Hermenuetics

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 (3)

This Is Your Brain on Evangelicalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Confusing Case of Caster Semenya

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

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

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

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

How do Christians make sense of Semanya’s story?

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

Quest for a Father’s Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running in the Shadow of 9/11

Much of my life has been lived in the kinetic shadow of New York City. Last weekend, I owned that city’s streets for three hours.

I have loved New York City my whole life. By that I mean since I was a preschooler living across the Hudson in North Bergen, New Jersey. Even from the relative distance of the Jersey Shore, where my family moved when I was 6 and where I’ve spent most of my days, “the city” has been as prominent a backdrop as the cool green Atlantic. From trips up north to see family, I watched the derided Twin Towers get built. While flying into Newark Liberty International Airport when I lived in California post-9/11, I pondered the void.

It was as a hometown girl that I ran (and walked) the New York City Half-Marathon last Sunday on behalf of the Children’s Tumor Foundation (CTF). I love to run and have been doing it since winning ribbons at elementary school field days. Running with CTF’s NF Endurance Team for research into a disease that may have contributed to my son Gabriel’s death is a particularly rewarding experience. Not only is CTF the world’s leading non-government funder of neurofibromatosis research, it has given me education and encouragement ever since Gabriel was diagnosed with NF as an infant.

CTF is headquartered on Pine Street in New York City, so it was a hometown race for the team as well. It was more than that for me though. Life for my family had been pretty idyllic for a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two nights before those attacks, Gabriel’s friend Christopher Braca was at our house. His dad Al picked him up. Al Braca worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and had lived through the first World Trade Center bombing. He didn’t live through the second. He was known as “The Rev” at work because of his outspoken faith. Stories came back to his family after his death that on that fateful morning, when all hope of survival was lost, Al had gathered people around him to passionately invite them to go to heaven with him.

A week after the attack, I dropped Gabe off at Christopher’s house to hang out. His mom, Jeannie, said, “I realized last night that Al isn’t coming home and neither is his body.” A little later, I got a call that I needed to come pick Gabe up. Despite Al's body having fallen more than 100 stories amidst tons of debris, it was found intact. We called it a miracle in the midst of unspeakable tragedy.

As it happens, our hotel near the finish line at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan was a block from Ground Zero. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had I spent time there since volunteering at a relief worker respite station in spring 2002. On Saturday morning before the race, my husband and I strolled around the site and took in the changes, including a visitor center and a bronze memorial to firefighters who had died there. Locals were giving tours, telling tourists about human remains found as late as a year ago.

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

So, How Are Those Summer Reading Lists Coming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Urban Chicks Movement

Living out faith can include 'just food.'

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

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

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

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

The Faith of Our Mothers

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

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

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

"Why?" he asked.

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

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

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

When a Pro-Life Blogger Goes Too Far

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Downside of Hooking Up

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

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

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

That was nearly three decades ago.

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

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

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

Author Interview: Elissa Elliott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it a Sin to Nip and Tuck?

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

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

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

Although she had medical complications along the way, her regimen ended with a hyalauronic acid peel in 1999 that burned the skin on her face so badly, she says it left her looking like a "freak of nature." 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, microdermabrasion (skin peel), and laser skin resurfacing were the most popular non-surgical techniques.

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

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

The Matriarchal Blessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist Profile: Anna Kocher

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

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

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

Where do your faith and your art intersect?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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."

Continue reading "Blog Comments and Christian Courtesy" »

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

An Apologetic for Ink

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

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

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

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

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

Why then would I get another tattoo?

Continue reading "An Apologetic for Ink" »

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

The Secret Life of Beekeepers

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

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

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

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

When Serving Makes You Sick

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

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

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

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

How do men and women experience church burnout differently?

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

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

Continue reading "When Serving Makes You Sick" »

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

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