Hermenuetics

Scared to Death of Death: Facing More Than Gramma’s Mortality

When my family moved my grandma cross-country to a nearby nursing home, I had no idea she would bring with her a reminder of irrevocable loss.

And Gramma makes three.

Almost.

Over a year ago, my mother and father moved across the country to live with my husband and me. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was supposed to come with them. But Gramma fell and broke her hip just before the move. She has not recovered enough to continue being cared for at home, as she had been before the fall. This meant being left behind by my parents when they relocated, much to my mother’s despair. But finally, months after my parents arrived, we were able to bring Gramma here—just not in accordance with our original plans. Instead of moving her to the room designed for her in the little home my husband built for my parents, we moved her to a nursing facility.

These events—waiting months for a space to open in the nursing home, followed by the nightmare of transporting across the country a frail 97-year-old woman in need of an airline-approved oxygen tank, an accompanying nurse, and proper identification documents (apparently, government agencies are not very sympathetic to the ways of the world a century ago, and those ways do not include the ubiquitous and standardized paperwork of today)—have given me a glimpse into recent headlines in my community predicting a shortage in services for the growing population of the elderly.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 8:58 AM | Comments (25)

Learning from Tim Tebow about Workplace Evangelism

Why we all could stand to do a bit more Tebowing around the office.

I can’t claim to be a football fan, but this season is the closest I’ve come to being one. This Saturday I’ll be glued to the playoff game between the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots, rooting for Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.

Last month, three Long Island students were suspended for "Tebowing" — mimicking Tebow's signature one-knee kneel — in the school hallways. According to the school, the sheer number of students who would mimic the move created "a safety hazard." This says a lot about Tebow’s status in pop culture, as does the fact that name-checking Tebow has become a common practice in contexts as diverse as GOP presidential debates to progressive talk radio.

But Tebow’s name is synonymous with more than just football (and stunning fourth-quarter wins). His signature move started as a bow to God. Tebow himself defines “Tebowing” as “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different.”

As Tebowing and Tebow himself have exploded into a nearly ubiquitous pop culture reference, he has attracted plenty of criticism, ranging from the ignorant to the outrageous, with conclusions about the larger meaning of the phenomenon ranging from bullying to unwise to maddening to sacrilegious.

I had a totally different reaction to the Tebow phenomenon: conviction.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:46 PM | Comments (32)

Sitting in the Dark, Waiting for Emmanuel

Instead of fixing people's pain, maybe the most Christian act of love is to sit beside them, and wait.

A few months ago, my friend Stephanie’s grandma was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In spite of brain surgery and chemotherapy, the tumor has grown, and her grandma is now on hospice. When I had coffee with Stephanie recently, I asked her when she’d seen her grandma last. She told me it had been a few weeks. She said it was too overwhelming to see her grandma suffering and not be able to intervene.

“I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything,” she said. “What do you think?”

I have not faced anything as serious as what Stephanie’s family is going through, but I’ve had similar questions about a family of Somali refugees I’ve been working with here in Portland. Sometimes I’m encouraged by how far they’ve come, and other times I’m discouraged by how far they still have to go. Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed, I avoid visiting the family because it’s too difficult to engage in a problem that I cannot solve completely.

And then I think about something my mom likes to say, that God made us human beings, not human doers. Life is about who we are being and who we are becoming, not so much about what we are able to accomplish.

The more I’ve worked with the refugee family, the more I’ve learned that not only do I need to be as an individual; I need to learn how to be with others—not to fix or change or cure them, but to be with them where they are.

So when Stephanie asked me what I thought she should do, I told her, “Your grandma doesn’t need you to cure her. She needs you to be with her. She needs you to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, holding her hand.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:43 AM | Comments (14)

Birth Pangs: When God Shows Up in Pregnancy

In her new book, minister and mother Sarah Jobe says God is present precisely in the "grossest" moments of pregnancy.

Last week I went to Johnsen & Taylor Inspirational Books and Gifts to listen to five women authors from the Redbud Writers Guild present "Women and Writing: The Importance of Using Your Voice for Christ's Kingdom." After the lively discussion, I wandered through the store looking at book jackets. Most of the books, all aimed at evangelical readers, were written by men. Most of the shoppers in the store were women.

I suppose some men feel less queasy about walking through displays of fluffy angels and inspirational wall plaques if they know that stacks of books by male authors await them in the back of the store, though few men were there that evening. I believe that men - and women, too - can learn a lot from male authors. On the other hand, I also believe that men - and women, too - can learn a lot from female authors. And I know that there are things that simply can't be said unless a woman says them.

Sarah Jobe is saying some of those woman things.

Creating with God: The Holy Confusing Blessedness of Pregnancy (Paraclete) isn't an obvious reading choice for a 63-year-old grandmother, but I picked it up anyway - and was almost immediately laughing out loud. "This book is an attempt to name how pregnant women are co-creators with God at precisely the moment in which we are pooping on the delivery table," Jobe writes in the author's note. "I will claim that pregnant women are the image of Jesus among us not in spite of varicose veins but because of them."

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:40 AM | Comments (6)

Should Christians Take Antidepressants?

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 5:04 PM | Comments (114)

Advent: Putting the Brakes on Christmas Insanity

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:22 AM | Comments (11)

Grumble Hallelujah on the Kitchen Floor

Why lamenting needs to be part of our Christian lives and our churchy conversations.

As I lay on the kitchen floor — my body rocking with sobs, my mouth telling my husband, “I hate my life”— it never occurred to me to pick up the phone and call a friend. To tell someone that the life I was living, in which rug after rug kept getting pulled out from under me over the past few years — my parents divorced, my husband’s business tanked, our debt rose, health issues loomed, and our marriage sagged under the weight of it all — was nothing as it was supposed to be.

In fact, I was mortified when my husband rounded the bend and saw me there. Crying and hurting is something I do best alone.

So I was surprised to find Amy Dickinson write this in her 2010 memoir of life as a single mom, The Mighty Queens of Freeville: “I wanted two things when I first learned that my marriage was ending. First, I wanted it not to end. And second, I wanted for others to share a complete and interior knowledge of my heartbreak, followed by demonstrable grief.”

Is that true? I wondered. Are there people whose first inclination amid heartbreak is to tell others? In person?

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 10:07 AM | Comments (15)

Why I No Longer Pray for a Husband

Lessons in longing, hunger, and trust.

Could fasting and prayer ever be a kind of sin? That was more or less the implication of one person’s response to the news that I had joined a group who weekly fast and pray about marriage and singleness. (And yes, we’re mostly female and mostly single.)

Perhaps it seemed like I’d committed myself to asking for a husband each Monday, that I’d found a spiritual guise in which to obsess about singleness and pester God to change things. But here’s why I don’t think we’re a bunch of women trying to apply The Prayer of Jabez to our love lives.

My first encounter with the fasting-and-prayer group came in summer 2008, a few months after my memoir of reluctant chastity was released. The book had begun as a blog, launched in summer 2004, when I was an angry Christian single woman, committed to serving God but struggling with deep doubts that he was really good enough to be trusted with my love life. By the time that four-year writing project concluded, I had discovered a far deeper intimacy with God, but was as single as ever and staring down my 30s. With the book done, I didn’t want to lose hope in God or drift away from trusting him with that part of my life, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Then a friend forwarded me an e-mail. A small group of people across the country, plus a few outside the States, were fasting and praying each Monday for God to bring marriages to those who desired them, to change and heal men in the ways they needed (but especially around their willingness to commit) and to do the same for women in the areas where we were most broken. To participate, I just had to sign up to receive the weekly e-mail meditations, skip at least one meal on Mondays (though other kinds of abstention were also possible), and pray. I joined them.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:46 AM | Comments (39)

Real, Authentic Authenticity

It's an attribute that disappears as soon as it's intentionally sought.

The top-read Her.meneutics post of all time was Karen Swallow Prior’s “Doing Authentic Ministry with My Smokin’ Hot Bride,” published this July. To avoid misleading any church planters who might read the piece in earnest, the subtitle helpfully clarified that the post was a list of “the worst ever Christian clichés.”

Among the greatest offenders was the overused virtue of authenticity. Listed under “Cliché Category #2: Good Words Gone Bad,” it elicited quite a few “Amens” from readers.

Christians are not alone in their over-usage. Last week The New York Times featured a segment titled “Authentic? Get Real,” in which reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom highlighted the popularity of authenticity as a self-descriptor among politicians and television personalities. Everyone from Michele Bachmann (“I’m a real person”) to Anderson Cooper (“I’ve always tried to just be authentic and real”) has touted their authenticity, often citing the attribute as the secret to their success.

Politicians are not alone. Rosenbloom noted that “legions of marketers and social networking coaches are preaching that to succeed online — on Twitter, Facebook, Match.com — we must all ‘be authentic!’ A proposed panel at next year’s South by Southwest interactive conference promises to teach attendees ‘how to be authentic and human without embarrassing yourself.’”

The truth is, Rosenbloom’s piece just as well described Christians as those outside the church. And to the extent that our society values “being real,” authenticity is near to becoming a core American ethic.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:10 AM | Comments (16)

Welcoming Doubt to Christian Education

Reflections on the Cardus Education Survey from a department chair at the world's largest evangelical university.

