Hermenuetics

Addicted to Books

My love of reading has too often become another way to stay busy rather than practice 'holy leisure.'

I took three books with me when I went backpacking last weekend.

When you’re a backpacking novice like me, every ounce in your backpack matters; after the first mile, you are ready to toss everything except maybe a water bottle and M&Ms to keep you going. My friend and I debated leaving part of the tent behind, and discussed the merits of toilet paper, but I never considered leaving my books behind. And if I had left them, I would have been reading the backs of our dried fruit packages when we stopped for breaks.

I love to read.

I read War and Peace on a dare when I was 15, read the backs of cereal boxes and shampoo containers when I eat and shower, and rarely leave the house without a book.

So I identify very much with journalist Bibi van der Zee, who decided to go “cold turkey” from books for a week, and wrote on her experience in The Guardian earlier this month:

I am usually reading three, sometimes four books, with a pile of books waiting in case I run out. I never leave the house without my book, and if I'm taking a train I'll usually have a back-up book in case I finish the first one. I'd rather read than do housework or laundry, and sometimes I'd rather read than talk to friends or husband or family.

Van der Zee went on her “book fast” because, she says, she often senses that "books are eating you up instead of the other way round.” I can identify. I try to read good literature, but even so, occasionally I find myself reading so much that I don’t stop to process what I’ve read. I read the last page of Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young and Handsome (a book I highly recommend) and proceeded on to an essay on terrorism I had been reading in The New Yorker.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:38 AM | Comments (4)

'Femivores' and Food Ethics

The trend toward locally grown, naturally raised food is giving some women more fulfilling lives than the workplace ever did.

If a daily trip to the vegetable patch to harvest vegetables and to the chicken coop to gather eggs means a woman is a femivore, then so be it, though I think the term is rather silly. Historically speaking, folks who did those things were just called "farmers," at least if they sold their produce or eggs. Otherwise, they were called "gardeners who kept chickens."

Every day I visit our hens, check their feed and water, and collect eggs. In the summer I freeze, can, and dry fruits and vegetables, and this year hope for a good honey harvest from the beehives. I never thought I was "radical" (see Shannon Hayes's 2010 book, Radical Homemakers). Rather, I’ve been inspired to live a little more like my grandmother did. I always admired her and her simple farmer’s life.

In last week's New York Times article “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” Peggy Orenstein describes the trend among educated women in the West to leave successful but unsatisfying careers to reconnect with nature by keeping bees and chickens and growing vegetables. While the term is a play off of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Orenstein uses femivore to describe women who are taking "the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove [them] into the work force in the first place," and applying them in the home.

Orenstein cites four women who gave up careers to build coops in their backyards, and she connects coop-building to the women’s search for meaning. We didn’t find it as homemakers in the 1950s, and we haven’t found it in a paycheck since. Orenstein thinks keeping chickens is another way women are searching for meaning; if they can be productive and connected to nature, life will be fulfilling. Yet she worries that the coop may become one more cage for women rather than a path toward meaning — one more expectation for women who want to have it all.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 2:20 PM | Comments (8)

Citing Modesty, Two Women Refuse Full-Body Scans

Pope Benedict and Muslim scholars have warned that the scanners — slated for major U.S. airports — violate principles of human dignity and chastity.

Two Muslim women boarding a plane in Manchester, England, last week became trailblazers in the debate over full-body scanners by refusing to undergo the scan, citing religious and medical restrictions. They forfeited their £400 airline tickets to Pakistan, as such scans became compulsory in the UK in February. The women are the first known passengers to refuse a scan under the new rule. Muslim scholars in the U.S. have already issued a fatwa against full-body scans as a violation of Islamic teaching on modesty.

More airports worldwide are installing full-body scanners after the Christmas Day bombing attempt by a Muslim Nigerian carrying explosives in his underwear on a Detroit-bound flight. The first round of 150 full-body scanners slated for major U.S. airports are being installed today in Boston’s Logan International Airport.

The Times (UK) reports that full-body scans give security staff detailed images of passengers’ nude bodies, which human rights groups decry as a “virtual strip search.” According to the Associated Press, the images are viewed in a private room and conceal passengers’ faces to protect identity. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has assured passengers that the scans are optional and that images are deleted. (This may not be true outside the U.S.; GetReligion’s Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes that one Indian celebrity has already said he received printed images of his nude body at Heathrow.)

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:12 AM | Comments (15)

Are Chick Flicks 'Emotional Porn'?

It depends on how you view them.

Nick Waters is your average Christian man who, in pursuit of becoming a better husband and person, did what some may consider extraordinary: he watched 30 chick flicks in 30 days. His blog project, which has picked up national media attention in the past few weeks, asks the question, “How far would you go to understand the opposite sex?”

With the help of his family, friends, and Internet strangers, he compiled a list of 30 films from the past three years and watched one each night leading up to Valentine’s Day, ending with a screening of Valentine’s Day on February 13. Each day he blogged his thoughts on the previous night’s selection, highlighting his observations on what the movie taught him about women. The blog is now becoming a book and has inspired many to take the “chick flick challenge.”

But do chick flicks really speak for women? Do we want them to? As Kate Harding at Broadsheet pointed out, only 11 of the 30 films were directed by women (though this is more than the 9 percent of female-directed films in 2008’s top 250). The state of chick flicks has been lamented by many — director Nora Ephron’s list of favorite romantic comedies included only one released since 1990 (Sense and Sensibility, a Jane Austen adaptation). There are few traditional chick flicks that I could actually point to as in some way reflective of how I think — particularly as a Christian woman, and the ways my faith convictions should shape my thinking on the stuff chick flicks are made of: relationships, marriage, and what makes a “happily ever after.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:34 AM | Comments (26)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:11 AM | Comments (10)

Why I'm Giving Up Counting Calories for Lent

The practice has led me to believe, erroneously, that thinness is a virtue.

As one of the 40 percent of Americans who makes New Year’s resolutions, in January I started going to a local gym three times a week. Wanting to stay active during Chicago’s long winter, I soon saw those lectures about the benefits of exercise from my dad — a former Marine with the health of a marathon runner — bear out. I felt energized and refreshed. I slept better. Stresses from the workday melted away as I jogged, stretched, and laughed out loud at Seinfeld reruns to boot. I found myself thanking God for making our bodies capable of tremendous strength and grace. Exercise became another facet of glorifying him.

For a while, at least.

Then the counting began. The gym is typical fare for Western-style health centers: an affordable private chain, it aims to make the gym experience personalized, pain-free, and highly measurable. For every step taken on the treadmill and every rotation on the elliptical, digitized numbers tell you how far, how long, how fast the pace and heartbeat, which body parts used, and, of course, how many calories gone.

