he was hugging, and then gently pat their back. It made sense; his bedtime routine usually consists of Daddy holding him in his arms and gently patting his back until he falls asleep. The logic behind the behavior didn’t diminish my gut-level reaction, however, at the sight of my son snuggled up in Daddy’s arms, his small hand barely reaching around the curve of Daddy’s broad shoulders, patting away.
Now 14 months old, my son says “Pat-pat” as he hugs and pats, and what we’ve dubbed “baby hugs with pat-pats” are a big part of family life. Along with the cuteness factor, my curiosity has been piqued: is my son just mimicking the behavior he’s observed? Or does he possess some rudimentary understanding of the meaning of a hug, a pat on the back? In the middle of a difficult day recently, I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands, trying not to cry in front of my children. Seconds later my 14-month-old was in my lap, his arms around my neck, patting my back. “Pat-pat,” he breathed as he hugged me.
I’ve written elsewhere about watching my children develop empathy and a sense of morality, so it was with great interest that I read Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s lengthy article in The New York Times on the moral capacities of babies. In graduate school, one of my professors was renowned for telling his students that the more studies we do on babies, the more we discover they are much smarter than we think — and Bloom would apparently agree. His article details a set of increasingly complicated experiments that he and his wife, also a Yale psychology professor, designed to measure babies’ morality.
In the first experiment, six- and ten-month-old babies were shown three puppets acting out a basic morality play: one puppet is trying to climb a hill while a second puppet helps the first and a third puppet pushes the first back down. At the end of the play, babies are offered the “helping” and “hindering” puppets to play with, and the experimenters tracked which puppet the babies reached for. (The basic assumption, of course, is that what an infant reaches for is what the infant desires; Bloom actually delves at some depth into the presuppositions behind the experiments, and the controls taken, in the NYT article.)
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Blogger Lynn Roush Talks to WORD-fm on Marital Health
Her.meneutics' recent review of Paul Tripp's new book on marriage, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, caught the attention this week of WORD-fm, a radio station based in Pittsburgh. John Hall and Kathy Emmons contacted reviewer Lynn Roush, a counselor in Missouri who first wrote for us about Jon and Kate Gosselin, to talk about the book and Roush's own experience with marriage. They cover the s word (submission), conflict, and how marriage spurs couples on to Christlikeness.
Click here to listen to their conversation, which aired earlier in the week.
Toying with Adultery?
'Runaway mom' Tiffany Tehan's story reminds us that no one is immune from the temptation of infidelity.
Tiffany Tehan, a pastor’s daughter and graduate of an Ohio evangelical college, went missing Saturday, April 17. Local authorities deemed the 31-year-old mother’s absence suspicious: her green Ford Explorer was found in a park near her home with a flat tire and the keys in the ignition. Husband David, who was home with their 13-month-old daughter, reported Tiffany missing when she didn’t return from a day of shopping.
Family, friends, and parishioners at the nondenominational Patterson Park Church, where the Tehans attend, began canvassing the community with missing persons fliers and search teams. They tirelessly combed the area for days. A highly publicized nationwide search ensued. On April 22, authorities found Tiffany with 42-year-old Tre Hutcherson, also married, at a hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Tiffany and Tre said they ran away to start a new life.
Media outlets and blogs lit up when Tiffany’s whereabouts surfaced. They dubbed her “the runaway mom,” questioning how a mom could abandon her child and take such extreme measures to cover up an affair. Some asked why her story in particular made headlines, as men who run away from their families are rarely greeted with such public attention and outcry. Others were just appalled that Tiffany’s husband wanted her back.
It’s easy enough to indict Tiffany for her poor choices. But her story reminded me of how easily any one of us can tumble into a physical or emotional affair. After all, Jesus said that our lustful looks are spiritually equivalent to committing adultery (Matt. 5:28). And it’s not just men or those in difficult marriages who are tempted. Christian women in particular may be less inclined to admit temptations and sins because they predict stigma and humiliation. With Tiffany’s situation in mind, I reviewed the disciplines I practice to help me embrace fidelity to my husband of 10 years, Shawn:
(1) Be honest with God, myself, and others. Shawn is my best friend, and we have an extraordinary marriage. Yet should I, on rare occasions, find myself thinking about or attracted to another man, I admit it to myself and to God. I then immediately call my friend Sue to confess. She is wise, gracious, and will keep me accountable. If thoughts were to gain a foothold in my life, I would tell Shawn. Shawn and I have discussed all of these steps.
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Marriage: A Dying to the Self
Paul Tripp's What Did You Expect? refreshingly goes beyond gender roles to arrive at the crux of marital problems: serving the kingdom of self.
During our engagement, my husband and I dutifully pursued premarital counseling. A well-meaning seminary professor and his wife graciously walked us through some of the highlights and lowlights of their marriage and how they had addressed issues. We covered faithfulness, forgiveness, and the roles of a husband and wife. But what I remember most about the evening was feeling that I already had marriage figured out. We were both seminary students who loved God, knew Scripture, and had great communication skills. That, coupled with our mutual love, meant that we were could do marriage “right” and avoid the sinkholes that had doomed other relationships.
Twelve years later, I am still, by God’s grace, happily married, but I continue to be confronted with the extent of my foolishness in those early days. I have faced unfulfilled expectations, disappointments, and unmet needs, just like every other married person has. Minimally, I could have better anticipated the hard seasons of marriage if I had understood the biblical concepts fleshed out in Paul David Tripp’s new book, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage (Crossway).
Tripp's biblical wisdom burrows beneath the layers of roles, communication mishaps, and felt needs that are the typical driving forces of Christian marriage how-to manuals, and arrives at the fundamental root of all marital problems: who or what we worship. To date, this is the first Christian book on marriage I have read that does not use the words submission or headship. Nor does it refer to the most classic passage on marriage, Ephesians 5. There are no listening techniques or explanations of gender differences. The kingdom model that Tripp describes transcends gender, roles, and the “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” ideas that pervade most approaches to marital troubles.
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The Hard Realities of International Adoption
Torry Hansen's story and the ensuing Russian adoption freeze might make some families reconsider.
A Tennessee woman's decision send her troubled 7-year-old son, Artyom Savelyev, alone on a plane back to Russia this month with a note saying he had psychopathic issues has turned the international adoption world upside down and seems to have frozen adoptions between the two countries. It has also unleashed a wave of resentment from Americans who feel that Russia passes severely disturbed children to foreign adoptive parents because the country lacks the will to reform an orphanage system that's an international disgrace.
As the mom of a 5-year-old girl adopted from Kazakhstan in 2007, I belong to five different adoption list serves, most of which lit up when the news broke. The overriding sentiment on the list serves was that, as awful as Torry Hansen’s action was, Russia is in no position to be pointing fingers. Yes, about 16 Russian adoptees have died in the U.S. since 1996 (out of 60,000 total adopted), but at least 15 adopted children die each year at the hands of Russian parents, according to The Times. Russia has 800,000 children in orphanages, with about 120,000 added each year. Americans adopt only about 1,600 per year, so we don’t make much of a dent. What depressed me in many of the posts written by adoptive parents were the horror stories about children they had adopted or knew about. This one is an example of the comments and links people post.
Many Russian children have some form of fetal alcohol syndrome whereby the child's brain is irreparably damaged due to binge drinking by pregnant moms. One recent Swedish survey estimated that 52 percent of 71 adopted children from Eastern Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine) were brain-damaged due to FAS. Those are horrible statistics, and the Russian Foreign Ministry seems to have few qualms about giving these children to unsuspecting foreigners.