I started school at age 5 and never left once. My formal education was entirely secular: public schools, then a private college, followed by graduate school at a state university. My teaching career began in Sunday school, continued in a business school, then two Catholic colleges, a state university, a Christian secondary school, a women’s college, and an evangelical university. I even served a six-year sentence as a high-school principal. I am no mercenary: in matters of education, I don’t believe one size fits all. Still, ideas have consequences, and the ideas that undergird a philosophy of education will bear their fruit.

So the results of the Cardus Education Survey, published in August, intrigued me, to say the least. The survey is touted as the largest known representative study in North America examining education’s long-term effects on students now aged 23-40 who represent various kinds of schooling: Catholic, non-religious private, religious home school, conservative Protestant, and public. The findings are fascinating and surprising.

One major finding is that the students from conservative Protestant schools were least likely to be involved in politics. Another is that the students from religious homeschools were the most likely to get divorced. Given that a primary focus of conservative Christianity over the past several decades has been political activism and family values, these findings are striking.

Because I’ve spent the past 20 years teaching in institutions aligned with these interests, the results hit home. Yet long before this survey, I was troubled by similar trends among some of my own students: More often than not, the students who’ve expressed to me the deepest doubts about the tenets of conservative Christianity, its social and political positions, and even the faith itself, had once been among the most committed.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:43 AM | Comments (121)

The Sin Behind My Swearing

Cussing out the didgeridoo in front of 5 kids only illuminated a bigger problem.

In my defense, it hadn't been a good afternoon.

My 6-year-old had a friend over, so I was watching five kids instead of the usual four. My 4-year-old was crying because the game he wanted to play on the computer wasn't working, my 3-month-old was crying because she wanted to nurse, and I was crying because it was Friday, my husband was late from work, and I had mastitis and a fever of 102.

Then my 2-year-old got his arm stuck in my husband's didgeridoo. The better part of an hour later, his arm was still stuck and the proverbial end of my rope was fraying fast. I was carrying him around with his arm wedged into a four-foot-long wooden cylinder, trying to reassure him that Mommy was going to find a way get him unstuck. Instead, Mommy came unstuck.

The word I yelled in the direction of the didgeridoo is one I won't bother to repeat. Suffice it to say that it did not pass the Philippians 4:8 test. As soon as the word passed my lips, I looked at my wide-eyed 2-year-old and knew I was going to hear that word again.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:20 AM | Comments (25)

Would Jesus Walk Away from a Mortgage?

Reflections from an underwater home owner.

My husband and I have joked that our 2006 purchase of a townhome in a blue-collar suburb of Chicago must have been the single transaction that popped the housing price bubble in America. Within weeks after we signed the papers, the housing market began a historic slide that hasn’t yet hit bottom.

We paid $193,000 for our property. Today, it is worth $101,000 – if we could find a buyer for it. We are now so underwater on our mortgage, I see coral reefs every time I write a mortgage check. If housing prices stopped declining today and prices began to appreciate 5 percent a year, it would take more than 13 years for the price of our house to climb back to the price we paid for it. Those calculations are far rosier than the cold reality that at middle age, we probably won’t live long enough to see the prices return to the numbers we paid in the good old bubble days of 2006.

Eighty percent of the homes on the market in our town are foreclosures. We find ourselves wondering if we could simply walk away from this bad investment. If only it were as easy as dumping a bum stock and writing off the loss.

More and more people have decided that it is. Earlier this year, CBS’s 60 Minutes highlighted the growing trend toward strategic default. Last year, nearly 11 million Americans were underwater on their mortgages. That’s a whole lot of potential walkaways.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:52 AM | Comments (39)

Should Christians Pursue External Beauty?

A controversial Psychology Today article arguing that black women are less attractive than others got me thinking about real beauty.

Give beauty back,
beauty, beauty, beauty,
back to God,
beauty's self and beauty's giver.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.”)

“Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

That's the title of a recent (and promptly removed) Psychology Today online article by London School of Economics psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa. It should be a dead giveaway that the content to follow will be nonsense. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out. Kanazawa rated survey responses from the Add Health project, a somewhat select questionnaire completed by a small pool of participants. He concluded that black women are “objectively less physically attractive than white, Asian or Native American women.” Kanazawa added, “The only thing I can think of that might explain the lower average physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races . . . .”

The public and journalistic uproar has died down. I’m sure Psychology Today has since had some interesting staff meetings. Naturally, I am tempted to cite the litany of painstakingly beautiful black women. But responding this way would be moot, suggesting the premise of the “scientific study” is legitimate discourse. Still, I have found myself reflecting on some deeper concerns it gets to, besides issues of racism that most critics have noted.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 2:32 PM | Comments (22)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:44 AM | Comments (11)

A Backyard Garden of Grace

When our family decided to buy only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade, little did we know how our garden would change us.

A move to Spokane, Washington, in the summer of 2004 brought many expected changes to our young family of four. There was a new call to pastor a congregation, new schools, a new house. But our home’s ready-to-harvest vegetable garden came as one of our biggest surprises. Little did we know, as we tentatively plucked tomatoes and snapped green beans off the vine for the first time in our lives, that this little inherited garden would bring the most change.

Before then, I had never seen homeowners mow their lawn or trim their trees, let alone harvest a backyard bounty of zucchini. For my husband, Craig, a lowly rhubarb plant provided his lone agrarian experience growing up in the Seattle suburbs. Like many in our Gen X generation, we grew up far removed from farming and agriculture, but since our first accidental harvest, we have joined a growing movement of backyard farmers.

A combination of recession economics and interest in "green" living has led to unprecedented growth in vegetable garden seed sales in recent years. Home Depot has named “Growing Your Own Food” one of its three gardening trends for 2011. "Edible landscaping" is a new catchphrase as we enter the heat of a new growing season. As a pastor and a Christian, I’ve come to see this move toward gardening as not only a step toward health and sustainability, but also as fertile ground for spiritual formation.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:05 AM | Comments (8)

Why 'Happy' Isn't a Christian Word

How to practice hope during the happiest season of the Christian year.

Last spring The Intelligent Life, a journal published by The Economist, ran an article claiming that Americans are overall an “unhappy lot.” Two years ago, The New York Times published “Liberated and Unhappy,” about the diminishing degree of happiness among American women (Her.meneutics weighed in too). And recently I stumbled across the website for The Happiness Project, a book by Gretchen Rubin that shot to number two on the NYT bestseller list within its first week of publication last year. I am still dizzy from the swirl of quotes and tips on the website about how to pursue happiness and join in on booming nationwide happiness-projects. The amount of literature being penned on happiness suggests that as a culture we want to believe that happiness is something we can will and achieve, and that it is our inalienable right and our due. At times, I too am guilty as charged.

I cannot help reflecting on our cultural obsession with happiness against the backdrop of Easter, these 50 days of invitation to dwell in the reality of resurrection. If the church could claim to have an official “happy season,” this would be it. Christ is risen. New life is possible in all circumstances. But, instead of the temptation to appropriate a Christian interpretation of a cultural phenomenon, perhaps the real place to begin is to consider that happiness may not be a word in our Christian vocabulary.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:11 AM | Comments (16)

Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn, and Power

Why power is so often spiritual poison.

American news outlets have been aflutter with conversations and questions about the messy relationship between power and sex, catalyzed by the coinciding revelations about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sexual indiscretions. Although the two cases are categorically different — Strauss-Kahn is accused of assaulting a hotel maid, whereas Schwarzenegger’s misdeeds, though morally repugnant, are nevertheless legal — both men compel us to look closely at the potentially combustible mix of sex and power.

Sadly, Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger are only two of many powerful men to come before them. Following the likes of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards, Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger perpetuate a sick pattern in which powerful men live as though the rules don’t apply to them. Given this trend, cultural analysts have been asking two key questions. First, what is the cause of this pattern? Why are so many men in power sexual cads? And second, how should we classify these sexual relationships between powerful men and powerless women? When a woman is economically or socially dependent on a man, is the relationship every truly consensual?

On a recent episode of NPR's On Point, Time magazine executive editor Nancy Gibbs responded to these questions by citing a new study on the effects of power in a business setting. According to the yet-to-be-released study, “The higher they rose, men or women, the more likely they were to consider or commit adultery." Social scientists theorize that this trend could be due, in part, to increased opportunity, but they also suspect power breeds a particularly blinding arrogance that borders on entitlement.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:45 AM | Comments (20)

A Christian Woman's Midlife Crisis

With the guidance of older, wiser mentors, women can face the existential angst of midlife hoping for a new identity in Christ, one stripped of status and comfort.

When we flipped our new calendars to January 1, 2011, the first wave of baby boomers began turning 65. According to the Pew Research Center, every single day for the next nineteen years, ten thousand more will join them.

As psychologist Vivian Diller recently noted, midlife is being redefined by the boomers who are now marking their passage through this life stage. Twentieth century notions of aging and retirement are being challenged by a combination of generational preference and financial necessity. The fastest growing demographic enrolling in seminaries are people over 50.

Even with the boomer propensity toward reinvention, there is no way to re-brand (or circumvent) the spiritual crisis that happens at midlife as we move from the ambitions that forge the first half of our lives to our search for meaning in the second half. As author Dale Hanson Bourke noted at Her.meneutics last summer, “Few decisions made in our second stage of life represent a natural progression toward what has been built in the first half of life. It’s as if we have to completely turn our backs on our first-half identities in order to invest fully in our second callings.”