For a Type A, task-oriented person like me, watching those burnt calories stack up felt like progress, like a sweaty checkmark of accomplishment. And it made me — who, medically speaking, does not need to lose weight and does not struggle with overeating — want to burn more calories each time, often with no “that’s enough” in sight. If the numbers ever stopped motivating, then copies of Shape, Women’s Health, and Self were readily available at the front desk to make sure I didn’t forget the goal.

Predictably, I began thinking in terms of caloric merits and demerits, as eating became a necessary (though, thankfully, usually enjoyable) activity that counteracted my gym achievements. Fixing brown rice and steamed vegetables for dinner was to keep on the straight and narrow; choosing the cupcake or brownie at a party was a failure of nerve and soul. The fitness-and-healthy-eating routine became a way to gauge my spiritual health — a way to congratulate myself for being a “good girl.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:44 AM | Comments (3)

Singing Praises in Port-au-Prince

Surprised by joy in the ruins of Haiti’s capital.

I had known this day would come. My husband, a pre-med student, had been planning a month-long trip to northern Uganda for a social medicine course, and January 12 was his departure date. I thought that would leave me spending the month at baby showers, coffee dates with friends, and with time to catch up on old movies that he never likes to watch.

What I didn’t know was that a 7.0-magnitude earthquake was about to crush Haiti and send me packing in the middle of the night to catch a January 13 flight to Port-au-Prince. I waved goodbye to my husband as I headed to the airport, while he packed his bags to catch his flight to Uganda that afternoon.

For three weeks, I worked side-by-side with Haitians and Americans who had come to help with relief efforts. As a disaster communications officer with World Vision, my task was to assist journalists who had flown in from around the world, helping them tell the stories of Haiti’s survival. A previous deployment to Thailand during the Myanmar cyclone and work with World Vision in Ghana and Haiti in 2009 had prepared me for long days, sleepless nights, and the challenge of working in close quarters with colleagues for long stretches with little rest. Precious sleep was usually on a cot in a sleeping bag; other colleagues were on the floor or in tents on the lawn.

But what we were living with — or without — paled in comparison to the needs of Haitians we worked with every day. Nearly all were grieving the loss of friends and loved ones and struggling to find food and water for their families. They were fearful of a future quake and of a future unknown in a country fraught with political corruption and abject poverty.

I remember one young man, Patrick, whom I met soon after arriving in Port-au-Prince. He was living in an abandoned football field–turned–makeshift camp near World Vision’s office. The sun beat down on families as they crowded underneath tarps and bedsheets stretched out over their heads. As our team approached to find out how we could help, Patrick spoke to me.

“I lost everything,” he said. “My wife, my children, my family. Please help me.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:24 AM | Comments (3)

Is Self-Promotion Sinful?

A lesson in soul care from J. D. Salinger, who lived in seclusion for a half-century.

J. D. Salinger, best known for his teen-angst novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), died last week at the age of 91 after living as a recluse for 50 years on his 90-acre compound in Cornish, New Hampshire. His death leaves the literati frothing at the mouth as they wait to see whether he left behind a treasure trove of manuscripts. Although Salinger never published another novel, he earned recognition for the collection Nine Stories and two compilations, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Shortly after publishing these, Salinger retired into a half-century of seclusion.

Though there were elements of Salinger's personal life that were reportedly unsavory, I believe we can learn from his efforts to spurn fame and self-promotion because they can lead to phoniness, something Salinger abhorred.

This time last year, through a series of events, I was encouraged to submit a manuscript for publication. The senior editor at the first publishing house said my writing was “like the best of the best” in my genre. That was a true confirmation of my calling. Here’s the rub: I didn’t make it past the marketing department. Although they esteemed my writing, I was a no name. They couldn’t take a risk on me, especially in hard economic times. I was dejected for a while, but, per the request of an editor at another publishing house, I sent it off. This time the senior editor told me that I was a good writer but that I “had to have an audience built up” before I wrote a book. In the publishing world, it’s called “having a platform.” Apparently my platform was not big enough.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:39 AM | Comments (15)

In Iran, a Covert Mission to Bring Women to Jesus

An excerpt from Forgotten Girls: Stories of Hope and Courage.

When Michele heard Naseem speak at a luncheon about her work in Iran, she knew immediately that this was a woman we needed to meet. Naseem had the stories we longed to hear. Naseem was gracious to us, but from the beginning she had a difficult time with our interview. She confessed as much: “You must not speak against anyone’s religion. It is not that I don’t want to tell you the stories. But how can I be certain you will not put anyone at risk?”

Naseem has good reason to fear. A quick Internet survey on Iran finds extremism and conditions that raise concerns for women and girls — actually, for everyone who lives there. Police sweep through Tehran, looking for anyone who appears “too Western.” Women must wear dark layers of loose-fitting clothes, and their hair must be entirely covered. Those who question or resist are arrested on the spot.

A peaceful gathering of women on International Women’s Day was met with the brutal arrests of 30 women in a park. After 17 years in operation, Zanan, a popular women’s magazine, was closed down because it was “corrupting the culture.” And just a month before this writing, a 22-year-old woman was sentenced to five years in prison for participating in an event called “One Million Signatures,” which supports greater rights for women. A female student who complained of sexual harassment by a senior male lecturer was also charged, despite the fact that YouTube postings show the woman’s fellow students with an audio recording of the lecturer sexually propositioning her. “Publicizing certain crimes is worse than the crimes themselves,” the local prosecutor claimed.

This is hard to understand from a Western viewpoint. But Iran is a theocratic republic, 98 percent Muslim, with a strict legal system based on sharia law. Sharia brings together elements from the Qur’an and the Hadith, a collection of the deeds and words of Muhammad, plus judges’ rulings from Islam’s first centuries. It also establishes such things as the inferior status of women. What Westerners are most familiar with is its penal code: the prescribed punishments for sexual offenses that include stoning; for theft that include amputation; for apostasy against Islam, for which the punishment is death.

It would seem that the sexual abuse and exploitation of girls is a huge contradiction in a culture that stones and hangs people for any hint of sexual impurity. “Not really,” Naseem said. “Girls are considered second-class citizens. Exploitation and repression actually fit right together.”

But things are changing in Iran, Naseem told us. Many educated women are pushing for change — carefully, but pushing nevertheless. Then she told us of a far more amazing change: “Many are also turning to Christ.”

///

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:32 AM | Comments (4)

Women at Halftime: Where to Go Next?

For many women, turning 50 means the best is yet to come.

Recently I was dining with a friend who, like me, works in the media. She is in her mid-40s and realizes that her days on the air are numbered. Putting aside the issue of why it’s acceptable for men in their 70s to be on the air but women over 50 are considered too old, she was grasping for ideas on how to reinvent herself so as to stay employed for another two decades.