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Breastfeed for the Health of the Nation?
Not nursing has major societal and health consequences — but even so, mothers deserve our support and understanding, not our judgment.
A new study published in Pediatrics journal concluded that breastfeeding has major life- and money-saving benefits. The study found that “if 90 percent of U.S. families could comply with the medical recommendations to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States could save $13 billion [per] year and prevent an excess 911 deaths annually, 95 percent of which would be of infants.”
The $13 billion figure came from examining occurrences and associated costs of 10 common illnesses that occur less often in breastfed children, as well as calculating the lost potential wages of infants who die. The preventable deaths are due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and several infectious diseases that breastfeeding has been shown to reduce.
Breastfeeding came easy for me and my babies. They latched on, my milk came in, they gained weight. It is not so for many women. Their babies are tired, their breasts hurt, the nurses are overworked, the grandmas won’t stop asking if a bottle might be easier, the calendar careens toward the end of maternity leave, and they crave nothing more than the uninterrupted sleep they might get if their husbands could give bottles of formula.
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A Failed 'Date Night'
Tina Fey and Steve Carell’s new romantic comedy about marital commitment hits a dull note.
Out of habit, I still watch Tina Fey in 30 Rock and Steve Carell in The Office every week, even though I do not particularly like the shows anymore. Both started out as a fresh, humorous takes on usual suspects, corporations and the average American work place. Regrettably, each has turned predictable, which also ends up describing Fey and Carell’s latest comedic attempt.
In Date Night, the TV stars play Claire and Phil Foster, a "boring couple from New Jersey" whose life turns exciting for one night during a disastrous date. The film might initially interest CT readers because of its family-friendly comedy and strong marriage themes. It opened last weekend to mixed reviews but still raked in $25.2 million at the box office. Perhaps my expectations were too high because of Fey and Carell's mere presence in the film, a likely draw for others as well. I was also eager to see a film that depicted a strong marriage, instead of the predictable "chick flick" as seen in films based on Nicholas Sparks novels. This isn't the usual love story challenged by cancer, but the themes seem conventional nonetheless.
Playing into the stereotype of the mundane marriage, Fey and Carell go through the humdrum parts of life: feeding the kids, going to work, as Fey puts her mouth guard on before bed. Each date night, for instance, consists of salmon and potato skins. We are set up to believe the couple has marital woes to confront as they watch friends go through a divorce; they've become “the most excellent roommates,” but nothing more.
One night, though, Carell takes Fey into Manhattan to a fancy restaurant to invigorate their marriage. The movie contains some charming moments, like when the actors look over at people at tables and make up their own stories about the couples. Unfortunately, the television stars’ usual hilarity doesn’t quite translate on the movie set.
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Caught between the Easter Bunny and the Empty Grave
Reducing Easter to a purely spiritual celebration is almost as problematic as reducing it to a consumer smorgasbord.
For two weeks now, our kids have been singing, “Hosanna!” Penny, our 4-year-old, sings the whole song: “Hosanna to the King of Kings!” William, 20 months old, just repeats this new, favorite word. We went for a walk yesterday afternoon, and there they were, arms raised, running in circles, singing “Hosanna!” Or in the car, driving to the grocery store, “Hosanna!” In line at the post office, “Hosanna!” We live in a pretty secular neck of the woods. My husband and I find ourselves quieter than we wish when it comes to faith. But our kids give us away all the time.
Right now, Penny and William don’t know about what I have taken to calling “American Easter.” They don’t know about the Easter bunny. They don’t know that the chocolate eggs and jelly beans that have shown up in our kitchen are connected to this upcoming holiday. They don’t think of Easter as a day of candy and treats and baby chicks and bunny rabbits. Their experience of Easter right now comes only through stories and songs learned in church.
But Penny is old enough now for us to make some decisions. Will our kids grow up with fond memories, as I did, of wearing new clothes and searching for Easter baskets on Sunday morning? Will they think of Easter as a time to dye eggs? As a harbinger of spring?
The average American is expected to spend nearly $120 on Easter this year, for a total of $13.03 billion nationwide, according to the National Retail Federation. As far as Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart and flower shops are concerned, Easter is about big business. The spiritual stuff is optional. The jelly beans and cards are not. In fact, the money spent on candy in preparation for Easter is comparable to the money spent on candy for Halloween.
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Mixed-Gender Housing, and Mixed-Gender Friendship
Christian colleges likely won't let men and women room together anytime soon. Will they teach men and women how to be friends?
Should men and women room together at college? Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that close to 50 campuses across the U.S. permit those of the opposite sex to room together in what's being called "gender-neutral housing." According to the article, “the movement began mainly as a way to accommodate gay, bisexual and transgender students who may feel more comfortable living with a member of the opposite sex. Most schools say they discourage couples from participating, citing emotional and logistical problems of breakups.” The majority of heterosexuals participating in the gender-neutral housing programs say they are not romantically involved. Although few students participate in these programs, colleges that do offer gender-neutral housing programs contend that their students should have the option of rooming with whomever they feel most comfortable.
It's almost certain that this housing trend will not be showing up on distinctly Christian college and university campuses anytime soon. (Nor should it.) However, the Los Angeles Times article highlights something I’ve been pondering lately: What more can Christian universities do to foster wholesome friendships between the sexes while keeping healthy boundaries?
This semester at Cedarville University, the Ohio Baptist school where I'm a resident director, I’ve noticed panic among many of the single women who are approaching graduation. Part of their panic is fueled by a fear (whether real or imagined) that the odds of meeting a godly man will dwindle once they graduate. Just a few weeks ago, I spoke with female nursing majors who lamented that, during their college experience, they'd had very few opportunities to interact with the men on campus. “It’s so bad, we don’t even know how to relate to a guy. We can barely carry on a natural conversation,” they told me. They wished for more opportunities to hang out with guys. After my conversation with these women, I starting thinking of additional ways our dorm could foster opportunities for healthy, meaningful interactions between men and women.
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Get Your Free Human Eggs
A recent in vitro fertilization 'raffle' in London entices British women with an unregulated American fertility market. But it's too easy to dismiss that market as a money-grubbing enterprise.
Imagine that you are a woman with an intractable medical problem. You awake each day desperate to find a way to live the life you have dreamed of. Your doctors have offered increasingly sophisticated, invasive, and expensive treatments, to no avail. You have depleted your savings, and your insurance coverage is inadequate to pursue further treatment.
You attend a seminar about a treatment that has helped other women with your problem. A raffle will award one attendee a free treatment from the seminar’s sponsor. When the seminar ends, the speaker announces the winner’s name to the hushed crowd. It is your name. Maybe, just maybe, your nightmare is over. This treatment could work. And you will not have to pay a dime for it.
Sounds like a dream come true, right? But what if the medical problem in question is infertility? And what if the grand prize is an in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle that includes another woman's donated human egg? And what if the raffle, held in London and sponsored by an American clinic, was designed to market a kind of medical tourism, in which British women travel to America for IVF with donor eggs?
According to news reports, including this one from The Washington Post, the seminar’s sponsor, the Genetics and IVF (GIVF) Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, insisted that they were not raffling human body parts, but instead offering free medical treatment. When I initially heard about the raffle, I was troubled by such blatant commodification of human reproduction. But I could not dismiss out of hand GIVF's claim that they were simply trying to help those who needed their services. Shortly after we got married, my husband and I met with the same GIVF physician who is quoted in the Post article. Because I have a genetic bone disorder, we explored conceiving via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is IVF with an added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular genetic anomaly. Although we never received treatment from GIVF, my experience there and later at a fertility clinic in Connecticut showed me that we cannot disparage all fertility clinicians as money-grubbing marketing machines.