This is not an abstract question for me as a woman born at the tail end of the boom. My age-peers are asking a lot of hard questions these days, best captured in a conversation I had with a friend not long ago. Kim invited me to follow her into her youngest son’s now-vacant bedroom as she searched an item I’d loaned her in a forgotten corner of the closet. As we stood in the empty space, she said wistfully, “I was prepared for the nest to empty. I am busy with work and church responsibilities. But I’m stuck. I feel I’ve stalled out spiritually. To tell you the truth, I think I was there long before Tyler started packing. I feel as empty as this room, and it scares the heck out of me.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:46 AM | Comments (18)

The Praying Pedestrian: A Lenten Discipline

How praying for my neighborhood changed it (part 1 of a 2-part series).

In the nondenominational Bible churches of my youth, Lent was considered a "Catholic thing." But as I’ve attended PCA churches in my adulthood, I’ve gained appreciation for the church calendar and, in particular, this pre-Easter season of penitence. Observing Lent can include forgoing habits or foods, but it’s also a time of adding something, such as a spiritual discipline.

For me, the discipline tied to my richest seasons of spiritual life has been prayer-walking.

I was properly introduced to prayer-walking during a visit to a friend’s small California church in a cliff-side community of surfers and artists. For a few years they had walked the entire town every few months, taking a calendar or gift to each house where the owners welcomed them, and praying over every residence. I happened to visit the week of their quarterly prayer walk, and joined them in praying a verse for each house in the few blocks my partner and I were assigned to.

Ours was ordinary work, and it was hard to see how so few words could accomplish much. Yet my friends believed their prayers had gradually increased the community’s spiritual receptiveness. And when I thought back to my most scarring stab at "spiritual work," on a summer evangelistic project, I noticed it was marked by a striking absence of prayer.

Once back home in Brooklyn, I started to realize how little compassion I had for my actual neighbors. One day, when I was walking home from praying for my own needs, I started to look at the street around me. I noticed more clues to the neighborhood's health than I expected. After a few days, I committed to pray for one particular block on my route to and from the Subway. Before long, the short prayer became such an entrenched habit that taking an alternative route became unthinkable.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:00 AM | Comments (18)

Should Christians Use Self-Help Programs?

Many programs teach self-love and self-compassion as a path to inner peace. What is the gospel response?

We were staying with friends, and I was getting ready for the day in their daughter’s bathroom. It was a typical tween-age space: cute stickers and sayings posted to the mirror, hair products and cotton balls and drugstore makeup on the shelf. A quote on the mirror caught my eye: “I’m Third.” It came from Kanakuk, a Christian sports camp in Missouri. In smaller print, I found an explanation: “God first. Others second. I’m third.”

Something about the quote struck me as off. I knew it came from the Bible. When the teachers of the law ask Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” he responds, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself' ” (Matt. 22:37-38). I assume the Kanakuk saying intends to echo Jesus, yet the Bible states the command in a less hierarchical manner. Love of God remains at the top of the list, but love of neighbor and self are inextricably related. In fact, Jesus' command implies that we will know how to love our neighbor only if we properly love ourselves.

I remembered that Kanakuk saying upon reading two recent articles about self-help. In the first, “Change We Can (Almost) Believe In,” Time reporter Nathan Thornburgh describes his quest for personal wholeness at the Landmark Forum, “one of the country’s largest personal-development workshops,” and later through yoga. Thornburgh, who went feeling disappointed "about myself and my default noir outlook on life," said he walked away "increasingly curious about the vast number of people in the midrange of the self-help spectrum: the enthusiastic brigades of the transformists and yogis and New Agers who embrace change as a call to action."

The second, “Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges,” from The New York Times's Tara Parker-Pope, discusses new research surrounding “self-compassion,” or “how kindly people view themselves.” Parker-Pope covers the research of Kristin Neff, a Texas-based professor of human development, who says that "most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be."

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:56 AM | Comments (19)

The Divine Grace of Diapers and Dirty Laundry

A harried mother of three rediscovers Kathleen Norris's classic The Quotidian Mysteries.

I sat in the chair with a sleeping baby on my lap. I held her close, and I prayed. I prayed about the things I wanted to be doing — responding to e-mail, taking a shower, writing an essay. And I admitted my fears to God: Those things feel so much more important than this. Yet I saw the lie I was succumbing to, and I looked once more at my daughter’s round face, and I prayed that I would have faith in the importance of holding my child.

It takes faith to be a parent. It takes faith for me to care for our three children day after day. It takes faith to believe that this 30-minute episode of crying, or this midnight, bleary-eyed feeding, or this time-out for hitting your sister, or this poopy diaper — that these will bear fruit. That they matter, and even eternally.

In the midst of dirty clothes and unmade beds and the daily scramble to get food on the table, I remembered a little book I read a few years ago. As I nursed our daughter, I re-read Kathleen Norris's The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work. The book itself is relatively old — published in 1998 after Norris gave the Madaleva Lectures at St. Mary's College in Indiana — but the contents are timeless.

Its epigraph offers a definition: “Quotidian: occurring every day; belonging to every day; commonplace, ordinary.” My life right now feels very ordinary and very repetitive. I am tethered to a child who needs to eat every three hours, who relies on me as her sole source of nourishment. And it is easy to believe that the quotidian stuff of life is the meaningless stuff, the stuff that gets done only to be taken up again, the stuff that gets in the way of “real” work or play.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:26 AM | Comments (8)

The Charlie Sheen Has Worn Off

This Lent, given the disturbed actor's slow self-wrecking, I'd like to fast from celebrity news.

For the past few months, Charlie Sheen has given our distraction-hungry culture a particularly delectable snack. “Hey look over here!” he grins. His grandiose, self-delusional bragging, his unapologetic hedonism, and his remarkable ability — whether it’s a result of mental illness, years of heavy drug use, that “Adonis DNA,” or a combination of the three — to call the broken parts of his life whole is stunning.

“Winning!”

The disturbed actor has been offering us the intimate details of his life on a plate, and we’ve been grabbing them by the handful, wolfing them down, and licking our fingers in expectation for the next course. But, after a few weeks of noshing on Charlie’s braggadocio and the perverse details of his life, the novelty of it is — forgive me — losing its sheen. We’re sick of hearing about him, but no worries: there’s an app for that.

Our culture wipes its mouth with the back of its hand and glances absentmindedly around the room. What’s next, we wonder. We want a new distraction.

Well, we could divert our gaze toward the April wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The Internet buzz gets louder and we turn our heads toward important questions such as: Is the bride-to-be getting too skinny? Could she be pregnant? How does she compare with her fiancé’s iconic mother. Hmm . . . like Princess Diana, Middleton 29, is admired as a fashion icon, commits herself to charitable causes, and, of course, is adored by William. But is she a mere “commoner?” (Was Diana? What does that mean, anyway?)

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

Why Your Church Needs a Dr. Oz

Fitness programs like the one launched at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church rightfully teach us that exercise and healthy eating are not spiritually 'neutral.'

Where do you exercise? Your basement? Your backyard? Your gym? Your church?

Browsing the list of weekly programs offered at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, fitness classes and weight-loss support groups are now listed alongside baptism and leadership training classes.

Warren made headlines last month when he announced his New Year’s resolution: to lose a whopping 90 pounds in 2011. Warren is certainly not alone in his goal: Every January, millions of people pledge to lose weight, get in shape, and eat healthier, and evangelical Christians have long used Christ-based fitness programs, like Gwen Shamblin’s The Weigh Down Diet and Jordan Rubin’s The Maker’s Diet, in their personal routines.

What make Warren's announcement headline-worthy was the significant commitment of his church’s time and resources to pursuing health and fitness, in the form of what he calls “the Daniel Plan: God’s Prescription for Your Health.” Developed specifically for Saddleback by Dr. Daniel Amen, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Mehmet Oz (Oprah’s health guru), the Daniel Plan, Warren says, is a “healthy lifestyle program including a six-week small group study, an online profile you will create on this Website that will help you track your progress, monthly Webcasts with me interviewing leading health experts, an optional healthy choice menu, and new outdoor fitness equipment set-up on the Lake Forest campus.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 4:52 PM | Comments (38)

Facebook Envy on Valentine's Day

Social media have given single people one more way to be reminded of what they don't have.

It’s Valentine’s Day: the day of flowers, candy, and candlelit dinners, that is, for those fortunate enough to be part of a happy couple. For others, Valentine’s Day can bring on a few twinges — of loneliness, pain, envy, resentment, or some combination thereof.

But things have changed a little in recent years. I don’t mean that lonely people no longer feel those twinges. What I mean is that now they get opportunities to feel them all year round.

An article in The Washington Post talks about the concept of “Facebook envy," that feeling that can ambush a person when scrolling through status updates and seeing happy announcements or reflections. According to reporter Ian Shapira, this is a rapidly growing phenomenon.

There's no shortage of people who feel pain while scrolling through Facebook: Chronically single people may envy friends' wedding pictures, for instance, and those who've lost a spouse can feel overwhelmed by friends' wedding anniversary announcements. Infertile couples say they protect themselves by hiding most, if not all, Facebook posts from pregnant friends who can't resist hitting the site's "Share" button to show off, say, the latest in maternity ware.

Staffers at Shady Grove Fertility, a large provider of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments in Montgomery County, said more and more patients talk about Facebook envy during consultations. . . .

At the McLean-based National Infertility Association, executive director Barbara Collura said many couples cannot fathom why friends post so frequently about their pregnancies. "What you're hearing in the infertile world about their pregnant friends on Facebook is: 'My God, they're obsessed. There's no filter.' "

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:35 AM | Comments (31)

The No-Makeup Spiritual Discipline

Why going out in public without mascara and blush is an act of Christian discipleship (for me, anyway).