She has reached success, but it’s ephemeral. She no sooner reached the top of her game than the game she was playing shut down. Nearly every week now she and I hear of someone in our field who’s moving on, retiring, or being forced to take a buyout.

My friend is in what author and Texas entrepreneur Bob Buford calls "halftime" — that period in your life when you switch from what you’ve done for the past 20 years to what you will do for the rest of your life. Call it self-renewal or the next big thing or refocusing. You begin asking what you want to be remembered for and what your epitaph would be. You think of all the things about your life that dissatisfy you and that, if you’re going to change them, you must do it now.

When I decided I wanted a child and that I would do whatever I had to do to get one, I spent my 47th birthday talking with a local adoption agency. Jobs don’t last, I figured, but people do. Three years later, I became a mom — one of the better decisions I’ve ever made.

A friend of mine decided to take a chance on a thrice-divorced — and repentant — man, and got married for the first time at age 54. She is as happy as a clam.

Famed rescuer Corrie Ten Boom was age 50 in 1942, the year her family became involved in the Dutch resistance and began hiding Jews in their Haarlem home. She spent most of her 54th year in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and in the years after that became known for her helpful advice on forgiveness. She was 79 when her most famous book, The Hiding Place, was published in 1971.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:59 AM | Comments (10)

Iris Robinson, Jesus Loves You More Than You Will Know

Speaking grace and truth into Ireland's sex scandal involving a born-again Christian woman.

Sex. Money. Power. Words that call to mind the recent debacles of Tiger Woods and David Letterman and a host of other celebrities before them. And now Iris Robinson — a self-described evangelical Christian and the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister (featured in the video below) — has made the news.

First, Robinson admitted to an affair with a 19-year-old boy. Then financial improprieties came to light. Robinson had secured political favors to benefit her lover’s business. The financial deals included kickbacks to line her own wallet. In the midst of it all, Robinson attempted suicide. And the fact that she has called homosexuals “an abomination” on public radio has not garnered her any public support or sympathy.

Robinson certainly does not stand alone as a prominent Christian caught in adultery. And the recent public events speak to a series of personal decisions that most likely started many years ago. It’s a story that recalls that of King David, deciding to stay home instead of going to war with his men. Power had allowed him to neglect his responsibilities as king. He became lazy. He surrounded himself with “yes men” who approved of whatever decisions he made, who were willing to summon the beautiful married woman from across the way and turn a blind eye as he invited her into his bedroom. That first decision to stay home from battle led to adultery led to pregnancy led to murder.

But finally, the prophet Nathan spoke up. And David repented. And the Lord forgave him. This story is recorded for us in both 2 Samuel and Psalm 51; it’s as if the Holy Spirit wanted to say, “Pay attention. This could happen to you. And here’s what you need to do if it does.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:18 AM | Comments (2)

Dr. Grace Augustine: Avatar's Christian Character?

Well, Christian-ish, anyway. Na'vi spirituality seems to mix pantheistic and monotheistic beliefs.

James Cameron, writer and director of Avatar and winner last night of the Golden Globe for Best Director, does not score points for subtlety. The guns are big and loud. The love story is predictable. And the names? There’s unobtanium, the element pursued by corporate bigwigs on earth. There’s Pandora, the name of the planet where the story unfolds, and an obvious sign that this story will not end well. There’s also Dr. Grace Augustine.

Grace, played by Sigourney Weaver, is the lead scientific researcher on Pandora. Her name suggests connections to the Christian faith, and yet the film doesn’t make them clearly. The first words we hear from Grace’s mouth are, “Where’s my cigarette?” She is brash and assertive, dismissive of Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine who will soon become the film’s hero. Jake and Grace both have avatars, which means they can enter a pod, fall asleep, and wake up inhabiting the body of one of the Na'vi, the natives of Pandora.

Grace is more “herself,” or at least more likable and free-spirited, in her Pandoran body. She smiles more. She revels in the foliage, in learning about the foreign ecosystem. In the past, she started a school for Na'vi children, who still flock to her side. And along the way, we get a glimpse of Grace’s understanding of Pandora’s spiritual dimension.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 9:31 AM | Comments (14)

Confession: I Stopped Giving to the Church

There's something psychologically important about writing a check and putting it in the plate.

I stopped tithing a few months ago. Okay, no scandal here. I got married in September, and my husband and I moved to a new area and wanted to find a church. As we slowly combined our finances, it became painful. (He’s a cheapskate, and I didn’t want him to see every pair of earrings I splurged on.)

Within a few months we found a church that we really liked for various reasons. As the new year approached, we resolved to streamline our finances. Eager to get in our giving before 2009 ended for tax purposes, we talked about back-tithing. We decided to tithe the four months we had been married, which felt like a lot of money. It was daunting to put the check in the offering plate and watch the money pulled from our bank account. I then vowed to talk with someone about having our tithing automatically deducted from our account so we wouldn’t think twice about it.

On one hand, you could argue, “It’s not your money to begin with, so pretend like you never had it.” On the other hand, there’s something psychological about physically writing a check and putting it in the brass plate. If we all paid our taxes once a year instead of having them automatically deducted from our paychecks each pay period, we would probably feel the pinch much more. I often wonder whether I should stop the deduction so I could invest the money during the year and then pay up later. (But that, of course, requires some self-control.)

The authors of Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, report that economist Milton Friedman came up with automatic tax withholding from employees’ paychecks. Americans weren’t paying their income taxes, as I would imagine it’s hard to remember to save up a huge chunk every year. Levitt and Dubner also write a lot about the importance of incentives: We need a really good reason to eat our vegetables (think Vitamin C) and to resist the temptation to speed (think a $100 ticket).

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 2:13 PM | Comments (20)

Police Arrest Woman Praying at Western Wall

Nofrat Frenkel's arrest exposes divisions within Jewish community about tradition and gender.

Last November, Israeli authorities arrested medical student and Women of the Wall (WOW) member Nofrat Frenkel for wearing a prayer shawl and holding a Torah at the Western Wall (Kotel), Judaism's most holy site. The first time a female worshiper has been arrested there, the event has prompted protests from many sides in an already tense debate in the Jewish community.

Founded in 1988, WOW believes devout Jewish women have the right to gather at the Kotel to pray, read the Torah, and wear religious clothing such as prayer shawls. Torah requires certain practices for men but does not prohibit women from those practices. Despite WOW's appeals to the Israeli government over the past two decades, its laws call for fining or jailing women who partake in these activities at the Kotel, which is segregated by sex.