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A Sinking Argument on Gender and Courage
Do secular feminists really want men to stop showing courtesy?
Cultural commentator Al Mohler recently covered an unusual study that compared passenger behavior on the Titanic, in 1912, and the Lusitania, in 1915. The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that men on the Titanic were more likely than those on the Lusitania to give up their lifeboat seats for women and children. On the Lusitania, which was struck by German torpedoes and sank in 18 minutes, more women and children died than did men, something the study attributes to the men’s physical strength and speed in getting to the lifeboats. Put bluntly, the men on the Lusitania acted selfishly, while those on the Titanic showed good manners.
Mohler draws from this study a lesson on gender roles and the created order. He writes that “modern feminists” wish to eliminate “all meaningful gender distinctions,” which he believes would lead to the disregard that the Lusitania’s men showed for women and children. “Are we really to believe that the moral call that makes men act against their own self-preservation is just a socially constructed artifact of manners?” he asks. “The feminists . . . call for a world like the Lusitania, but must hope against hope that the world is really more like the Titanic.”
Unfortunately, this argument suffers from two serious flaws. First, the most telling of all the statistics is not taken into account: the overwhelming number of upper-class people, male and female, who were rescued on the Titanic. Time magazine reports thusly: “The Titanic’s first-class passengers had a 43.9% greater chance of making it off the ship and into a lifeboat than the reference group; the Lusitania’s, remarkably, were 11.5% less likely.” In other words, it is not so much that men gave their lifeboat seats to women, but that poor men and women gave up their seats to wealthy men and women. On the Titanic, poor women died and rich men lived. Neither today’s feminists nor Mohler would, I wager, want to support that trend today.
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Should Pro-lifers Call Black Children an 'Endangered Species'?
The controversial Georgia ad implies that, like endangered species, black children should be protected up until they're born.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the controversial billboard campaign sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, that state’s largest pro-life organization, in partnership with a Christian group called the Radiance Foundation. In signs put up around Atlanta, as well as through a dynamic website, the campaign puts the abortion issue squarely in the faces of passersby with the image of a young child next to the startling words, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” It’s a provocative image and caption, created in part by black and biracial people with compelling stories related to pro-life issues.
I applaud the campaign’s message and the attention it draws to the devastating impact of abortion in the African American community (one CDC survey reports that African American women have abortions at three times the rate of white women and almost twice the rate of other racial groups). But I find the use of “endangered species” language and imagery to describe black children to be profoundly inappropriate.
First, there’s the problem of comparing African Americans to animals. Because of the ways those kinds of comparisons have been made to dehumanize blacks in the past, I think the campaign’s organizers should have reconsidered leveraging the “endangered species” comparison for its shock value and attention-grabbing potential.
I understand that the point of the Georgia campaign, like those “Save the Baby Humans” bumper stickers, is to emphasize the hypocrisy in caring more about animals than we do about people. But black children aren’t animals — and that’s precisely why their lives are important. They shouldn’t be compared to the Okaloosa Darter or the Galapagos Petrel, or some other species most of us haven’t heard about and don’t care about the survival of.
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'Why Don't You Just Adopt?'
The frequent question assumes that adoption is both easy and morally superior.
The detention of U.S. Baptist missionaries who tried to take 33 children out of Haiti after the January 12 earthquake shone a bright light on complex moral questions related to the country’s adoption practices. The Wall Street Journal reports that, even before the earthquake, an estimated 400,000 Haitian children lived in some type of orphanage, and only a few thousand were orphans in the traditional sense. One American arrived in Haiti to find that the girl he planned to adopt not only had a living mother, but that her mother actually worked in the girl’s orphanage. When the man balked at taking the girl, the mother assured him it was what she wanted for her child. She beamed as her daughter drove away with her adoptive father.
While Haiti’s child welfare system seems uniquely overwhelmed, the focus on Haitian adoptions reveals a broader truth: Adoption is not quite the straightforward, ethically superior choice many of us assume it is.
“Why don’t you just adopt?” Well-meaning people say this often to those who have used or are considering reproductive technology to conceive because of infertility or a troubling genetic history. The question implies that adoption is the simplest, most loving, and least selfish choice. Wouldn’t it be a better use of resources to adopt a child who needs parents rather than paying fertility clinics to help make a baby? If a couple really wants a child, should they really put their desire for a biological child over the needs of living, breathing children who could use a home?
These questions rely on what theologian and ethicist Paul Lauritzen has called the “myth of unwanted children.” Lauritzen, in Pursuing Parenthood, writes that “even to talk about ‘unwanted children’ may be misleading in situations where a woman is relinquishing a child not because she is unwilling to care for her child, but because she is unable to do so. . . . To speak about ‘unwanted children’ is to fail to take seriously what is perhaps the most compelling reason women relinquish children, namely, poverty” (p. 126).
For every mother who weeps in relief as her child leaves for a better life, another mother weeps in anguish that she felt compelled to make such a choice. As Christians called to care for “the least of these,” we are also called to help create healthy societies where mothers aren’t forced to relinquish children because they are overwhelmed by poverty, violence, and chaos. Given that our Scriptures frequently remind us that our treasure is not to be found in wealth, we need to guard against believing that a well-off parent is by default better than a poor one.
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Michelle Obama Tackles Childhood Obesity
The First Lady has been criticized for mentioning her daughters' weight to launch the 'Let's Move!' campaign.
As President Obama presided over a seven-hour cross-party debate on health care last week, First Lady Michelle Obama continued to make headlines in the advancement of her latest cause: childhood obesity.
In an historic appearance at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association on February 20, Obama called for a nationwide program to combat obesity in America's children, stressing as she did that such a plan need not be expensive.
Aims of "Let's Move," the name given to the Obama obesity initiative, include a $400 million annual budget to encourage grocery stores to carry healthier food selections, especially grocery stores in "underserved" areas, according to National Public Radio. "Let's Move" will also beef up (pardon the pun) initiatives to offer healthier lunches in schools, and partner with schools in achieving those goals.
It's no secret that being overweight is unhealthy and that obese children tend to grow into obese adults. And with childhood obesity continually on the rise, according to the latest government statistics, it's obvious something needs to be done. But from the minute it left the starting gate, "Let's Move" has endured some hefty criticism.
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Eliminating Suffering or Eliminating People?
When genetic testing threatens our common humanity.
Imagine sitting in a doctor's office and receiving this news:
Good morning, Mrs. Santos. I have the results of the screening test you had last week, 12 weeks into your pregnancy. The test indicates a high likelihood that your baby will be a typically developing child, and I want to make sure you understand the implications of this diagnosis. Typically developing children are at risk for a number of physical, emotional, and mental complications throughout their lives.Although the risks are many, I will mention a few of the most prevalent. Your child has a 30 percent risk of obesity, an 8 percent risk of diabetes, and a 10 percent risk of clinical depression. Each of these factors can result in premature death. One in 166 children in the United States develops autism, and one in 500 dies within the first few months of life from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
In addition to the potential physical and mental problems, I want to make sure you've considered the financial costs associated with a typically developing child. Do you think you can afford to raise this child, given the current economic environment, rising health care costs, and the rising cost of higher education?
The decision regarding this pregnancy is entirely up to you. I just want to make sure you have the information you deserve, based on the test results.
Advances in technology are offering women more information about their pregnancy than ever before. Marilynn Marchione, of the Associated Press, reported last week on the increased use of genetic screening to “curb genetic diseases.” Those she interviewed see genetic screening as positive, a means to ensure that “some of mankind’s most devastating inherited diseases” will continue to decline.