About a week before Christmas, I decided to join my husband’s family for an entire day of shopping. I got ready for the day with my usual routine of showering, blow-drying my hair, and picking out an outfit, but there was one difference: I left the house without an ounce of makeup on my face.

“Today I am going out without makeup on as an act of Christian discipleship!” I announced to my in-laws upon entering the living room. My confidence flagged, however, as soon as I walked in the first store. I vainly wanted to tell the salespeople, “I don’t normally look like this” — as if they were concerned. Eventually I adjusted to the change, but the entire time I kept asking myself, Why do I feel naked without makeup?

In order to answer that question, let me retrace some steps. It all began with a book by Maria Harris titled Dance of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Women’s Spirituality. Harris, a Catholic professor of religious education, bucked linear models of human development and offered a more organic, true-to-life framework of spiritual development. As Harris conceived of it, a woman’s spiritual growth is more like a dance than a straight path: She moves forward, sometimes backward, and often repeats the same moves over and over throughout the course of her life. Indeed, Harris’s gender-inclusive language and her discomfort with accepted Christian traditions would make any evangelical cast a wary eye. Even so, in the course of my doctoral research at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I have found myself rather inspired by her surprising voice.

Harris termed the first stage of a woman’s spiritual dance awakening, which is best compared to the scriptural concept of daily renewal. Romans 12:2 instructs Christians to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” and 2 Corinthians 4:16 reminds us that “inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” This seems to be what Harris had in mind as she encouraged women to awaken to God, and their identity in him, on a daily basis.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:21 AM | Comments (24)

The Best Ever Christmas Gift

Women in particular, it seems to me, have a hard time thinking of themselves as gifts.

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is to re-read “In the Bleak Midwinter," a poem by Christina Rossetti (the sister of famous pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti). The poem is so lovely that it has been set to various musical arrangements since Rossetti wrote it in the late 19th century. The most recent musical recording is by Annie Lennox (yes, that Annie Lennox), and as a fan of both Rossetti and Lennox, I must admit, I’m thrilled with the result.

Rossetti’s poem has much to teach us about the overflowing nature of a loving God and the honor of worshiping him with the gifts that are most essential to our very being, to the selves God created us to be.

Yet we have a tendency — especially as women, I think — to recognize the gifts of others more readily than we recognize our own gifts. Likewise, it is also easier sometimes to value the gifts others are blessed with more than our own.

I remember one Christmas afternoon going to visit the home of a classmate and finding that her parents had spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on her presents (and that was many years ago). It was hard at age 13 not to be jealous of those gifts, even though just that morning, I’d been exceedingly excited about my own. I read somewhere once that “comparison is the thief of joy,” words that explain perfectly what happened that day and, perhaps, far too many other days in our lives.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:55 AM | Comments (6)

Lynne Hybels: My Lazy Christmas Wish

At 29, 39, and 49, I couldn't imagine an unhurried holiday season. At 59, I have realized that very little matters.

It’s 4 on a Thursday morning. I'm wide awake because my 4-year-old grandson, Henry — enjoying a “sleepover” with Nana while Mom and Dad are out of town — woke up at 3 with a sore throat. After a trip to the potty and a few sips of juice, he has drifted back to sleep. If he wakes up cured in the morning, he can go to preschool, as planned, then enjoy his afternoon play date with cousin Mikayla. My day, too, will go as planned. But if Henry’s middle-of-the-night sore throat greets the morning, the day’s priority will immediately shift: together we willl snuggle up under a fuzzy blanket and watch The Velveteen Rabbit — again. My morning meeting will be cancelled, and I’ll have to bow out of the fancy-schmancy luncheon I’ve been invited to.

No big deal.

At age 29, 39, or even 49, I might have been undone by a last-minute change of plans. Especially in December. The crazy month. The season of peace and joy during which I have often been frustrated and miserable.

But not this year. Several weeks ago I celebrated my 59 birthday. I find this shocking, and for the most part I would rather be younger. But I have to admit there is something to be said for the perspective (dare I say wisdom?) that the years have given me.

Here’s the main difference between me at 29 and me at 59: I used to think that everything mattered. Now I realize that very little matters.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:20 AM | Comments (31)

Holiday Shopping for Jesus

How women — who have begun to out-earn men in the U.S. business sector — can use their holiday spending to glorify God.

The statistics aren’t available yet, but the questions proliferate: After two years of “anemic” spending in December, will the retail market rebound? Will Americans prop up an ailing economy by spending lots of money on Christmas presents?

Wherever the numbers end up, women will make the majority of the decisions surrounding purchases throughout December. As Belinda Luscombe recently reported in Time, “[Women] make 85% of the buying decisions or are the chief purchasing officers of their households.” Further, as women control more than 50 percent of private wealth in America, and as women — in certain age groups and metropolitan centers — begin to outearn men (see “The Growing Buying Power of Women”), Luscombe comments, “The more money women earn, the exponentially more money they manage. And women are increasingly making the calls where men have traditionally held sway.”

Questions about how and where we spend money are relevant at all times. But December marks a time when we spend money in disproportionate amounts compared with the other eleven months of the year. As Christmas approaches, how should Christian women think about spending money on gifts, and food, and decorations?

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

A Peter Singer Sympathizer Changes His Mind

After his infant son, August, suffers irreparable brain damage, professor Chris Gabbard re-thinks what makes a life worth living.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the primary news source for university and college faculty and administrators, recently published a remarkable opinion essay by a University of North Florida English professor about life with his 10-year old son, a legally blind quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. The essay was taken from a new book, Papa, Ph.D.: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy.

There is no dearth of moving stories of the sacrificial love shown by countless parents caring for severely disabled children. After all, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 1 in 33 infants each year is born with birth defects, while 2-3 out of 100 have major disabilities.

Yet The Chronicle’s publication of this piece, “A Life Beyond Reason,” is startling, to say the least.

For one thing, the essay offers an unapologetic affirmation of the inherent value of human life, one that is not typical of academic publications. But even more arresting than the essay’s conclusion is the starting point of the journey described within.

Before the birth of his son, Dr. Chris Gabbard likely would have viewed the life that his child, August, is fated to live as one not worth living. Gabbard explains that his own upbringing was immersed in a culture defined by the intelligentsia. He “grew up prizing intellectual aptitude . . . and detesting ‘poor mental function’.” The credo that guided his life was that of Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Even his own academic specialty is on the period known as the Age of Reason.

In fact, Gabbard so revered the life of the mind that he came to espouse the utilitarian, humanist views of Peter Singer, the Oxford-educated philosopher who has been a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University since 1999. Singer is most famous for his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, which established him as a founder of the animal rights movement. But he is infamous among Christians for basing personhood (in his book Practical Ethics) on the capability “of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future,” or having a sense of one’s “own existence over time.” Singer asserts the right of society to exclude those who have no such sense (including infants and the severely disabled) by ending their lives, passively or actively.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:56 AM | Comments (9)

Secular People Need Sabbaths, Too

Internet fasting. Experiments in chastity. Meatless Mondays. Nonreligious people are seeing the personal benefits of Christianity, even if they don't have the whole story.

It’s taken years for me to integrate Sabbath-keeping into my week. For most of my life, I have attended a church service on Sundays, but otherwise Sundays haven't been distinct. In recent years, though, ceasing from work, resting, and celebrating God’s goodness on Sundays has gained importance in our family. It's become a day when we worship with our church community, eat a midday meal, nap or read for a long portion of the afternoon, and enjoy time together in the early evening. As I’ve written elsewhere, we try to avoid purchasing things on Sundays. We also try to avoid e-mail. I’ve taken to giving our household appliances a rest. The laundry can wait.

American culture doesn’t share my family's appreciation for the Sabbath. I routinely pass a highway billboard from People’s Bank extolling their around-the-clock services. They boast that if there were eight days in a week, they’d be open all eight days. We live in a 24-7 era. We may only report to an office five days a week, but most people are “on” all the time, via the internet, cell phones, and retail establishments.

So my ears perked recently when I heard an interview with William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. One of Powers's strategies for using technology wisely is what he calls “an Internet Sabbath": "We turn off the household modem . . . We can't do Web surfing . . . We really enter this other zone, and it's wonderful. . . . Even when we're connected, we can feel the benefits of having been disconnected a couple days ago.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:14 AM | Comments (15)

Doctrine in Diapers

In teaching my children about God, I'm not sure who's receiving the greater lesson.

For a few years now, we’ve begun our family meals with a blessing. We started with “The Lord’s Been Good to Me,” otherwise known in our household as “Johnny Appleseed.” The song’s theology is pretty innocuous. It acknowledges God’s existence and says a basic thank you. Then we introduced “Thank you Father” (to the tune of “Frere Jacque”), which gets a little more personal because it introduces the concept of God as Father. Over the summer, my husband and I were getting bored, so one night we suggested the Doxology. And ever since, our kids have requested what they call “Praise Father,” from the last line: “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” We mix it up occasionally, but “Praise Father” remains their favorite. Somehow, Penny and William moved us from a vague deism to Trinitarian worship.

In addition to asking God’s blessing on our food, we pray as a family. Our kids have started to add their own requests, which range from Penny wanting to pray for a boy from school who can’t walk, to William asking that we pray for him after he had an unfortunate run in with a pear that tasted yucky. We read “Jesus stories” from a picture Bible. We go to church. And we talk about Mom and Dad having “time alone with God” in the mornings. We hope the way we structure our family time will impact the structure of our children’s lives, that they will grow up with a sense that God is present and active, that God cares about and for their daily needs.