WOW meets every month for Rosh Hodesh at the Kotel, as well as for other select holidays. Rosh Hodesh is a celebration of the new moon and is traditionally viewed as a women’s holiday. At WOW's December meeting, leader Anat Hoffman said the women wore scarf-like prayer shawls under their coats rather than traditional prayer shawls so that the garments wouldn’t upset other worshipers. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that the women went wearing prayer shawls and carrying scrolls in protest of Frenkel’s arrest, but that rain caused them to cover both items.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:24 AM | Comments (3)

Resolving to Fail in 2010

New Year's resolutions are great, if they point us to our absolute dependence on God's grace to change.

Goal-setting has never been one of my strong points. I consider myself a classic Type B personality, and have been content with a mantra that has served me well each New Year’s: “I resolve to not make any New Year’s resolutions." This year, however, I felt stirred to push myself out of my comfort zone and make some resolutions. But the three I came up with exist in thought only. Although they are manageable, I sense that as obstacles arise, I will mentally retract them.

Not keeping my resolutions would put me in good company; one bit of research shows that about 80 percent of all New Year’s resolutions are broken by January 31st. So what’s behind the inevitable failure that comes with resolving to change? Is success even an option?

A biblical look at change for the Christian is encouraging. Scripture teaches that not only is change possible, it is fundamental to the gospel message. Christ’s ministry was a call to move us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. In him we are transferred from death to life (Eph. 2:4-5), our heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh (Ezek. 36:26), we become friends of God instead of his enemies (John 15:15), and we are no longer slaves to sin but slaves to righteousness (Rom. 6:19). Given such radical changes on a spiritual level, why are changes on a smaller scale so seemingly impossible?

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 4:00 PM | Comments (3)

Dave Ramsey, Megan McArdle, and Jesus

The Atlantic blogger's new-found appreciation for the evangelical finance guru forgets his inspiration.

In my most recent Her.meneutics post — on the biblical dimensions of frugal living — I took issue with Atlantic “econoblogger” Megan McArdle’s New York Times review of Lauren Weber’s In CHEAP We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue. I didn’t care for the fact that McArdle detached evangelical finance guru Dave Ramsey’s advice from its biblical source when advocating his frugal living principles over Weber’s more ascetic values. Now McArdle has written a profile of Ramsey in the December issue of The Atlantic. She once again makes it clear that she appreciates Ramsey’s principles, but not so much his Jesus.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey noted at GetReligion that McArdle oddly compares Ramsey with a televangelist. A more substantive problem is that Ramsey’s “give 10 percent, save 15, get out of debt” advice sounds like it was lifted from the late Larry Burkett, whose Crown Financial Ministries rates a passing mention.

For those of us who came of age on the late 20th-century evangelical block, Burkett was John the Baptist compared to McArdle’s televangelist. His now-classic Your Finances in Changing Times was first published in 1975. And who can forget his 1991 tour de force, The Coming Economic Earthquake — a book whose veracity was diminished, in my mind, by Burkett's Y2K hysteria. Of this misstep, World magazine editor Joel Belz wrote last year: “It is appropriate — and maybe even necessary — to acknowledge that a prophet may have missed a relatively minor point or two just to enhance the essential nature of that person's central message.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:08 AM | Comments (7)

I Have a Confession to Make

Why online confession booths like FamilySecret and Post Secret take us only so far.

In support of her latest novel, Daisy Chain, Christian author Mary DeMuth launched Family Secrets, a website where users can anonymously confess their secrets to an online audience. DeMuth writes, "In Daisy Chain, many characters harbor secrets, but only a few are brave enough to bring them to the light of day and find freedom and hope. That's why I created this site — to give you a safe place to air a secret anonymously."

DeMuth's project picks up on a confessional trend made famous by PostSecret, a blog that posts submissions from its ongoing community mail art project, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. The blog, which boasts of attracting 284,343,252 visitors (and counting), has been turned into museum exhibits as well as five books, the most recent of which tackled the topic Confessions on Life, Death, and God. The idea is to rob the secrets of their powerful grip as writers identify, process, and share with others those things they are afraid to admit to themselves.

There’s a simple reason these blogs are so popular: We experience a rush as we recognize the pain and courage each entry represents, heightened when we find ourselves connecting with the confessions. “I thought I was the only one,” we marvel as we see our own hearts in the words of a stranger.

Confessing to others is good for our spirits and psyches. Often we evangelicals make light of it, thinking of it as “a Catholic thing” and insisting that God is the only one we need to confess to. But by doing this, we ignore not only the rich tradition of confession in church settings, but also the biblical command: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:45 AM | Comments (14)

This Is Your Brain on Evangelicalism

NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty's Princeton lecture last week revealed a woman highly ambivalent about evangelical spirituality.

In 1995, NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty was interviewing members of Saddleback Church for a Los Angeles Times Magazine article on why some churches grow and others don’t. She talked with a woman named Kathy Younge about her spiritual journey. Younge was suffering from recurrent melanoma, but she didn’t believe God was trying to kill her; she believed he was giving her a transcendent purpose. As Hagerty and Younge were talking, the journalist says, the air grew thick, moist, and warm, as if someone was breathing on them. She felt enveloped in a circle of light.

This is the story Hagerty opened with at a Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion lecture last week. She was there to discuss her most recent book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (which CT magazine reviewed this May). I was surprised to hear her validate evangelical faith so openly given that, as a regular attendee of the center’s lectures, I’m accustomed to hearing that faith's adherents talked about as if they were part of a carnival sideshow.

The experience presented Hagerty with a crisis. She says she was “spooked” and shut down the discussion quickly, but on the drive back to LA, she began asking herself questions: What happened? Was it a delusion? A chemical reaction? God?

The veteran journalist set out to answer some of these questions for herself, others like her, and her NPR listeners — most of whom, she said, aren’t members of the Southern Baptist Convention. In her research, she discovered that 51 percent of Americans say they’ve had a dramatic spiritual experience, but that 93 percent of National Academy of Science members don’t believe in God. “If 51 percent of Americans had schizophrenia, scientists would want to study it,” she concluded. She decided early on to include her own experience in the book, because, she said, journalists tend to be like anthropologists, treating their subjects as specimens. She wanted readers to know she was one of them.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:57 AM | Comments (33)

The Confusing Case of Caster Semenya

The South African runner may lose her gold medal after gender test results are released.

What might have been weeks of celebration have become ones of public scrutiny for Caster Semenya, the South African runner who won the women’s 800 meter final at the World Athletics Championship August 19. Due to Semanya’s 8-second gain over her time in 2008, as well as her masculine appearance, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) required the 18-year-old to take a gender verification test. Initial test results confirmed that the teenager has three times the normal levels of testosterone for women. Rumors swirled about Semenya’s head coach, Ekkart Arbeit — who was accused of giving female gymnasts steroids in the 1970s — and whether he had given Semenya similar treatments.