Medical information can be useful in making decisions about trying to conceive children biologically, and even about how best to care for children once they are born. But when it comes to genetic screening, using medical information to eliminate disease often means using such information to eliminate life.
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Pregnant Olympians Are Not 'Selfish'
Women like Kristie Moore show that parenting well and taking healthy risks are not mutually exclusive — especially when taking risks means obeying God.
Last Friday a friend forwarded me a link to an article titled “Are Pregnant Athletes Selfish?” She guessed correctly that I might have something to say about it. It took one glance at the big black letters of the headline for my hackles to rise. The subtitle, “Olympic curler Kristie Moore is five months pregnant. Is this okay? Our OB/GYN reacts,” didn’t help calm me down.
Before I could get to the doctor’s reaction, my mind fumed over the fallout if indeed this doctor deemed curling too dangerous for a pregnant woman. Among other things, I'd have to guess a good chunk of the world’s pregnant women have little if no choice but to haul heavy things while shuffling over ice. It’s called “life” for pregnant women in winter.
As it turned it, I had no reason to fume. The doctor affirmed the same thing my OB told me throughout pregnancy. In considering whether or not in fact is was “okay” for Canadian Kristie Moore, who is 51/2 months pregnant and due May 27, to curl — and possibly become the first pregnant woman to win a gold medal — she wrote, “Olympic athletes are presumably some of the most fit people on the planet, so it's absurd to think that curling when you're five months along would do anything but benefit mother and baby. A happy, fit, endorphin-filled mom is a great place for a baby to grow!”
So, that settles that, right? We can watch Moore and her darling baby bump compete with ease, even excitement? And then we can all move on. Or, am I the only who’s still bugged by the initial question, especially since it headlined at a presumably “pro-woman” site?
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A New Frontier in Pro-Life Stem-Cell Research
FDA-backed Georgia researchers hope stem cells from umbilical cord blood will effectively treat cerebral palsy.
A team of researchers at Georgia’s health science university, the Medical College of Georgia (MCG), announced last week that they are conducting a clinical trial using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood as a treatment for cerebral palsy. The trial will build on a successful series of past tests using adult stem cells in regenerative medicine.
“Evidence up to this point has been purely anecdotal,” said James Carroll, chief of pediatric neurology at the MCG and principal investigator on the study. “While a variety of cord blood stem-cell therapies have been used successfully for more than 20 years, this study is breaking new ground in advancing therapies for brain injury.”
MCG's is the first clinical trial using adult stem cells approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and comes on the heels of last month’s announcement of the first FDA-approved trial of embryonic stem-cell treatment. FDA approval generally means enough funding and prior research has accumulated to make a heavily regulated FDA review worthwhile.
While there’s not exactly a competition, scientifically speaking, between the two different approaches, the fact that the government now supports embryonic stem-cell research underscores the importance of ramping up research into other methods (like cord blood stem cells).
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Saving the Life of a Shaken Baby
Byron and Susan Mondoks' adoption of their granddaughter, abused by her birth father, unearths the meaning of love in action.
Justice is what love looks like in public, so says Princeton professor and pop philosopher Cornel West. When we think of justice though, we generally think of that which is found in courts or through political activism, or, failing these avenues of redress, what will be found at the judgment seat of Christ. But sometimes, justice is found in extraordinary acts of familial love.
Such is the case for Allie Rae Mondok, a little girl whose birth father shook her in January 2007 until her brain was irreversibly damaged. His one abusive act left Allie legally blind, paralyzed, comatose, and on the verge of death. But Paul Cote, then 22, quickly confessed to having abused his daughter several times a week during the few months that Allie and her then 19-year-old mother, Charity Mondok, lived with him and two other roommates in a San Francisco apartment. X-rays revealed old injuries including shoulder and rib fractures. Cote told Allie’s doctor that he would sometimes grab his 10-month-old daughter by the neck and choke her. He also force-fed her until she vomited. All of these things he did knowing that they would only make things worse, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
In his final act of violence against Allie, Cote shook her vigorously for what he said was 20 seconds and then he squeezed her hard, because she wouldn’t go to sleep. Finally, she went limp in her bed, and a roommate called 911.
When Allie finally emerged from her coma, it was not to life as any of the Mondoks had previously known it, but to a future that doctors described as incredibly grim. Charity relinquished her parental rights and later attempted suicide. Her parents, Bryon and Susan, began a year-long process of becoming adoptive parents to their granddaughter. In order to do this, they left their home in Florida (which was subsequently lost to foreclosure), along with Bryon’s job as a missions pastor, and their 18-year-old son, Aaron, who lived with friends until they returned.
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When to Leave if You Can't Cleave
Homebound adult children in Italy are called ‘big babies.’ But can staying at home be a mature choice?
When is the right time to leave home? Italian government minister Renato Brunetta thinks it’s age 18, and recently suggested a new law to require it.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports that in Italy, “48 percent of offspring between the ages of 18 and 39 [are] still living with their parents.” In Italian, this phenomenon is called the bamboccione, or “big baby” syndrome. Canadian columnist Mark Steyn points out in Macleans:
[M]ost developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentive parenthood — quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. It’s no coincidence that the countries most prone to bamboccioni and parasite singles are the world’s oldest and fastest aging, with the lowest fertility rate: Japan, Germany and Italy are already in net population decline.
I wrote recently about modern China, where very different social pressures have also created a problem of demographics and economic peril. But I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that living at home is symptomatic of delayed adulthood. No, the real problem is not grown-up children living at home, but their using it to shirk responsibility and hard work.
Many of my childhood friends were raised with inherent assumptions about “leaving the nest.” However, most of them were also female, and whether unspoken or understood, most expected that by the time they reached 18 — or about 21, if they went to college — they would find someone to marry. Leaving home would then be the natural next step. Leaving home in order to cleave to a mate would provide its own compensation, in other words.
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Reading to Enrich a Child's Soul
In Read for the Heart, Sarah Clarkson wants to introduce families to good, true, and beautiful books.
![32485879_935aabe33b.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/02/32485879_935aabe33b.jpg ""Big Sis Reads," courtesy of jemsweb, flickr.com")
While American children and young adults might be reading more than in years past (says a 2009 study from the National Endowment for the Arts), they also are on the whole spending more time lost in a media blitz. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported last week that kids ages 8–18 spend an average of 7.5 hours a day consuming TV, movies, and music.
In a media-saturated and -distracted age, Sarah Clarkson hopes to reignite a love of reading books among families and children. Read for the Heart: Whole Books for Wholehearted Families (Apologia, December 2009) is Clarkson’s roadmap to books worthy of family reading and study. Her lists are substantial — the chapter on children’s fiction lists 51 authors, many with more than one book — so for families looking to add more reading into their routines, or for lovers of lists and of reading, Read for the Heart is a valuable resource.
Clarkson, based in Colorado and currently writing a children’s novel, spoke with Ruth Moon about the delight of children’s books and her philosophy of choosing good books.
What’s the value of adults reading children’s books?
Children’s stories distill big concepts down to the level of the simply true and beautiful. Some beautiful children’s books — the Chronicles of Narnia or At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald — have some of the deepest ideas in the world distilled into the simplicity of what you can tell a child. Children’s books can say true things about the world in a way that all the adult thinking and introspection and description can’t capture.
Why is it important to read to children?
It is astounding what words do for children’s brains. Reading helps them to make sense of information, and vocabulary is key to succeeding in any area of school. If a child isn’t read to or spoken to often, they won’t be able to proceed in math or science. Reading is constantly enriching the mind to be able to think more broadly and deeply. Everybody should be reading on a regular basis, but especially children during the years they are being educated.