But teaching our children the love of the Lord is more complicated than prayers and Jesus stories. Try explaining why all the people go under water except Noah and his family (Noah shows up in every kids’ Bible, I think because kids like animals). Or try explaining why sometimes we pray for people and they don’t get better. Or why we go to church and many other people we know and love stay home on Sunday mornings. Or that Jesus differs from an imaginary friend or the tooth fairy or a fictional character on television.

Two recent posts on Motherlode, The New York Times parenting blog, caught my attention. “What To Tell Children About God” related the stories of two parents who are agnostic yet find themselves fielding questions about God from their young children. They struggle to answer honestly. I don’t share their angst when it comes to conversation about God’s existence and God’s fundamental love and care for humans, but I resonate with some of the themes brought up in the post. Talking about God is serious business.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:15 AM | Comments (7)

The Best Christian Halloween Party

Along with hell houses and harvest fests, might evangelicals consider celebrating All Saints' Day?

In case you hadn’t noticed the inflatable purple spiders dotting the lawns of suburban neighborhoods or been tempted by those Venti-sized bags of mini Snickers, this Sunday is Halloween. What kind of story will your church tell itself about the holiday?

Shortly after I came to faith in Christ, during my teens, I attended a haunted house sponsored by a parachurch organization. Busloads of youth group kids and their non-Christian friends came to the well-publicized event. The affair offered an in-your-face spiritual confrontation, presenting teens with sensationalized images of gore and death so they would choose life with Jesus. I didn’t disagree with the message being proclaimed, but even my teen self rebelled against the exploitative nature of the event. I felt it turned the horrific realities of death and evil into de-fanged caricatures of themselves.

Fast forward a few years. As a parent, I wanted to help my children navigate a season broadcasting spiritual messages I couldn’t embrace. As many Protestant churches have, our church offered a Harvest Fest alternative party, complete with carnival games, costumes (positive characters only, Bible character preferred), and evangelistic tracts, along with an impressive haul of candy and trinkets. One of the kids called it the “Not Halloween” party.

Hell houses and Not Halloween parties. Is this the best we can do this time of the year?

I began to ask this question in earnest after reading Jon Sweeney’s The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of a Catholic Tradition. Sweeney grew up in a conservative evangelical household. As an adult, he found himself wrestling with questions about the mystery and the historicity of his faith. Though at the time he wrote the book he had not crossed the Tiber, he found his questions affirmed in some of the writings and practices of the Catholic Church. Sweeney discovered unlikely companions by connecting with the lives of some of the flesh-and-blood members of the church over the past 2,000 years, men and women known as saints.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 12:00 PM | Comments (15)

Why Should the Devil Get Halloween?

The holiday, one of my favorites, reminds me why I became a Christian in the first place.

Halfway through our hayride, around the second bend into the woods, two of our fellow riders — the clown and the guy with the Scream mask propped on top of his head — jumped out. Unlike the rest of us, who had taken the hayride for fall family fun, these guys took it as a ride to work. After the sun went down, they were to jump out from behind or swing down from trees to terrify folks riding the haunted version of our sweet hayride.

The woman next to me said that at the end of the haunted version, a horse with a headless rider charges out of the woods. My eyes widened. I leaned across my daughter to tell my husband, “We have to come back without the kids.”

My husband — a perfectly brave man — rolled his eyes, not sharing my enthusiasm for haunted houses or hayrides. When my daughter asked, “Mama, why do you like being scared so much?” he laughed. And waited for my answer.

“I don’t like being scared,” I told them. “I like being spooked. Big difference.”

And there is. I’m not a fan of the heart-sink that happens when my 3-year-old darts across the street. I don’t like the raccoon that pops out from behind our garbage cans at night. Goodness, it took three tries and practically being pushed by the guy behind me for me to jump off the high dive. This summer.

But my love of the creepy and ooky-spooky is altogether different. It’s a love I’ve had for as long as I can remember. When I was 6 and my cousins tried to torment me with ghost stories about their creeky house in Louisville, far from not being able to sleep, I wanted to explore it.

My penchant for all things creepy fuels my love of Halloween as well. It’s why I congratulate neighbors on their fog machines and eerie playlists and animatronic monsters. It’s also why I’ve expanded the treat-or-treat rules that I grew up with: While my mother allowed us to dress only as cute and nice things, my kids are allowed to dress as pretend scary things. Vampires, ghost-brides, and swamp creatures have all gotten nods from me. (Costumes that mock others, that objectify their bodies, or that represent actual killers will never.)

I might be embarrassed to admit all this if it weren’t for one thing: Whatever it is that draws me to the creepy is what initially drew me to God, and still does.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:38 AM | Comments (39)

When Doubt Comes to Church

How should we respond to intellectual challenges to Christianity from inside the flock?

In a presidential address at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s annual conference in 1972, evangelical luminary John Stott admitted that he found himself "wondering how the apostle [Paul] would react if he were to visit Western Christendom today. I think he would deplore . . . the contemporary lack of a Christian mind” (from Your Mind Matters). Quoting Anglican theologian Harry Blamires, Stott continued: “The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century church.”

Are things any different nearly 40 years later?

New Humanist magazine recently co-hosted a debate at London's Royal Society for the Arts, Manufacture and Commerce on the question, “Where is the God debate going?” Panelists included novelist Marilynne Robinson, philosopher Roger Scruton, and historian Jonathan Rée. According to The Guardian's Mark Vernon, the debate mostly turned into a critique of the New Atheism, with some questioners in the audience proposing reasons for why “people of faith never question their beliefs (unlike scientists).”

Vernon hints that while the New Atheism may be slipping out of fashion, the God debate is not. Indeed, religious questions are still on the public’s agenda. But it’s not just atheists and agnostics who are lobbing objections at Christianity and theism in general, and bemoan a perceived anti-intellectualism among people of faith. Some within the church are grappling with the problem of evil, religious pluralism, and the origins debate, to name a few issues, wondering if their faith is intellectually robust enough to face into these topics honestly.

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail from a college student expressing his intellectual struggles with Christianity. He gave me permission to share this excerpt:

I have realized that the arguments I have been fighting all these years — against ethical relativism, against Darwinism, against atheism, against Pentecostalism, against nihilism, against the gay-rights advocates, against amillenialists, against Lutherans and Catholics, against you-name-it — were not fights against those things at all. I had been spoon-fed caricatures my whole life. Triumphantly defeating the caricatures was easy. But sooner or later, I learned that I would have to encounter real competing arguments instead of watered-down versions. You can’t live in your rosy, private schooled, small . . . church world forever, where every challenge (or perceived challenge, whether innocent or not) to Christianity has a nice, clean, naively compelling answer.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:50 AM | Comments (28)

Why I Envy Young Nuns

What a remarkably large class of young Catholic nuns-in-training taught this Protestant.

I have a vinyl sticker on the back window of my car that reads, JESUS INSIDE. It's an effective conversation starter because it frequently invites teasing: “So, where does Jesus sit?” “Hey, did you know Jesus is inside your parked car?”

That decal came to mind while I read this weekend about young Catholic women who have joined the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville. This year, the traditional convent, replete with flowing black-and-white habits, is accepting a novitiate class that, at 27 women, is the largest in the U.S. The women are joining a convent whose median age is 36. At the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, another thriving and traditional convent in Ann Arbor, the average age is about 28. Sisters of Mary reports a highly educated new class of 22 candidates, including one Harvard graduate who spoke in Latin about her decision to take vows during her commencement speech. These young nuns-in-training are taking a modern path back to a traditional way of serving God.

Many Protestant women lack a precise spiritual equivalent to joining a convent. Many, of course, have shown sacrifice and dedication in various ways, such as overseas missions work and teaching at third-world schools. But others of us, including myself, lack a clear path to establishing lives of devotion. I am a woman devoted to God, and, incidentally, chaste. But I wonder how many situations I have been in where nobody knows that about me. Is my vinyl decal acting as my Protestant nun’s habit?

Some of the older sisters quoted in the AP article theorize that young women want to do something “radical” for God. As a young woman trying to figure out the fundamentals of life — where I’ll live, who I’ll live with, where I'll work — I get that. Jesus doesn’t naturally come up in my day-to-day conversations any more, and I occasionally feel as though I blend in with the world without trying.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:10 AM | Comments (16)

A New Message at the Strip Club-Church Showdown

What happened when two Christian women entered the Fox Hole strip club in Warsaw, Ohio.

“I can’t make out what you’re saying to me. Please have someone call me so I’ll know what you’re saying.”

Sitting in her car, Anny Donewald prayed these instructions to God last month.

Founder of Eve’s Angels, Donewald ministers to women in the adult entertainment industry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’d been mulling over the news that dancers from a strip club in Warsaw, Ohio, were picketing the local nondenominational church that for years had picketed them.

When Donewald’s phone rang moments later, it was her friend Sheri Brown, who co-leads JC’s Girls, a ministry to women in San Diego. She’d called to talk about the news. Donewald says she knew immediately that “God was telling me to go to Ohio.”

As quick as you can say holy irony, both were bound for Warsaw. There the two women would do what they did every week: get a table at a strip club, spend time with the dancers, bring them pizza, offer them gift bags — and tell them, “God loves you, and we love you.”