Now, a source close to the IAAF probe has told an Australian newspaper that the test showed that Semenya “had internal testes and no womb or ovaries,” calling her a hermaphrodite later in the report. (Medically speaking, the source is wrong: a hermaphrodite is someone who has simultaneously functioning male and female sex organs. Thomas Rogers at Broadsheet helpfully clarifies the differences between a number of rare intersex conditions.)

While the IAAF stated today that it will not release its findings — which could disqualify Semenya’s win — until November, media have already picked up on the hermaphrodite label. Semenya’s parents and other South Africans have responded angrily, not only because the test might strip Semenya of her gold medal and an athletic career, but because it has exposed Semenya to sexual humiliation and her family to shame. Whether or not Semenya is biologically female, she has understood herself to be a female her whole life — something Semenya asserted with jewelry, makeup, and trendy clothing in You! this week (pictured above). As she told the South African magazine, “I am who I am and I am proud of myself. God made me the way I am and I accept myself.”

How do Christians make sense of Semanya’s story?

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 2:38 PM | Comments (16)

Quest for a Father’s Love

Author Margot Starbuck talks about the universal need to be ‘seen, heard, known, and loved.’

In The Girl in the Orange Dress, Margot Starbuck chronicles her quest for her birth parents, for healing of physical and emotional pain, and for the unfailing love that is promised in Scripture, but which she had never felt.

Written with a light tone, the book contains episodes of outlandish behavior by its author—as she struggles through denial, insecurity, seminary, relationships, and an intense period of “seeking.” Alicia Cohn spoke with Starbuck about her book, which provides a personal encounter with the message that there is freedom in the love of Christ: freedom to be in health relationships, and freedom to be who he’s made each person to be.

What does it mean to be “heard, seen, known”?
At the end of Exodus chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3, when God’s people are suffering in Egypt, God says, “I see your suffering, I hear your cries, I know and I care.” Then God tells Moses to go do it, which kind of seems like a dirty trick. But as I began to look around the circle of people that God had put in my life, I became more and more convinced that that is exactly how God does it. God sees us, God cares about us, and God’s method is using human faces to liberate the oppressed, to seek justice, and to tell us the truth about who we are. God’s big plan is for a person to be a redeemer. Moses, my therapist, my friends, my husband function that way in [my] life. It feels as though that redemption was in the same pattern of God choosing to come as a person, in the person of Jesus Christ.

Is there a particular desire in women to be “heard, seen, known and loved” by a man?
If we haven’t yet received that in our bones from God, that is a burden to put on a man. When I was able to have that deep need met in God’s love for me, then I found that—not in a desperate way, but in a natural way—I would see in my husband’s face a reflection of some of the things that I longed to see in God’s face. He became kind of a human reflection of those.

How did you learn to deal with the tension between forming attachments and becoming clingy to people?

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 9:45 AM | Comments (1)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:07 AM | Comments (8)

So, How Are Those Summer Reading Lists Coming?

How to read the Bible in an age of anxiety; plus three book reviews from Christine A. Scheller.

With the end of summer in sight, your summer reading list is probably still untouched. If so, you are not alone. Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin wrote last week on “the lost art of reading,” in which he muses on his past as an avid lover of the printed word and wonders what happened to his craving for books.

Our attention-deficit-inducing era of video games, multi-tab browsers, and YouTube videos hasn’t been around that long. If you’re like Ulin, you might have grown up devouring books only to find yourself now reading this, wondering, When was the last time I didn’t have to remind myself to sit down and read? Ulin admits that “some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down,” and only then by forcing himself to stay focused. He writes:

Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Ulin raises another question when he writes, “There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago." When Ulin writes that “reading has become an act of meditation,” he is talking about text itself — any text. But as Christians, perhaps we ought to consider this as a matter of biblical importance. As Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and so is the Bible as the written revelation of him. How difficult is it for Christians in the digital age to sit still and allow the unchanging Word of God to permeate what Ulin calls “the buzz . . . a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age”? Or, as Ulin put it, “How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?”

Alicia Cohn is an intern at Christianity Today magazine. She has written previous blog posts for Her.meneutics on marriage in Florida, the Breast Cancer Bible, and The Stoning of Soraya M.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:59 AM | Comments (16)

The Urban Chicks Movement

Living out faith can include 'just food.'

"What are you building?" the cashier asked as we paid for several sheets of plywood and some 2×4s. When we told her she said, "a lot of people are building chicken coops this summer."

City ordinances are changing to allow for backyard chicken keeping. From Portland to New York City, ordinances are being revised, spelling out what will be allowed as cities respond to pressure from residents for permission to raise chickens. (See ordinances for information about your city.) Most cities prohibit roosters (this video shows why) and backyard slaughtering, and limit the number of hens allowed and the placement of coops near homes and property lines. Many prohibit backyard chickens altogether, though if neighbors don't complain residents raise them anyway.

Urban chickens were common in the 19th century, and helped supplement family diets and budgets during the Great Depression. While the current urban chicken movement did not emerge in response to economic woes, it may play a part in reshaping how we think about ourselves as consumers. The trend is part of a growing movement encouraging people to buy local or raise their own - whether beans and corn or eggs and honey.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:03 AM | Comments (8)

The Faith of Our Mothers

Surveying the countless women in history who lived audaciously for Christ, we have a tall order to fill.

This week is Vacation Bible School at our church, and my four-year-old daughter's first year in attendance. In a moment of questionable sanity, I volunteered to help out in the nursery, with my two-year-old and three-month-old sons in tow. Suffice it to say, it's been a very VBS-centric sort of week.

On the CD of VBS songs, there's a hip-hop rendition of "To God Be the Glory" that starts out with a funky beat and a suave voice chanting, Check it out now, to God be the glory! "I wonder what Fanny Crosby would think of this?" I asked my husband as we listened to the CD in the car on our way home from church.

"Why?" he asked.

"She wrote this song," I told him. "She wrote, like, a hundred hymns or something, I think. I read a biography about her when I was little."

When we got home, I looked up Fanny Crosby online and found that my memory was slightly off. Crosby actually wrote over 8,000 hymns during her lifetime, and is considered by some to be the most prolific hymnist in recorded history.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:07 AM | Comments (1)

When a Pro-Life Blogger Goes Too Far

The case of 'April's Mom' is less an indictment on the pro-life movement and more the story of a deeply pained woman.