What gave you the idea for the book?
I went to England for a C. S. Lewis Foundation conference and heard Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), speak. He was speaking on poetry for the conference, but he mentioned a report on reading. In his work at the NEA, he had been part of one of the largest surveys ever done on literacy in America.
When I got home I ordered the reports, and it was shocking. Reading had declined in every area and across every age group. [Editor’s note: 2009 was the first time in 25 years that the NEA saw an uptick in literary reading.] I had been writing book lists for people for years, and people had been asking me what I loved about books. Reading the reports made me realize, I want to write a book about this.
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Saved by Spanking
Reconsidering the controversial form of discipline in light of a new study — and timeless Scripture.
I was spanked. Not often, because I was a good kid. But still, I have one clear memory of getting a solid swat across my butt: I was probably 5 and had thrown a doozy of a tantrum in the grocery store. My mom told me that if I didn’t calm down, she would spank me when we got home. I didn’t calm down. So when we got home, she unloaded the car, put away the groceries while I sat, brooding and panicking. When she finished, she called me over with a pat of her lap and gave me a couple whacks.
I don’t remember crying. I’m sure it didn’t hurt (my mom’s pretty wimpy). So of course it hurt my mom more than it hurt me, as she assured me when she hugged me afterward. And in fact, according to a study by Marjorie Gunnoe, a professor of psychology/child development at Calvin College (full disclosure: my beloved alma mater), those whacks made me the well-adjusted adult that I am today (*cough, cough*).
While other research (the ones that have kept my husband and me from spanking our children — well, except that once) has shown that spanking ramps up aggression and other not-so-great attributes in kids, Gunnoe’s study says that “children who remember being spanked on the backside with an open hand do better in school, perform more volunteer work and are more optimistic than others who were not physically disciplined,” according to The Grand Rapids Press.
Of course, aside from loving and following Jesus, the qualities that Gunnoe mentions — doing better in school, being uber-volunteers, and being hopeful — just about sum up what I want for my kids. So now I’m wondering if I ought to get cranking with the spanking.
Gunnoe’s study certainly isn’t the only time I’ve wondered if we have made the right — or the most godly — choice regarding discipline. I mean, I’ve read Proverbs. I know the verses, the ones that say that kids who get the rod turn out better. I’ve also read the one that says that kids who don’t get the rod shame their mothers. But, yikes! I’m pretty positive God doesn’t want me beating my kids with a shepherd’s rod.
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China's Own Marriage Crisis
Gender imbalance due to sex-specific abortions signals imminent crisis in the Chinese family.
Family planning has become a controversial phrase in China, due to the government’s One Child Policy, a vast social experiment launched in 1979 to cap population growth and speed up economic development. State media reported recently that more than 24 million men in China are expected to be without spouses by year 2020. This is the latest consequence of a policy that has led to utility-based, sex-specific abortions (when faced with only one choice, boys have greater economic potential for parents) and created a critical gender imbalance.
The report, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, raises critical questions about what the Chinese nuclear family will look like in 10 years, or whether it will even exist. Along with the impending marriage crisis and already endangered family unit, subsequent problems will likely include increased underage marriage and forced prostitution.
Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, maintains that the widespread use of contraceptives (85 percent of reproduction-age Chinese women use them) is a sign of success. “I’m not saying what we have done is 100 percent right, but I’m sure we are going in the right direction and now 1.3 billion people have benefited,” she told China Daily.
Her perspective seems short-term. Workers ages 50 to 64 make up over half of China’s work force today, a result of the 1950 population swell. “[O]ver the coming generation, China’s prospective manpower growth rate is zero,” reports the Far Eastern Economic Review. In comparison, think of America’s baby-boomer generation, which is slowly leaving the work force and becoming dependent on the next, smaller generation.
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Matchmaker, Matchmaker, I Don't Want a Match
Most yentas mean well, but their meddling only adds unnecessary pressure to a single's life.
It wasn’t until I read Cathy Lynn Grossman's USA Today blog post Tuesday that I knew there was a word for them: Yentas, the people (usually women) in your life who pry about your love life (or the absence thereof) and, for better or worse, try to set you up with someone. The term is Yiddish slang (think Yente, the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof), but let’s face it, every culture has its yentas. And American evangelical culture is no exception.
Are evangelical yentas helpful? In my experience, they only serve to exasperate.
I’m 23 years old and a recent graduate of a private evangelical college where people paired off as quickly as its suburban rabbit population reproduced. I graduated without an official significant other, and thus became prime yenta target.
Fresh from the holiday season, I’m sure many Christian singles have had recent encounters with yentas. Surely the yentas in our lives mean well when they about our love lifes and try to set us up with a “nice young man” or “sweet Christian woman.” But I ask the evangelical yentas out there: Why do you do what you do?
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The Real Problem with Mary's Baby Bump
Jesus' mother likely didn't face the public shame associated with unwed mothers.
![206930221_b60cbc3c04.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2009/12/206930221_b60cbc3c04.jpg ""Melissa," courtesy of Karin Dalziel, Flickr.com")
This Christmas you may hear a sermon or two comparing today's unwed mothers with a well-known one from the ancient Mideast: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Reflecting on the alleged public shame Mary endured as an unmarried mom-to-be, we hear, the single moms in our midst deserve our special compassion and care. (Christianity Today's most recent issue featured Bob Smietana's reported piece on churches' support for single moms.)
Without discounting the crucial need to support single moms and their children and stand against the shame that our culture can dish out to them, Lynn Cohick, associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, suggests a different read of Mary’s story. In her recent book, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, she researches the historical context of marriage and motherhood in the first century A.D., and believes that Mary did not experience shame during her pregnancy. Cohick explains.
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Mary was betrothed to Joseph, which was a legally binding arrangement in the Jewish culture. All that awaited the couple was the wedding. If they engaged in sexual intercourse with each other, that was not seen as a violation of any cultural norm. Later rabbinic writings allowed that a future groom who had sexual relations with his bride-to-be at her father’s house was not guilty of immoral behavior.
If pregnancy occurred before the wedding, this was not a problem because the parentage of the child was secured. What is shocking is that Mary is pregnant and Joseph knows he is not the father. The problem is not that a betrothed couple had sex, but that presumably Mary had sex with another man — she committed adultery.
This explains Joseph’s reaction to divorce her, for that was the legal remedy when faced with infidelity during the betrothal period. And as Matthew tells us, Joseph wanted a quiet, “no fault” divorce (Matt. 1:19). This probably reflects the current perspective on divorce that was promulgated by at least one group of Pharisees, the Hillelites. They argued that Deuteronomy 24:1 should be interpreted that a man must divorce his wife for infidelity/adultery and also for any matter that seemed right to him. Another group of Pharisees, the Shammaites, held that Deuteronomy 24:1 taught that only for adultery could a husband write divorce papers.
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Baby Dies Aboard United Airways Flight: A Response
In our eagerness to assign blame, mothers usually bear the brunt of tragedies like this.
My mind is still reeling from the news that a 4-week-old infant was unable to be resuscitated after the baby stopped breathing on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Kuwait. The plane made an emergency landing in London, but the child could not be revived.
"Mom smothers baby breastfeeding on jet," the headline blared when I went to check my e-mail last Thursday. I quickly closed my laptop before my daughter could wander over and start reading over my shoulder. But I went back online later to read more, driven by the same compulsion that makes us slow our cars and look out the window when we pass an accident. All morning the headlines stuck in my brain as I cleaned the house, played with my children, and nursed my own baby.