For Brown and Donewald, pizza and goodies are about more than pizza and goodies. “It’s all about relationship,” says Donewald. She tells the women, “Anytime you want to hang out or need something, call me.” The beautiful thing is, they do.

What made this outing different, of course, were all the church folks in the parking lot waving placards.

What Donewald and Brown would share that Saturday night, first with dancers in the club and then with church members outside, was, “What you’ve been hearing isn’t quite right.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:07 AM | Comments (24)

Simplicity: It's Complicated

When trying to buy and spend less only breeds anxiety, maybe it's time to check motives.

The New York Times recently profiled an Oregon couple who winnowed their possessions down to 100 things, giving away most of what they owned and cozying up in a 400-square-foot apartment. The article discussed new (read: more cautious) spending patterns, spurred by the recession but potentially having long-term staying power. Americans are investing in experiences and leisure activities such as vacations and concerts, which contribute to their happiness in a way that the latest electronic gadget does not. “ ‘It’s better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch’ is basically the idea,” says Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia.

The emphasis on owning less relates to the Christian virtue of simplicity. In Matthew 6:19–20, Jesus reminds us to store up treasures in heaven, not on earth, while the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16–21) warns against preoccupation with saving for future comfort. Biblical examples of giving away wealth and possessions abound, from Old Testament teachings on tithing to Jesus telling the rich young man to “sell all that you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21).

Should Christians hop on the 100-things bandwagon? Does material simplicity — spending and owning less — always lead to spiritual and emotional enrichment?

In my 20s, I attended a Washington, D.C., church that had rigorous membership requirements, including a minimum 10 percent tithe. I worked for low-paying nonprofits in an expensive city, so tithing made a big difference in what was left once rent and groceries were covered. Instead of embracing forced simplicity, I resented it for making even the most mundane purchases occasions for anxiety and guilt. I remember standing in a drug store aisle contemplating whether it was irresponsible to buy new pantyhose. Scrutinizing every purchase didn’t free me from material concerns to make room for spiritual ones. It just made me cranky. And it didn't feel like freedom to agonize over a $4 pair of pantyhose.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:13 AM | Comments (15)

My Encounter with Mental Illness

College is a seedbed for depression. Here's what Christian campuses can do to help.

My freshman year, I spiraled into a clinical depression triggered by an off-campus move. That semester, my lack of finances required moving from the dorms into an apartment across the street from the university. There, I lived rent-free with a generous elderly woman. Yet I felt like an outsider looking in as daily I’d peer out the window at students walking to and fro.

Although I lived in a cloud of mental confusion, somehow I managed to attend classes and chapel. For over a year, I daily fought back a stream of tears that threatened to publicly out me. I thought I was crazy; my only relief was sleep. So I slept a lot. And I loathed myself. Even though I prayed and read Scripture daily, I felt numb, isolated, and alienated — damned. It felt as if God had fled. Although surrounded by several thousand professing Christians, I was too ashamed and embarrassed to tell others except a counselor and superficially a few others. For the most part, no one seemed to notice. I contemplated suicide.

Because of the fervent prayers and encouraging phone calls of my younger siblings, Kenny and Michelle, I clung to life. Day by day they ministered God’s grace. And, thanks be to God, I started the climb out of the lowest rungs of hell late in my sophomore year.

Yet I know that not everybody makes it. And according to one report released last week, the number of college students struggling is growing. At an American Psychological Association meeting, John Guthman of Hofstra University reported that, based on a sample of over 3,000 U.S. students, the percentage of students with moderate to severe depression rose from 34% to 41% from 1998 to 2010. Relatedly, the number of students on psychiatric medications went from 11% to 24% in the same period. (Conversely, the number of students who said they had considered suicide within two weeks of counseling went from 26% to 11% in this period.) Guthman said the rise isn’t about increasing stress loads — though that’s a likely factor — but about more students with pre-existing conditions attending college, and their increased willingness to seek help.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:43 AM | Comments (26)

'Eat Pray Love' Book Club Discussion

For all the bad and the ugly in Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 spiritual memoir, I wanted to hold on to the good. Here's what I found.

After finally reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s enormously popular 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love, I could write an entire review about any one of these observations:

(1) The story embodies everything wrong with bourgeois Western spirituality: it’s self-centered, consumerist, and privileged without even knowing it.

(2) Gilbert offers a self-made spirituality, one that encourages readers to “cherry-pick” whatever rituals from various traditions make them feel better, without examining those traditions’ history or ways they flat-out contradict each other. For Gilbert, faith is primarily therapeutic, not theistic. And of course, her faith and mine clash on many points.

(3) If Gilbert talks the way she writes — (lots of parenthetical jokes) and ALL CAPS and italics! — she would exhaust me in about five minutes.

The book (whose film adaptation starring Julia Roberts comes out tomorrow) follows the newly divorced and seriously distraught writer on her trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of psychic healing and spiritual insight. “Eat” takes place in Rome, where the 34-year-old savors the Italian language and an abundance of gelato, margherita pizza, and enough pasta to widen her waistline a couple blessed notches. “Pray” chronicles Gilbert’s four-month stay in a secluded ashram in Muktananda, where she gets up at 3 every morning, learns how to chant Sanskrit and meditate for hours, and meets Richard, her “big Texas Yogi” friend, who always has a well-timed word of advice. “Love” follows Gilbert’s stay in Bali, Indonesia, where — surprise — she falls for a significantly older, wealthy Brazilian named Felipe who calls her “darling” and makes tender love to her for days upon days.

Gilbert has a hard life.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:15 AM | Comments (34)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:05 AM | Comments (9)

Multitasking: Bad for the Soul

Sure, I was getting a lot done as a mother of four. But I was having a hard time obeying God.

My husband and I had been married for eight years when I gave birth to our first child. Two years later, his brother was born. Eighteen months later, their sister. And less than two years after that, we started the adoption process and soon brought home a daughter.

“You’re busy,” people would remark, eyeing me with my children. I never knew whether the comment was tinged with pity or admiration.

Yes, I was busy. But, more significantly, I was evolving into a different person. No longer the dreamy, walk-taking, tea-drinking, poem-writing person who baked her own bread, I had become a woman barreling down the aisles at the grocery store, baby in sling, toddlers fastened into cart. After years of toting children on my hip, my forearms had begun to resemble Popeye the Sailor's.

And I wasn’t just busy with the kids. Like many “at-home” mothers, I had part-time work and volunteer responsibilities at church and my children’s schools. Meanwhile, I was making Herculean efforts to stay close to my husband and friends. I found myself setting up interviews for a newspaper story, ordering curriculum, and making reminder calls from my cell phone in the grocery store — while, of course, keeping the kids in sight, buying food for the week, and stopping to compare the prices of varieties of pears.

In short, I learned to multitask.

In recent years, of course, we’ve learned that it is actually impossible to multitask. Study after study after study chide us for believing we can make our brains do more than one thing at a time. “A core limitation [of the human brain] is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” says René Marois, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. When we are multitasking, we are actually just switching from one task to another at astonishing speed. It’s unproductive, distracting, and dangerous to multitask, we are told.

But over the years, I became something of a multitasking expert. And I began to suffer from it. I answered e-mail from my phone while waiting for a freight train to pass. Before picking the kids up from school, I’d troll around the neighborhood, choosing a parking space based on whether I could find a Wi-Fi signal in order to get an additional few minutes of work done.

I felt, to use the old expression, that I was drinking from a fire hose. Equally compelled to answer unimportant messages (“Thanks for letting us use your car-top carrier. We left it on your front porch”) as more critical ones (“Can you remind me where I’m supposed to be for the photo shoot this afternoon?”), I was losing perspective. I was also finding it hard to hear God, what with all the text and e-mail alerts on my phone, the call waiting signal, and my kids’ voices creating a low roar.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:00 AM | Comments (14)

Following Christ at a Porn Convention

Editors' Note: This post has been removed at the request of the author.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:10 AM

Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, and Jesus

In Unsqueezed, Margot Starbuck explores what shopping and eating to the glory of God looks like.

Christian women aren’t supposed to have body image issues. Have you ever thought that? Perhaps quietly, to yourself, while looking in the mirror before walking out the door to church. In her new book, Unsqueezed: Springing Free From Skinny Jeans, Nose Jobs, Highlights, and Stillettos, Margot Starbuck notes that Christian women face a “double whammy” when it comes to appearances.

First we feel bad when our muffin tops overflow the world’s skinny mold — and then, as people of faith, we feel guilty because we tried so hard to cram ourselves into that death-dealing mold in the first place.

Unsqueezed is Starbuck’s wrestling with that double whammy. She offers a humorous yet surprisingly sharp examination of the ways that women, specifically Christian women, fixate on physical beauty.

“When I started writing the book, I wanted to say that appearances don’t matter at all,” Starbuck told me in an interview for Her.meneutics. “My editor looked at me with my crazy tie-dye and painted boots and nose ring, and she said, ‘Well, it seems like you put a certain degree of energy into your appearance.’ ”

So instead, Starbuck explores what moderation looks like and overcoming what she calls the “binding preoccupation with self.” The preoccupation begins with a fear: “the silent question of the human heart . . . am I acceptable?” a question that's only aggravated by modern advertising. The theme of acceptance will also be familiar to readers of Starbuck’s first book, The Girl in the Orange Dress: Searching for a Father Who Does Not Fail, which explored her difficulty believing that God accepted her. Accepting that God is “for us” frees us up to be “for” others, Starbuck says. Unsqueezed and her next book — which she tells me she’s already working on — examine the idea of acceptance in depth.