Last Sunday night, a popular pro-life blogger known as "April's Mom" or "B" posted the tragic news: Her newborn daughter, whom she had carried to term though diagnosed with a terminal case of Trisomy 13 and HPE, had died hours after a difficult home birth. This marked the end of the nine-month journey she had shared with the world on her blog, Little One April, where she chronicled her struggles, pains, and hopes as she traveled the journey many would have ended after such devastating news. She wrote often of the centrality of her Christian faith and pro-life values to her decision and motivation, and filled her posts with Bible verses and Christian music. Her readers lauded her courage, prayed for God to save the baby, and sent gifts anticipating her arrival: a baby hat, a pair of little shoes, a hair bow, a crocheted blanket. Pro-life bloggers rallied around this embodiment of the cause, linking to the blog and adding "Pray for April Rose" buttons to their own.

It could have ended there, but "April's mom" decided to post a picture of the baby, a picture that was quickly identified by some readers as not a baby at all, but a "Reborn doll," a vinyl toy made to look like a real newborn. The entire story quickly unraveled; April's mom was actually 26-year-old social worker Rebecca Beushausen, a Chicago-area woman who had not been pregnant at all, though she had lost a child in 2005.

All that is left of the blog now is an apology - and a media mess. In her final post, Beushausen wrote, "I am a Christian and while I wrote many of my posts under dishonest contexts, the God I shared with all of you and wrote about is still God; the Creator or life, Father and Savior. I hope to regain my relationship back with Him, fully, myself." She went on to apologize for her actions - she never intended for anyone outside her immediate circle to find or read the blog - and to link readers to a site for families actually dealing with T13 pregnancies.

So why did this happen? Beushausen told the Chicago Tribune that "I've always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear. Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand. I didn't know how to stop. . . . One lie led to another." But there's no hiding on the Internet; though Beushausen scrambled to remove the blog, along with its accompanying Twitter and Facebook pages, when it became clear she had blown her cover, the details of her identity came spilling out over the blogosphere and then the national news over the course of a few days.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:25 AM | Comments (7)

The Downside of Hooking Up

The message of 'female sexual liberation' comes with a cost.

In 1980, Roger Ebert reviewed a coming-of-age movie called Little Darlings. The movie starred Tatum O'Neil and Kristy McNichol as summer campers who embark on a bet to see who can lose their virginity first. Kristy was taught by her mother that sex is nothing more than a biological function. About her on-screen deflowering, Ebert wrote this:

"It was not, of course, quite like she expected it to be. She sits quietly in a corner of a deserted summer cottage, her thoughts a million miles away from her teen-age boyfriend. At last she says, "I feel so lonely." The feelings implied in that single line are completely true to the scene and to the character. Kristy is lonely because she has suddenly and rather unhappily passed on from the ranks of pubescent girls. She is now an individual, possessed of the sometimes uncomfortable freedom to make decisions. Sexual intercourse, she tells the boy, "made me feel like you could see right through me." She slept with him for childish reasons, but now, we feel, she will never approach the decision so casually again."

That was nearly three decades ago.

Fast forward to June 2009. NPR reports the now-old news that young people are "hooking up" rather than dating. The reasons, according to "experts" cited in this article, include delayed marriage, fragmented lives that make young people skittish about intimacy, women's sexual empowerment, and social media.

Hooking up reportedly emerged in the 1960s and '70s out of the worst idea ever: co-ed campus housing. Back then it was called casual sex or one-night stands, which stilled carried a stigma, at least for women.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:20 AM | Comments (35)

Author Interview: Elissa Elliott

Her debut novel explores what the Book of Genesis would look like from the first woman's view.

Writers and artists have for centuries been using their imaginations to make the Creation and Fall accounts in Genesis come alive for readers. John Milton's Paradise Lost is the most epic and well-known example; others include Perelandra, the second installment of C. S. Lewis's space trilogy, and David Maine's provocative Fallen, from 2006. But what if the story of Adam and Eve were imagined from a - or the - woman's perspective? That's the question Elissa Elliott asks in her 2009 work of literary fiction, Eve: A Novel of the First Woman.

Elliott tells the Genesis story from the perspective of Eve and her three daughters, Naava, Aya, and Dara, who narrate the events of the summer leading up to Cain's murder of Abel. Although the women's voices vary in their believability, Eve's internal monologue as she lives out her curse (Gen. 3:16) adds depth to the sparsely outlined Genesis account. Elliott toys with possibilities, creating family rivalries and another, older civilization with which Eve's family collides to explain the motivation behind Cain's infamous murder. The result is a thought-provoking read.

Elliott, who spent two years at Biola University before receiving a degree in biology and an M.A. in education from UCLA, lives in Minnesota with her husband and child. Eve came out in January from Delacorte Press, and Books & Culture editor John Wilson gave Eve a mini-review here. Her.meneutics editor Ruth Moon sat down with Elliott recently to talk about her faith, women, and her debut novel.

What did you learn by writing from the perspective of Eve?

When I started writing the book, I thought I was going to redeem Eve. I thought I was going to pull her from the depths of obscurity and somehow raise her to a level of humanity. I came away with a more personal God who was concerned about me as a woman. He's been trying to talk to me but I cannot hear him, I cannot see him, and I get so obsessed with my everyday problems that I rant and I rave, but he's there for me.

The second thing is about women in general. Four years ago, I was co-teaching a married couples' Sunday school class that both my husband and I attended. On the days that I would teach, there were certain men who would leave the room and go sit in the café. Their wives would openly tell me they didn't want to be taught by a woman. I felt offended, not that they wouldn't want to hear me, but that they wouldn't want to hear a woman's perspective. So in writing [about] the women of the Bible, I wanted to give them a voice, I wanted to give them an avenue that perhaps God might speak through them.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

Is it a Sin to Nip and Tuck?

Cosmetic surgery may be one more manifestation of Paul's warning about self-improvement.

"Beauty often wins love. It just does," write Karen Lee-Thorp and Cynthia Hicks in Why Beauty Matters. No wonder women and, increasingly, men are willing to endure the pain and risk of elective cosmetic surgery to attain it. New York Times reporter Alex Kaczynski states it bluntly in her cosmetic surgery expose, Beauty Junkies. "In the end it all comes down to sex. . . . We are looking for love. And we will accept lust."

Few admit this with the aplomb of Cena Rasmussen, a former model who readily confesses that her cosmetic surgery addiction was fueled by the bliss of turning heads. By her own admission, Rasmussen has spent years looking in the mirror. Aesthetic surgery was a biannual ritual that continued for two decades. There were rhinoplasties, breast surgeries, lifts — eyes, face, neck — and non-surgical procedures as well.

Although she had medical complications along the way, her regimen ended with a hyalauronic acid peel in 1999 that burned the skin on her face so badly, it left her looking like a "freak of nature," she says. Since then, Rasmussen has had nothing but $4,000 worth of laser treatments to reduce the scarring. Still, she remains undaunted and is planning another facelift — her third, or is it the fourth? She can't recall.