Breastfeeding isn't the culprit, experts were quick to state (to my relief) when the news hit the press. Dr. Ruth Lawrence, past president and founder of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, was very clear in her interview with ABC News: "Breastfeeding doesn't smother babies." Instead, Lawrence pointed to the fact that the mother fell asleep while nursing.
Janet Fyle of the Royal College of Midwives agrees that breastfeeding shouldn't be blamed. The true culprit, she says, are the airplane seats itself, because they make it so easy to fall asleep. "It's not breastfeeding that's the problem," Fyle stated. "It's the chair.''
Pardon me for quarreling with the experts, but this mother is being blamed for falling asleep? On a transatlantic flight? With a 4-week-old?
What nursing mother hasn't fallen asleep while nursing her child? Back before the days of studies and guidelines and research and panels, back when the experts were primarily mothers, most women probably fell asleep every night while nursing their children. Many still do. But we're not supposed to, because sleeping while holding a baby is taboo right now, along with letting babies sleep on their stomachs, or using forward-facing car seats, or feeding babies honey before age one.
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Should Christians See 'Precious'?
What is the spiritual benefit of watching hard-to-watch films?
After reading Camerin Courtney’s 3½-star review of Precious for Christianity Today Movies, I knew I wanted to see the film. Well, kind of.
Alongside other reviewers, Courtney made it clear that the film — about an obese, illiterate African American teenager who is HIV-positive and pregnant by her father for the second time — is often unbearable to watch. Filmmaker Lee Daniels and executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry were committed to capturing the rawness of their source material, poet Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push. (NPR has helpfully posted an excerpt from the book, though some of the language may be offensive). Sexual abuse and violence are pervasive themes throughout the film, which earned five Independent Spirit Award nominations last week.
Claireece “Precious” Jones’s nickname is, of course, ironic. In others’ as well as her own eyes, she’s the antithesis of one who is esteemed, cherished, or beloved, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it. Growing up in Harlem in 1987, Precious refers to herself as the “ugly black grease to be washed from the street.” Her parents have no doubt led her to conclude thus. Her father, who we never see except when he is raping her, has abused Precious since she was a toddler; her mother, a bitter welfare recipient who spends her days chain smoking in front of the TV, inflicts on her daughter constant verbal and physical assault, telling her at one point, “I should have aborted your a**.” Until attending an alternative school, where her teacher, Ms. Rain, has the effect of dignifying those around her, Precious is not so much a person with agency as an object to which terrible things are done. And perpetual poverty is the backdrop for her family’s story, telling its inhabitants that it would be a lot easier if they just didn’t exist.
If reading this description makes you flinch, it just means you still have a beating heart. Aware of Precious’s visceral punch before seeing it, I was still tempted more than once to leave the movie theater two weeks ago. And for some reviewers, the film’s commitment to shocking viewers with its subject matter diminishes its value. Esteemed critic Armond White excoriated filmmaker Daniels for exploiting popular stereotypes of blacks: “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés . . . it is a sociological horror show.” CT Movies critic Brett McCracken took issue with a scene depicting Precious running down the street with a stolen bucket of fried chicken: “A film like this would be more effective, I think, without such an ungainly commitment to in-your-face shock value. It’s a shocking-enough subject matter without the scenes of fried chicken larceny."
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Silencing the Maternal Nag
I've learned that our baby needs a mother and father, not two mothers.
Women want their spouses to be more involved in raising their children, but they need to allow fathers to father, not force them to mother. The New York Times reported last week on new research that suggests that women are unintentionally blocking men from greater participation in child-raising because they insist that men do it their way. Women need to find a way to encourage their partners for the good of the children. The research shows that children thrive when both mom and dad are involved, not one or the other.
The article hit close to home. As a new mother, I confess to needing to fight the temptation to turn my husband into my employee in the Raising Our Son business. We both work outside the home, but because I’ve chosen to exclusively breast-feed, I’ve arranged my schedule so that I’m with our baby more than my husband is. Naturally, I feel like the expert on what each of our son’s cries and coos mean. Sharing information on our son’s development is helpful, but when I swoop in to rescue our fussy baby from my husband’s arms, I know I’ve gone too far. More often than not, the baby keeps fussing in my arms, anyway.
But shouldn’t my husband be quietly humming Brahms Lullaby instead of singing the raucous Rocky Raccoon song (our own creation) while he is getting our son ready for bed? Isn’t PBS better than the Golf Channel for their television viewing? Should they even be watching television? Again, I have to silence the inner nag. The point is that my husband is involved in the raising of our son. Our child needs a mother and a father, not two mothers.
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The Day We Let Our Son Live
It ended up being the most important day of my life.
When it comes to the chance for those with genetic defects to live, the news has not been good on either side of the Atlantic. Last week’s Telegraph reported that of all women in the U.K. who find out through prenatal testing that their baby will have Down syndrome, about 90 percent choose to have an abortion. And yesterday, ABC News reported a near-identical rate among women in the U.S.: 92 percent of those who find out their child will have the chromosomal defect decide to abort. One geneticist at Children’s Hospital Boston found that, without prenatal testing, the number of Down syndrome births would have increased by 34 percent between 1989 and 2005. Instead, the number of Down syndrome births has dropped by 15 percent over that time.
Upon hearing such news, I remembered Ellen and Al Hsu (pronounced shee), a Christian couple who works at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois, and who faced the same situation as the women above. This is Ellen’s story of Elijah, their 4-year-old with Down syndrome, as originally told on their family blog, Team Hsu.
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I gazed in wonder at the blurry form on the screen. “Hi, Baby,” I whispered. The image of our baby was much clearer on the level-two ultrasound. The technician rolled the ultrasound wand over my growing abdomen, and I marveled as I watched our son squirm and suck his thumb. A new life forming within me.
Our OB/GYN had referred us for a level-two ultrasound after he noticed choroid plexus cysts on our baby’s brain during the standard 20-week ultrasound. I was anxious about what the maternal health specialist might find. We knew a couple whose ultrasound also had showed choroids plexus cysts, but whose baby was perfectly fine when he was born. We had spent the past week praying for our baby and hoping for the best.
Al walked into the exam room as the technician was finishing up. She hadn’t said much and explained that the doctor would be in to take a look for himself and to explain what he found. Al and I chatted quietly while we waited. I was relieved that he had made it before the doctor came in. Little did I know how much I would need him.
The doctor came in and began his exam. I was delighted at the chance to see more images of our baby. But my world was shaken when the doctor finally began explaining what he saw. “Something is very wrong with this baby.”
He continued to roll the wand over my tummy as he pointed to various spots on the screen and began listing all the “abnormalities”: larger than usual nuchal folds; clenched fists; possible club feet; something wrong with the liver; enlarged ventricles in the brain; possibly no stomach. My tears flowed as his list grew longer. My delight at the new life within me turned to icy fear, and I clutched Al’s hand tightly.
The doctor suspected a chromosomal problem, possibly Trisomy 13 or 18, birth defects caused by an extra 13th or 18th chromosome. He explained that both of these conditions are generally “incompatible with life.” We were told that if our baby was born alive, he was likely to die within a day. If we were lucky, he might survive for 6 to 12 months. We wondered if we should begin preparing for death instead of life.
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Where Someone Loves Us Most of All
Is Where the Wild Things Are too wild for children?