Unsqueezed is also a portrait of responsible consumerism. “The invitation to love God and love other people with our heart, soul, mind, and strength — I believe that extends to what’s in our wallet, what’s in our closet, what’s in our refrigerators,” Starbuck explains. The book offers ideas for how to replace our self-focused activities with ones that are other-focused. “We want to be not just deleting things from our lives, but also adding practices that help us live into the truth.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:21 AM | Comments (4)

Growing Gardens to the Glory of God

Lessons gleaned from Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s tale of eating only homegrown food for a year.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is Barbara Kingsolver’s captivating account of a year spent eating only homegrown and locally raised food. Known best for The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 novel about Christian missionaries in the Congo, Kingsolver uses beautiful language and humorous anecdotes to take readers through the ups and downs of her family “. . . ma[king] every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew.”

With her husband and two daughters, Kingsolver begins the journey by moving from Tucson to a farm in Appalachian country, Virginia. Once there, the family patiently waits for the asparagus to bloom so they can begin their year living as locavores (not to be confused with femivores). Kingsolver winds in and out of stories told chronologically about raising turkeys, entertaining 100 guests on locally grown food, and feeling apprehensive in the scarcity of winter and joyful in the abundance of summer. The stories made me laugh out loud, share the book with friends, and prompted more than a few good discussions.

Kingsolver makes the same point that writers like Michael Pollan and the documentary Food Inc. do: Most of us Americans have forgotten where our food comes from, and don’t recognize the environmental cost of having that food brought to us. To counteract this forgetfulness, Kingsolver encourages eating foods in season, which she says helps appreciate that food more (not to mention that the taste of food picked and eaten immediately can’t be beat). Eating only in-season food might feel daunting to many of us, but Kingsolver argues that’s “only because we’ve grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:28 AM | Comments (15)

The Anti-Racist, Anti-Fear Gene

People with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic condition, show us what it means to live trusting others as God calls us to.

Over the past month, NPR has addressed various aspects of Williams syndrome, a rare chromosomal condition in which a series of genes on one chromosome has been deleted. Williams syndrome (also Williams–Beuren syndrome, or WBS) is characterized by learning disabilities and cognitive delays, small physical stature and features, a love for music, and a high degree of sociability and trust of other people, including strangers. One NPR report, "Is There an Anti-Racism Gene?" highlighted the fact that people with Williams Syndrome do not share most people's tendency to discriminate against others of different racial backgrounds. A second report, "A Life without Fear," focused on a family in California with a daughter with Williams, Isabelle. It mentioned that Isabelle is “pathologically trusting” and that it is “biologically impossible for her to distrust” other people. A third explored the social alienation experienced, sadly and ironically, by many persons with Williams in spite of their innately deep love for other people.

It’s a puzzling condition. Positive and even desirable traits of love, trust, and acceptance bump up against the biological fact that we need social fear in order to survive. To cite one example of the problems that arise with this loving, trusting nature, Isabelle cannot go to the bathroom alone at school because of the many stories of children with Williams who have been sexually abused. Isabelle herself has climbed into the backseat of a stranger’s car, ready to join the unknown family for a trip to Dairy Queen. Her mother says it is her job to teach Isabelle not to trust people.

According to NPR and most other media, biology describes and defines behavior. People with Williams trust because their genes tell them to. Or, put another way, they fail to fear because their genes don’t kick in when they should. Clearly, biological reasons account for these differences. Yet hearing the stories made me wonder whether there was also a spiritual component to this genetic difference.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:57 AM | Comments (3)

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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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:51 AM | Comments (13)

Barbara Brown Taylor Builds 'An Altar in the World'

The former Episcopal priest helps readers pay attention to where God is dropping ladders in surprising places.

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor’s most recent book, uses a variety of spiritual — though not always distinctly Christian — stories to demonstrate the surprising ways the spiritual and physical worlds intersect.

Taylor’s unconventional spirituality is partially rooted in her involvement with Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches before settling in for over 20 years as an Episcopal priest. From these experiences, Taylor has authored 12 books, becoming a noted voice on religion in the literary world. She currently teaches religion at Piedmont College in northeast Georgia and is an adjunct professor of spirituality at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Altar bears some similarities to Taylor’s 2007 memoir, Leaving Church, which recounts her decision to leave the priesthood for teaching and delineates between loving church and loving God. Like the former, Altar finds spiritual meaning not just in concrete beliefs but also in the realm of nature. Taylor recounts a road to God that included drawing close to the “ground of all being” and the “one heart beating inside all living things,” phrases borrowed from Eastern philosophy and religion more than Christianity as such.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:35 AM | Comments (2)

Yoga: An Exercise in Discernment

How I submit the meditative practice to Christ.

About 16 million adults in the United States practice yoga — an increase of 85 percent from 2004 to 2008 — and the Los Angeles Times reports that both Christian and Jewish groups are incorporating the Eastern meditation practice into their respective faith tradition. Explicitly Christian yoga classes, such as Laurette Willis's PraiseMoves, seek to "transform your workout into worship!" I've practiced yoga for over six years now, but haven’t sought out a Christian class, instead being content to bring my faith to the class I attend. This exercise in Christian discernment has strengthened both my body and my spirit.

I had two reservations when I began practicing yoga. One, I don’t like trying new things, and the thought of contorting my not-so-flexible body in front of others made me nervous. Two, I knew that yoga had Eastern origins, and didn’t want to turn exercise into an unwitting endorsement of Hinduism. But the class was free, and I wanted to be more willing to try new things, and I figured my faith could withstand one yoga class. So I went.

And I loved it. As a Christian, the spiritual aspect of yoga both attracts me and concerns me. It’s easy to affirm the goodness of taking care of my body. Even though “honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:20) was written to address sexual morality, it extends to the care we take in other areas as well. Christian theology insists that our bodies matter. God’s physical creation is a good one. In contrast to the Greek idea that the body is corrupt, Christ’s incarnation affirms the importance of physical existence. Moreover, Christian hope is built on the promise that our souls and our bodies will be resurrected as a part of God’s new heaven and new earth. Again, Christian theology insists that our bodies matter — even though our spiritual practices, especially in private, are often devoid of physical expression.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:30 AM | Comments (28)

Art That Reveals Our Need for Grace

Physically disabled photographers surprising work reveals to viewer their own limitations.

After seeing an advertisement for the 8th Annual Garden State Film Festival on Twitter, I requested a press pass, thinking I might screen an inspiring film or two that I could recommend to Her.meneutics readers. The festival director suggested Newt Gingrich’s Rediscovering God in America, which I saw and appreciated, but not nearly as much as two other films. Both reminded me that seeing the world through another person’s eyes is often the route to both empathy and greater self-awareness.

Shooting Beauty introduces viewers to a community of people with cerebral palsy, first through the eyes of an aspiring fashion photographer whose career is diverted as she teaches them how to take pictures, and then through their own and each other’s eyes. The second, Dark Light: The Art of Blind Photographers, defies logic as it highlights the stunning art and unique vision of some of the world’s leading blind photographers. Yes, that’s right, blind photographers. And no, I didn’t believe it either until I saw their work and their processes for myself. Both films tell their stories without either pity or sanctimony. This is a significant accomplishment for filmmakers who don’t travel through life in the dark or by wheelchair.

Shooting Beauty opens with the first person story of Courtney Bent. She initially visits a cerebral palsy day program to photograph its severely disabled clients, but soon discovers that her own limited perspective distorts the images she creates.

She decides to equip the clients with cameras of their own. In this way, they can communicate to others what the world looks like from their vantage point—one that often shows up in their photographs as a witty, tender, waist-high one. This is no easy feat for Bent, as nearly every camera must be uniquely modified. One man, for example, can use only his mouth, so she mounts a camera onto his wheelchair within reach of his tongue, which he then stretches, twists, and bends to make his pictures.

Bent’s project spans a decade, and thus takes her and viewers out of the realm of charity and into authentic friendship. There are love affairs, successes, heartbreaks, marriages, a divorce, and a death. Both the filmmaker and one of her subjects long to love and be loved. Both find what they’re looking for. One loses it. Their journeys, and ours, intertwine.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 9:21 AM | Comments (7)

A Higher Calling Than Barbie

Why do women want to be represented by a plastic doll?

Last week in a coffee shop, a complete stranger felt compelled to show me an article in the local newspaper. It was an article about career-oriented Barbie dolls. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that a recent poll on Mattel’s website asked people to vote on what career the next Barbie doll in the “I Can Be . . .” category should have.

“Mattel gave them a choice of architect, anchorwoman, computer engineer, environmentalist and surgeon,” the WSJ reports, resulting in more than 600,000 votes during a four-week period. “Girls the world over overwhelmingly cast their ballot for anchorwoman Barbie. . . . But by the end of the first week, a growing flood of adult votes for computer engineer Barbie trumped the popular choice. Female computer engineers who learned about the election launched a viral campaign on the Internet to get out the vote and ensure Barbie would join their ranks.” Both dolls are now available on the Mattel website.

The kind, quirky woman brandishing a page out of her newspaper seemed far more excited about Barbie’s new career aspirations than I did, but the WSJ story suggests that a lot of women feel strongly about the symbolism of Barbie. What is it about these dolls that women take so personally?