Rasmussen may represent an extreme in the use of cosmetic surgery, but the trend saw no signs of slowing until the economic crisis. In 2006, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reported that Americans spent just under $12.2 billion on 11.5 million surgical and non-surgical procedures. That's a 446 percent increase from 1997. Surgical procedures increased by 98 percent, and nonsurgical procedures by 747 percent. Liposuction, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), and breast reduction were the top surgical procedures that year, while Botox injections, hyalauronic acid, laser hair removal, microderm-abrasion (skin peel), and laser skin resurfacing were the most popular non-surgical techniques.

So is it a sin to get a nip and tuck? It depends on whom you ask.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:33 AM | Comments (26)

The Matriarchal Blessing

Even without words, our oldest relatives have something important to tell us.

With Mother's Day just around the corner, I've been thinking about the matriarchal blessing - the moment when an old woman, staring death in the eye, communicates to a younger female relative or friend that life is good and love is eternal.

As far as I know, the only mention in the Bible of an older woman blessing a younger woman is when Elizabeth says to her young, unwed, pregnant relative Mary: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb" (Luke 1:42). Elizabeth probably wasn't the matriarch of her family, and she wasn't about to die, but her Spirit-inspired words were still similar to a matriarchal blessing. She welcomed the new life growing in Mary, and her loving hospitality surely must have given courage to the baffled young mother-to-be.

The more typical matriarchal blessing, however, is a deathbed event: think of Isaac blessing Esau and, inadvertently, Jacob; or Jacob blessing his own sons and grandsons.

"The last time I saw my mother alive was very, very special," my friend Kathleen told me. Her mother, who was 90 years old, had been declining from Alzheimer's disease for several years. "She was trying to talk about something but couldn't make words that were comprehensible, so she just decided to go to sleep. She must have napped for about a half hour. I stayed with her and held her hand. Her skin was so transparent that I wondered if she would die right then. But no. She woke up and squeezed my hand, and we had a chance to tell each other how much we loved each other. It was one of the best times I ever had with my mother."

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 7:00 AM | Comments (4)

Artist Profile: Anna Kocher

The Philadelphia painter finds 'gritty physicality' in motherhood and in faith.

Anna Kocher is an artist in the greater Philadelphia area whose work has been displayed at her alma mater, Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, the Center Art Gallery at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Church of the Good Samaritan, where she and her family attend.

In this interview with Elrena Evans, Anna talks about what it means to be a Christian and an artist, and how motherhood has impacted her work.

Where do your faith and your art intersect?

My faith and my art have both been a part of who I am as far back as I can remember. I always believed; I always drew. Both have changed and matured and gone through times of drought and times of abundance.

In high school and early college, I had this feeling that I should do something practical. . . . But when I decided to pursue art in college, I had this rare moment of clarity and knew that it was the right thing for me to do. I've been grateful for that moment of insight and find myself clinging to the memory when I start to feel like maybe I should have been an accountant or something. (For anyone who knows me, the idea of me as an accountant is laughable.)

You write on your website, "We live in a society obsessed with the material and ideal but terrified of true, gritty physicality." It strikes me that motherhood - pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and just the day-to-day experience of raising small children - is steeped in "gritty physicality."

[M]otherhood . . . strips away the facade in so many different areas. I always had a sense that life was fragile, though I don't think I dwelt on it much. People always talk about how miraculous infants are, which I always took to mean something about how amazing and precious they are. After actually having an infant (two, as a matter of fact), I would say that the miracle is that they stay alive at all. It seems to defy reason that this tiny, helpless creature with sporadic, phlegmy breathing who spews up strange substances and seems, at times, intent on refusing everything that would help it sustain itself (sleep, milk, socks) would grow and flourish and become an individual with thoughts and opinions (strong, strong opinions).

Motherhood also strips away illusions you hold about yourself. Physically, you get to know your own body in a very different way. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it's not always pretty. It is also very revealing in less tangible ways. You find yourself coming face to face with the deepest parts of yourself, which, again, are not always pleasant. . . . Somehow being a mother manages to be so much more joyful and beautiful than I could have imagined before, but also more painful and difficult than I could have anticipated. It's humbling to realize how one-dimensional my understanding of motherhood was before having children, and instructive to apply that insight to issues of faith and truth.

What is the role of a Christian artist? One of your paintings, for instance, shows a man sitting on a toilet - is there anything fundamentally Christian about that piece?

Continue reading "Artist Profile: Anna Kocher" »

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:37 AM | Comments (3)

Lynne Hybels: Beware! Dangerous Women

They might just step up and do something.

I'm not a numbers person, but I keep on my desk a list of percentages that shakes me every time I read it. Did you know that
? Seventy percent of the world's extremely poor are women?
? Almost 80 percent of all refugees are women and their kids?
? Every year, as many as 4 million women and children are sold for the sex trade or to work as slaves?

And consider this all-too-common scenario in the developing world. An unfaithful husband infects his wife with HIV. He leaves, and the young mother becomes sick with AIDS. While her sons continue going to school, her daughters stay home to care for the family. When the mother dies, her property is taken over by male relatives, and her children are taken in by some woman - often a grandmother so poor she can't provide necessities for her grandkids. Many such orphaned girls, uneducated and desperate, become prey for sugar daddies who promise food or education in exchange for sex. Many of these girls become infected with HIV, and the cycle continues. This helps explain another sad statistic: that worldwide, 60 percent of those infected with HIV are women.

I have been shocked to discover how many of the world's injustices disproportionately impact women and girls. Is there anything we can do about this? Is there any hope?

Let me answer with a true story. Barb, a young mother in my church, receives a letter from an organization caring for AIDS orphans in Zambia. She reads the letter to her grade-school son and daughter, and the kids decide they want to raise money for the orphans. Barb comes up with the idea of having a used toy sale, and she helps her kids organize it. All the children in the neighborhood drop off their gently used toys in Barb's garage and help put up signs throughout the community. On the appointed day, kids buy each other's toys, parents buy toys, strangers who saw the signs buy toys. By the day's end, the kids have raised $1,300 for orphans. The next year, they have another sale and raise even more.

Here's another story. The women's fellowship at a poor Nigerian church has an active membership of about 175 women, 90 of whom are widows. So the fellowship starts a "widow's bucket" project. Every time a woman prepares the main meal of the day, she measures out what her family would normally use, then removes a handful of the main ingredient, like rice, beans, or corn, and puts it in her widow's bucket. At the end of the month, she has a full bucket of grain to contribute to the widow's committee at church.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:46 AM | Comments (5)

Blog Comments and Christian Courtesy

Some otherwise loving believers could use a remedial course in table manners.