Every night while I was growing up ended just the same. "Mommy loves you, Daddy loves you, and Jesus loves you most of all," my mom would say as she tucked me into bed. The ritual was a reminder, enforced through years of repetition, that no matter how far I ventured out into the world, which can be scary, cold, and unloving, I would always have a safe place with the people who love me and a God who loves me more. This is such an important lesson; children need to know that no matter what happens "out there," they are loved. Love doesn't make problems go away, but it grounds us in something greater than ourselves and our problems.
Most children's movies emphasize can-do messages: You can do anything you want if you believe in yourself! Go out and have an adventure! And then along came Where the Wild Things Are.
Perhaps you've heard of it? In production for nearly 10 years, it was last weekend's highest-grossing film. It's also been the source of much controversy, particularly over whether the children's movie is even appropriate for children.
When a Newsweek reporter asked Maurice Sendak how he would respond to parents who might ask if the adaptation of his book is too scary for children, he replied, “I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate.”
But what we allow our children to watch is important. And many children will want to see this movie; the trailer set the hype machine in motion months ago (the first time I saw it, I cried). The movie has been called too philosophical, too postmodern, too psychological, and too bleak for children. Perhaps we think children need something easy to digest. But that is the true genius of the original book, and of great children’s literature: It does not talk down to children or their ability to understand and process, whether consciously or subconsciously, the complexities of their own lives.
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Trouble with Online Love
Australian police found that two out of three victims of “romance fraud” are women.
More Australians are being duped by “romance fraud” or “love scam,” particularly Christian women, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Through dating or social networking sites and Christian chat rooms, online scammers posing as love interests have convinced people to send millions of dollars to places like Nigeria.
"They go into Christian chat rooms and a lot of the time when they ask for money, there's a Christian element to the [scammer's] story," Queensland police Fraud Squad chief Detective Inspector Brian Hay said. "It's a comfort thing for the victim. "We are seeing more targeted attacks because people put information about themselves on to the web."
USA Today’s Cathy Lynn Grossman poses the question: “Do you worry that sharing your faith on dating or social networking online sites could attract people who treat your values as stepping stones to a scam -- financial or spiritual?”
Christian Dating Watchdog lists various dating sites that Christians should avoid because of a site’s secular ownership, gay/lesbian profiles, or “questionable methods of advertising.” However, it doesn’t mention any troubling sites due to romance frauds.
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Stranded in Manila, A Mother Prays
Twin typhoons Ketsana and Parma pummeled the Philippines and surrounding regions last week, taking more than 250 lives in Metro Manila and bringing the worst floods in 40 years to the capital. When Ketsana struck, Normi Son — an evangelical who works for a Montessori school downtown — found herself separated from her two children, ages 8 and 14. Below is her first-hand account of the floods that threatened to split her family in two.
At about 11 a.m. in my office at Cainta City, Metro Manila, I received a text message from my nephew: “Aunt, you won’t believe [this], but the river behind our house overflowed and the streets are now submerged into 2-meter-deep floodwater. Our neighbor’s fence has collapsed and their house is flooded. A landslide had occurred blocking the only road that would lead us to safety. Do not attempt to come. The roads are impassable.”
I phoned home to find out how my children were. They told me the river was still rising and that the walls behind our house could crumble anytime. My home was built on a piece of land 6 meters from Antipolo River. I felt numb at the thought of my children being stranded at home by themselves. I went to a corner and poured out my heart to God. “Please stop the rain now.” I kept uttering these words throughout the day, but the rain grew heavier. I wondered if God was listening.
Meanwhile, a member of my staff said that her husband had to swim to escape their submerged house. She said that flooding had started around our office. I looked out the window and saw dirty water rising up. Within a few minutes, it turned into a brown river raging in every direction; it engulfed plants, vehicles, bungalow houses, and small trees.
More complications hit us as the day wore on. The electricity was cut off by noon. Everyone on staff failed trying to go home by foot. I spent the entire afternoon with three of them, helping about 50 children and adults who had arrived at our office building. By nightfall, I completely lost contact with my children.
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Snakes, Spiders, and the Science of Gender
Why do women tend to be more afraid of creepy crawlies than men?
My toddler son is taking a class this fall about bugs. "Learn about insects and their important role in our environment and everyday lives through stories, crafts and games," the brochure boasts. "Great class for boys and girls!"
As long as I don't have to be one of those girls, I'm fine. I plan to spend the class time hanging out with my 6-month-old, as far away from the bugs as is legally allowed. While my son hears stories about spiders and makes crickets out of pipe cleaners and black plastic combs, I'll be doing something else — anything else. And while he and his classmates are tromping outdoors with boxes of live insects, I'll be practicing that Lamaze breathing that does nothing for labor pains — but perhaps does something for bug phobias.
According to a recent Boston Globe article, women are four times more likely than men to be afraid of bugs, spiders, snakes, and the like. Yet no discernible gender difference exists for specifically modern phobias (the article mentions needle injections and flying). Why is this?
To find out, David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment with 11-month-old infants. He showed them a series of pictures — a snake, a spider, a flower, and a mushroom — paired with either a happy face or a frightened face. Baby girls quickly associated the snake and the spider with the frightened face, reports Science News. Baby boys did not.
Rakison believes the discrepancy may be evolutionary in nature. In prehistoric times, he theorizes, snakes and spiders posed a greater threat to women than to men, in terms of the survival of the species, because children could not survive without their mothers. Thus, the female brain has evolved in such a way as to recognize this danger from an early age.
Debates about evolution aside (although feel free to take it up in the comments section!), I could probably come up with an alternative explanation for why girls are more afraid of snakes, at least, and it would probably run something like this: Snake tempts girl. Girl succumbs. Sedition, eviction, perdition.
Any takers?
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Early marriage sounds great — as long as there are mature Christian men willing to initiate.
If you thought navigating the 20-something dating and marriage scene wasn’t complicated enough, former President Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson just put his oar in.
In an argument similar to Mark Regnerus’s cover story in the August issue of Christianity Today, Gerson says that “it doesn't seem realistic to expect most men and women to delay sex until marriage at 26 or 28.”
He believes that kind of self-control is possible but not likely, even among churchgoers. Besides, marrying late in one’s 20s can result in unhappier marriages, while early-20s marriages have the happiest results.
Where does Gerson get those numbers, you might ask? Slate’s XX Factor did some digging and found this 2004 study from the National Fatherhood Initiative. (Especially check out the graphs on page 19.) XX Factor also notes that some key information, like statistical significance, is missing from the graphs, so it’s hard to tell how seriously we should take the information.
Statistical reliability aside, Gerson’s argument — marry young, because people cannot handle not waiting to have sex until their late 20s — is weak on many levels. Is marriage really an excuse for sex? Should a lack of self-control be rewarded with early gratification? To say nothing of evangelical churches and families, it doesn’t seem like that mindset will lead to a healthy society at large.
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Adoption: Single Christians Need Not Apply
When there are 132 million orphans in the world, should unmarrieds really be discouraged from reaching out to them?
National Adoption Month is coming up, and churches are mobilizing like never before to encourage people to adopt. But there is a secret underneath it all: Single Christians need not apply.
When I was considering adopting my daughter, one of the most disheartening things was the active discouragement of many Christians who told me point-blank that only married couples should adopt. It was bad enough, I thought, to be consigned to a life of singleness because of the lack of unmarried men in church. For people to say singles are unworthy to adopt a child who would otherwise be living in an orphanage boggled my mind.