Perhaps I would be more interested if Barbie’s career path more closely mirrored my own. In Ohio, a female Episcopal priest recently took that matter into her own hands, creating her own version of career Barbie: the High Church Reverend. Although she’s not available for sale by Mattel, this Barbie has attracted 6,000 friends on her Facebook page and a story by the Religion News Service last week.

My first thought on reading about the Rev. Barbie was hesitation over the idea of encouraging girls to “aspire” to priesthood. Isn’t that a calling rather than a career?

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 9:13 AM | Comments (8)

Turning Child's Play into a Passion Play

How we might consider observing Lent after Easter.

I’ll confess I’m not sorry to see Lent come to an end this year.

Usually, I enjoy the Lenten season—although perhaps “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word. I love that the liturgical calendar has a space for penitence and discipline, for the work of preparation that heralds joy and victory. But if I’m completely honest, what I probably like most about Lent is that it appeals to my dramatic side: the weeping and gnashing, the sackcloth and ashes, the oh-Lord-I-am-but-a-worm mentality.

These dramatic tendencies of mine might help to explain, in part, the Lent I found myself observing this year, the one that I am so happy to see come to a close. Early one morning shortly after Ash Wednesday I discovered my five-year-old daughter lying on the couch in her red footie pajamas, her arms outstretched and feet crossed. Wisps of strawberry-blonde hair framed her small face, twisted into a painful expression as she held her arms out to the side, cruciform. Atop her head she’d perched my U-shaped nursing pillow, to be her halo. All she lacked was a sign saying “This is the King of the Jews.”

I knew at that moment it was going to be a very long Lent.

Since that morning, my children have enacted the Passion so many times I’m starting to feel as if I’m living in a medieval morality play. Oberammergau it’s not, but the reenactments are heartfelt, and as the weeks have dragged on they’ve gotten it down to a science: my daughter plays Jesus dying on the cross, and my three-year-old son weeps. Then they switch. This arrangement leads to random comments like “Get off the cross! It’s my turn to die.”

As I watch them, I wonder what Lent will be like next year when the baby is old enough to play, too. How will they expand their repertoire? The Roman guards? The thieves on the cross? Mary? Perhaps Veronica? Suffice it to say, by the time we got to Holy Week I was definitely feeling an excess of Lent, and longing for the promise—and resolution—of Easter.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Cosmetic Surgery to the Glory of God?

Christians can't dismiss such surgery until they seriously consider our God-given desire for beauty.

I’d never thought much about plastic surgery until 28 years ago, when my then 2-year-old son bit through an extension cord and burnt his mouth. Even though we had no insurance, my husband and I found a plastic surgeon who restored symmetry and proportion to our son’s features. To have left our child’s face distorted would have been unthinkable, and Christian friends supported our decision as parents.

Twenty years later, when I considered restoring symmetry and proportion to my body after a 70-pound weight loss, I received the opposite response among Christian friends; many questioned my motives and some my spiritual integrity. Cosmetic surgery was a pursuit of the vain and shallow, they told me, even though I desired the same restoration for myself that I had wanted for my son.

A seminary grad, I began investigating cosmetic surgery through a biblical lens, particularly a theology of beauty and the implications of cosmetic surgery in a postmodern, consumer-driven culture. I wrestled with my motives: What did I really believe I’d achieve through such surgery? Was the story I was telling myself about who I was and would be if I had surgery consistent with God’s story for me? And what about stewardship? My husband was a Christian school administrator. Could we justify the expenditure?

In many ways, I saw myself as an unlikely candidate for cosmetic surgery — different from “other vain” women I envisioned. I was a Christian school teacher who didn’t know another soul who'd had a cosmetic procedure. (If they had, they didn’t talk about it until I came looking for them.) But I discovered on my journey that I was very much like thousands of other women — Christian and non-Christian — who seek cosmetic surgery. I wanted restoration. I wanted healing from emotional pain. I wanted to be average — not a beauty queen, just a woman beautiful for my husband, even though he already declared me beautiful.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:00 AM | Comments (22)

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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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 10:52 AM | Comments (18)

Technology's Dark Underbelly

A non-Luddite asks how media saturation shapes our minds and hearts.

When news broke that a Pennsylvania school district was using laptop computers to spy on students in their own homes, I did what seemed the only logical thing to do: I panicked. In a world where airports can view detailed images of passengers' naked bodies in the name of security, I confess I often wonder how long it will be until I find myself sitting in Room 101, tracing patterns in the dust and idly scrawling 2+2=5.

Initially intended as an anti-theft device, the laptops that Lower Merion school district was giving to high school students contained the capability to snap a picture, remotely, should the laptop ever be stolen. School officials reported their ability to recover missing computers in a meeting with school board members, but they didn’t specify how.

Unresolved questions about the laptop scandal, dubbed "Webcamgate," prompted Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) to hold a special hearing to investigate the topic of students and remote-tracking software. When the school decided to hand out laptops with anti-theft software installed, “it had no intention of dragging Congress into a national debate about wiretapping laws and webcams,” Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson wrote, “but that's exactly what it got.”

InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely notes that, even when the laptop scare is resolved, it will not be the end of the story: "The unintended consequences of technology can come back and bite you." The real issue is not whether laptops were used to spy on students; it's that they could have been used to do so. The technology was readily available, so that all the school, or any other nefarious user, had to do was switch it on.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:16 AM | Comments (6)

Therefore Let Us Keep the Feast

Celebrating the Passover meal prepares Christians for Easter.

Last night’s sunset marked the beginning of Passover for millions of people worldwide. It is the only major Jewish holiday recognized by most mainstream calendars and celebrated by the U.S. President.

Although the Jewish holiday lasts all week, until sunset next Monday, the most widely celebrated aspect is Seder, the traditional Passover dinner (Exodus 12). This is the meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the Upper Room before his crucifixion (Matt. 26:17-30; Mark 14:12-26; Luke 22:17-20). Because of this, it carries special significance to both Jews and Christians.

I had the privilege of celebrating two Messianic Seders last year, and Communion has never been the same since partaking of it within the original context. I highly recommend that every Christian attend a Seder at least once. I am missing it this year, without a community to invite me to its celebration. (Passover, like most Jewish holidays, is family-centered and essentially impossible to celebrate alone.) Surprised by my own intense craving to celebrate again, I did a little research and found multiple locations that offer Seder open to the public. These are hosted for a variety of reasons by a variety of different groups, but few are Messianic.

It’s hard to describe the beauty of a Messianic Passover except to call it a precious balance of Old and New Testament. Specifically, of course, Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt in the Exodus. But the Exodus is part of a much larger story of God’s proven faithfulness in upholding his covenant with the children of Abraham.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:51 AM | Comments (2)

Learning from the Cornell Suicides

The Ivy League school's six suicides in six months serve to remind us of the people in our networks who are struggling privately.

The public image of Cornell University, the Ithaca, New York, Ivy League school, changed drastically this month when news broke that a third student in one month had committed suicide by jumping from Cornell’s famed gorges, following three other student suicides since October.

The March deaths of Bradley Ginsburg, William Sinclair, and Matthew Zika contributed to the stigma the press attached to the Ivy League school. The gorges’ eerie presence on campus didn’t help shake the labels. The natural landmarks served as an unusually public stage for suicides, and an all-too-effective reminder of the deaths for students forced to cross them on the way to class.

Cornell's administration responded quickly, posting guards at the bridges overlooking the gorges and sending staff to every campus dorm to search for students struggling to cope. Administrators have created a website compiling news related to the recent deaths and mental-health resources.

It's perhaps logical for the press and public to view the tragedies and Cornell’s response with increased concern. What is wrong at Cornell? The questions began. Is such a competitive academic program too much for most young people? But even with the rash of suicides, Cornell is no more a “suicide school” than other similar-sized universities. The Big Ten Suicide Study (1997), the most recent comprehensive study on college suicides, found that students in higher education programs are half as likely as non-college-bound young people to take their own life. The suicide rate for students in higher education is 7.5 per 100,000, compared with the national average of 15 per 100,000 among same-aged counterparts. By these numbers, Cornell, with some 20,000 students, falls within the national average for a school its size. In most years, it falls below the general average for overall deaths by suicide in the U.S., which is 10.9 deaths per 100,000 people. In fact, Cornell did not lose any students to suicide between 2005 and 2008.

Christians are wise to let Cornell’s tragedy serve as a corporate and personal reminder about how we communicate love and meaning. There are likely people in our lives who struggle with private depression, wrestling with deep questions and insecurities that do not often play out in settings as public as Cornell’s gorges. I was personally reminded of this earlier this month upon hearing that one of my former students took his own life at age 21.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:15 AM | Comments (4)

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 (5)

'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 (14)

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 (19)

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 (34)

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 (12)

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 (7)

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 (16)

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 (19)

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).

Continue reading "Confession: I Stopped Giving to the Church" »

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 2:13 PM | Comments (23)

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 (2)

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 (17)

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 (28)

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?

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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 (10)

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?

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:43 AM | Comments (12)

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 (39)

Scared to Death of Death: Facing More Than Gramma’s Mortality

Learning from Tim Tebow about Workplace Evangelism

Sitting in the Dark, Waiting for Emmanuel

Birth Pangs: When God Shows Up in Pregnancy

Should Christians Take Antidepressants?

Advent: Putting the Brakes on Christmas Insanity

Grumble Hallelujah on the Kitchen Floor

Why I No Longer Pray for a Husband

Real, Authentic Authenticity

Welcoming Doubt to Christian Education