When my children learned to talk, they began evaluating my cooking. Their commentary involved words like "I hate fish," "Don't make me eat that," and the all-purpose "Yuck." After a year or two of this, we decided it was time to give lessons in civil discourse.

"If I serve something you don't like," I explained, "you may politely refuse it. A simple ?No, thank you' will do. But if you say you say bad things about the food or about the cook, or if you make unpleasant retching noises, you will have to eat it."

Intelligent children, they decided not to risk a simple, "No, thank you." Perhaps I would take offense at their tone of voice and they would be forced to ingest - heaven forbid - fish sticks! mushrooms! avocado! To guard against such evils, they developed an elaborate approach to food avoidance: "Oh, Mother dear, those mushrooms look scrumptious, but I fear I must decline . . . ".

Several years ago, in an article for the Los Angeles Times, Richard J. Mouw - president of Fuller Theological Seminary and one of the most civil people I know - noted that "the family meal is the primary workshop in civility." Perhaps churches should arrange remedial family meals for people who leave comments on blogs.

I love it when polite, well-brought-up people of opposing viewpoints disagree vigorously. Iron sharpens iron, and let the sparks fly! Mature people know how to do this respectfully. They treat their opponents with courtesy, as they would wish to be treated themselves.

According to Mouw, civility

requires us to show tact, moderation, refinement and good manners toward people who are different from us. But civility also has an inner side - the struggle to get beyond our own perceptions, to see fellow human beings as creatures made in God's image, no matter how defaced and damaged they may appear.

"Every human being is a work of divine art," he says. "I can learn a lot about how to treat an unlikable person with reverence if I keep reminding myself of the value the person has in the eyes of God."

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 4:53 PM | Comments (8)

An Apologetic for Ink

Why I got a second tattoo after the first one was a complete mess.

When I see a young woman with a tattoo, I cringe - not because I'm an old prude, but because I know from experience that she may well spend the next 20 years trying to hide it and/or many times its cost trying to get rid of it.

A 2008 Harris poll found that men and women get tattooed at nearly identical rates (15 percent vs. 13 percent respectively), but women report saying they feel sexier afterward (42 percent vs. 25 percent). Conversely, 42 percent of non-tattooed respondents said tattooed individuals are less attractive, less sexy (36 percent), less intelligent (31 percent), and more rebellious (57 percent).

This is the crux of my disdain, if not its visceral source: self-perception vs. communal perception. Those 30-60 percent of respondents with negative views may be biased, but they are also potential influencers whose opinions have the power to either limit or expand opportunities. With the barriers women face, why add unnecessary obstacles?

I got a tattoo on my ankle when I was 16. I wanted something small and feminine, but ended up with an unsightly four-inch mess. Over the past 20 years, I've covered the deformed spider lily with thick scar makeup, bandages, and slacks. When I've ignored it, others often haven't, wondering aloud what it's supposed to be. On my 40th birthday, my husband offered to pay for laser removal treatments. I gratefully accepted. After four $300 treatments, I'm left with a faded pastel skeleton of the original design, and an unwillingness to invest any further.

Why then would I get another tattoo?

Continue reading "An Apologetic for Ink" »

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:43 AM | Comments (11)

The Secret Life of Beekeepers

Beekeeping reminds me of the many tasks before me — and my dependence on others.

Four students came over yesterday to help "hive" our second package of bees. (That's beekeeper lingo for shaking bees out of a shoe-size box into a book-size box.) I'm learning the lingo fast, hoping it will give me confidence. When we learned last summer that the bee population was in decline, my husband, Mark, and I decided to become beekeepers. We spent the year reading, took a beekeeping class for beginners, built our brood frames and supers, and ordered our bees. Mark was out of town when the gentle but weary travelers arrived in Portland, so I hived Lucy, the first "package," to figure out how to do it. Amy, Hannah, Sara, and Allie, who have their own love affair with bees, came to watch and help hive Emma.

"The bee is more honored than other insects, not because she labors, but because she labors for others," said John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople. For Mark and me, beekeeping is less about the honey (though we will enjoy it), and more about preserving the pollinating labor of bees that yield us food. Hives have been hit with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). No one knows for sure what's causing it, but guesses include pesticides, genetically modified foods, effects from transporting bees across the country, cell phones, mites, and disease. The effect of CCD is being discussed in scientific journals, agricultural circles, on NPR, and in Congress.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:25 AM | Comments (7)

When Serving Makes You Sick

Popular blogger Anne Jackson witnessed hurting church leaders at an early age, when vitriolic attitudes invaded the churches her parents were pastoring. Years later, while working 70-hour weeks at a Midwest megachurch, she re-encountered that hurt — expressed in addictions, adultery, and depression — and knew she was called to remind leaders of the primary antidote for burnout: union with Christ. Her first book, Mad Church Disease: Overcoming the Burnout Epidemic (Zondervan, 2009), aims to do just that. CT assistant editor Katelyn Beaty interviewed Anne yesterday.

You grew up a pastor's daughter in Texas. What was your family's experience with burnout?

After my dad finished seminary, my younger brother and I were born, my mom had her tubes tied, and our family jumped into the world of ministry. We mainly pastored at smaller, rural churches in West Texas and at first, everything seemed perfect. [But] at my dad's third church, the politics started invading. I was only 9 at the time, but I could tell my normally involved, optimistic father was withdrawing. My mom wore her concern on her sleeve. I spied on a deacon's meeting and discovered the truth: Our church was full of a lot of mean and bitter people.
Three years later, the same ugly politics resurfaced. I was 16, and at a brutal business meeting, my dad was forced to resign. I stood up, confident in my teenage angst, and confronted the church [members] for their lack of unity. Storming out, I climbed a fire escape and wrote a letter to God, begging him to give me a way to help restore unity to the church.

We moved to Dallas a few months later, and I'd like to say everything has been great since. But almost 13 years later, my parents are still deeply hurt from the last experience. They have only recently started attending a church. . . . Their faith in the local church has yet to be rekindled. That kind of brokenness breaks my heart every day. It also propels me forward with a passion I can't begin to explain.

How do men and women experience church burnout differently?

As I've extensively researched and interviewed thousands of church leaders and their families over the last two years, [I've found] there isn't much difference. Burnout doesn't play favorites.

Sometimes the force behind our burnout may differ, though. Genesis 3 mentions how, after the Fall, men will be slaves to the earth (work) and women will be ruled over by men. I see how many times men chase ministry like it's their work — and find their purpose in what they do. Ultimately, that leads to burnout. And generally speaking, many women fall to the approval of man. We are people pleasers by nature, finding our worth and affirmation of our calling by being a slave to man — not God.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:30 AM | Comments (35)

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