The other day, I received a copy of SBC Life, the Southern Baptist Convention’s denominational magazine, where I saw David Roach’s piece “Adoption Ministries Thriving in SBC Churches.” First, the good: It pointed out how any church, large or small, can be involved in adoption ministry toward those who want to adopt, how scandalous it is how many orphans are in this world, and that it’s up to Christians to do something about it. I was gratified to learn of a few loan programs out there for those wishing to adopt, as the costs — especially for international adoption — usually climb well past $30,000. It was also refreshing to see how many parents were supporting interracial adoption. And it providing some good ideas for preparing for November 8, which is Orphan Sunday.
All the photos and the pronouns used in the article, however, referred to couples. This was true on some of the related websites, such as Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, where I found no mention that some of the adoptive parents might be single men or women. This was certainly true on the application forms attached to these sites. I e-mailed Highview's adoption ministry director about this, and she was not aware of any singles adoptions there. “The leadership of Highview believes that it is the best for children to be adopted into traditional homes with a father and a mother,” she told me.
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The President's Speech and Parental Rights
To what extent should the government shape children’s beliefs?
Children in many U.S. schools yesterday heard President Obama exhort the values of hard work and personal responsibility in his back-to-school address. Reformed pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church praised the speech as “a wonderful gift of common grace from God to the students of our land.” Before the speech, many parents had protested the way it was framed — the Department of Education had given schools a “menu of classroom activities” that suggested students write about “how they could help the President” — rather than its content. Many parents demanded that their school districts provide alternatives to watching the speech or that they not show it at all. School districts were forced to respond with less than two weeks’ notice to the Education Department’s announcement.
Meanwhile, in Quebec, a court struggle recently broke out over a new, mandatory “Ethics and Religious Culture” course that will replace three separate religion courses for all students. Some Christian parents protested it as a violation of their right to choose their children’s religious education, but Quebec’s Superior Court ruled August 31 that the class does not violate the right to “freedom of conscience and religion” in the Canadian Charter of Rights. Here's how one law professor at the Université de Sherbrooke defended the ruling:
What parents were demanding was the right to ignorance, the right to protect their children from being exposed to the existence of other religions. . . . This right to ignorance is certainly not protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Freedom of religion does not protect the right not to know what is going on in our universe.
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Half the Sky: A Must-Read Book
The fight for women's dignity worldwide, the 'cause of our time,' needs Christians now more than ever.
This past weekend, The New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted its entire issue to "Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time." Some very sober and powerful reading there — and not what you might think upon encountering a magazine with a title like that. In fact, these are real, global, and serious issues that should have the attention and ministry of Christians everywhere. More on that in a moment.
The lead feature was an excerpt from the forthcoming book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn,a former Times correspondent who now works in finance and philanthropy. Here's a summary of the book, titled Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide — one that includes an honest fact about abortion that I was stunned to read in a mainstream publication. This is a good indicator of the journalistic veracity of this book's research:
Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at pro-democracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.
Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.
A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.
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Breast-feeding Dolls: Cute or Creepy?
I'm pretty ambivalent about Bebe Gloton, the world's first electronically nursing doll.
Let me start this post off by saying that I'm a little bit of a lactivist. I don't think I'm the scary kind, but I do champion the rights of nursing mothers, practice child-led weaning, and, well, use words like lactivist.
And I'll admit to having filched the toy bottle out of the package before giving my daughter a new doll for her birthday, in an effort to minimize the bottle-as-normative aspect of our culture. (See what I mean? That's lactivist logic.)
So having said that. My reaction to the news of a new breast-feeding doll from Spanish toy company Berjuan?
Eww. Gross.
Meet Bebe Gloton — which translates out to "Baby Glutton" according to The New York Times, and "Greedy Baby" according to The Daily Mail. (I'll hold my comments on the name.) The doll, sold in both baby boy and baby girl versions, is being marketed as the world's first breast-feeding doll. When held up to the chest of young mommies-in-training, electronic sensors in Bebe Gloton's mouth "suckle" at strategically-placed daisies on the girl-sized halter top that comes in the box with the doll.
I'm creeped out just writing that. And I'm not alone. Bebe Gloton is garnering criticism as videos of the doll in action go viral, with readers' comments ranging from concern about the sexualization of young girls to fear over an unhealthy ramp-up in early maternal desires.
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Running in the Shadow of 9/11
Much of my life has been lived in the kinetic shadow of New York City. Last weekend, I owned that city’s streets for three hours.
I have loved New York City my whole life. By that I mean since I was a preschooler living across the Hudson in North Bergen, New Jersey. Even from the relative distance of the Jersey Shore, where my family moved when I was 6 and where I’ve spent most of my days, “the city” has been as prominent a backdrop as the cool green Atlantic. From trips up north to see family, I watched the derided Twin Towers get built. While flying into Newark Liberty International Airport when I lived in California post-9/11, I pondered the void.
It was as a hometown girl that I ran (and walked) the New York City Half-Marathon last Sunday on behalf of the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF). I love to run and have been doing it since winning ribbons at elementary school field days. Running with CTF’s NF Endurance Team for research into a disease that may have contributed to my son Gabriel’s death is a particularly rewarding experience. Not only is CTF the world’s leading non-government funder of neurofibromatosis research, it has given me education and encouragement ever since Gabriel was diagnosed with NF as an infant.
CTF is headquartered on Pine Street in New York City, so it was a hometown race for the team as well. It was more than that for me though. Life for my family had been pretty idyllic for a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two nights before those attacks, Gabriel’s friend Christopher Braca was at our house. His dad Al picked him up. Al Braca worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and had lived through the first World Trade Center bombing. He didn’t live through the second. He was known as “The Rev” at work because of his outspoken faith. Stories came back to his family after his death that on that fateful morning, when all hope of survival was lost, Al had gathered people around him to passionately invite them to go to heaven with him.
A week after the attack, I dropped Gabe off at Christopher’s house to hang out. His mom, Jeannie, said, “I realized last night that Al isn’t coming home and neither is his body.” A little later, I got a call that I needed to come pick Gabe up. Despite Al's body having fallen more than 100 stories amidst tons of debris, it was found intact. We called it a miracle in the midst of unspeakable tragedy.
As it happens, our hotel near the finish line at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan was a block from Ground Zero. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had I spent time there since volunteering at a relief worker respite station in spring 2002. On Saturday morning before the race, my husband and I strolled around the site and took in the changes, including a visitor center and a bronze memorial to firefighters who had died there. Locals were giving tours, telling tourists about human remains found as late as a year ago.
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The Persecuted Rifqa Bary?
Christians rally support for a 17-year-old believer who says her Muslim parents have threatened to kill her. Should they believe her?
Fathima Rifqa Bary's story is quickly circulating on blogs and Christian media as proof of Islam's violent roots and the cost of following Christ. While the latter is true no matter who's doing the following, the former is disputable in the case of the Ohio teen who fled her home two weeks ago to meet up with Blake and Beverly Lorenz, Florida pastors she had met on Facebook.
"They [my parents] threatened to kill me," Bary says tearfully in a YouTube video (above) posted Tuesday. She goes on to explain the logic of honor killings: "They have to kill me. My blood is now hallal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I am from a Muslim background. It's an honor, they love God more than me. They have to do this."
Bary says she hitchhiked and rode a bus July 19 from New Albany, a Columbus suburb, to Orlando, calling the Lorenzes upon arriving. She stayed with the pastors of the nondenominational Global Revolution Church until Monday, when she was placed into emergency custody with the Dept. of Children and Families.
"We are doing everything we can to protect her," Blake Lorenz told The Orlando Sentinel. Beverly Lorenz told The Columbus Dispatch they hardly knew Bary but took her in and called an abuse hotline last Friday, which prompted a visit from state police. Blake Lorenz said that he's "very concerned that the system will let her down."
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