Hermenuetics

Making the Most out of Mommy Blogging: The Woman Behind Money Saving Mom

Crystal Paine is not your average mommy blogger. She doesn’t tell you about her day or post picture-perfect images of her lifestyle for you to envy. The homeschooling mom of three based in Kansas wants to help you make ends meet, to use many pieces of information to make choices about everyday purchases. With 4 million pageviews a month, she operates one of the most well-known coupon-clipping blogs in the country, and her new book, The Money Saving Mom’s Budget (Gallery Books), wraps all of her practices up in one place.

Paine told Her.meneutics that her blogging began as any other site back in 2004. “I mentioned that I spent $17 on groceries that week, and people started asking, ‘How on earth did you do that?’ ” she said.

She created an online course that taught some basic strategies, such as how to create a meal plan and how to combine the manufacturers’ and store’s coupons for a double deal. “People were saying, ‘I need more practical information. I need you to break it down: what should I buy at the store this week? The goal was finding practical ways to save on groceries,” she said. So her blog turned into a mix of posts, including daily deals on products, tips for managing money, and ways to live more simply.

Paine, who attends an independent Baptist church with Southern Baptist leanings, sees her blog as a different kind of ministry model, one that helps people get down to the nitty-gritty details about their finances.

“I try not to use ‘Christianese’ so someone who is unchurched can’t catch on,” she said, noting that she points to her faith in various posts. “I see it as though I’m digging a well. I’m providing people help with food and clothing, helping them get out of debt, and then they’re open to hearing the gospel.”

On the surface, most of Paine’s posts show you how to get free samples, save a few bucks, or organize your life. But she says her readers glean bigger principles.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 10:13 AM | Comments (11)

The Woman Who Shelters New York City's Trafficking Victims

When award-winning nonprofit leader Faith Huckel moved to New York City in 2003, she expected her time there to shape her career, but she thought that impact would come more from the social work graduate program she was entering than events at the United Nations headquarters nearby.

Then, just weeks into her studies, President George W. Bush addressed the UN, concluding a speech focused on the Middle East with a discussion of human trafficking, which he called a “modern-day form of slavery.” Four months later, The New York Times Magazine ran an 8,500-word cover story on sex trafficking in America that launched thousands of shocked conversations.

Speaking to me recently, Huckel recalled the typical reaction to the report: “What? This is happening here? No. Come on. That’s crazy.” But, for her, she said, curiosity became an “obsession.”

During previous social work in Philadelphia, Huckel, 33, had already seen the connection between poverty and commercial sex. “No one wakes up as a little girl one day and says, ‘I think I’m going to be a prostitute. That’s a great career for myself,’ ” she said. “Because of poverty, of gender oppression, of life situations and circumstances of being coerced, oftentimes forced, you are then forced into prostitution.”

Yet, like many Americans at the time, Huckel was stunned by what she learned about the scale of sex trafficking. “The more and more that I learned, the more broken I became for wanting to do something about this,” she said.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 11:23 AM | Comments (6)

Confessions of a Beth Moore Convert

Americans are becoming more biblically illiterate than ever. The Barna Group reports that fewer than half of us can name the four Gospels. Sixty percent of us couldn’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and fewer still could name two or three of the disciples.

The now-deceased but ever-respected Michael Spencer warned that this illiteracy was only part of the free-fall that is seeping into evangelicalism. Spencer warned in 2009, in the widely read "The Coming Evangelical Collapse": “Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.”

Spencer was right. We have managed to busy ourselves with issues that have us flailing about in shallow waters, rather than investing in the disciplines of our faith. We find it sexier to participate in a march advocating prayer in schools than to actually spend time praying. We’d rather sit at Starbucks discussing the Bible than to spend time reading it.

Bible Study is like homework, right? And everyone knows, homework is, like, so B-O-R-I-N-G.

Unless, you happen to be Beth Moore.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 4:50 PM | Comments (67)

'Mother Teresa of Our Age' Talks to Her.meneutics

Vesicovaginal fistulas (VVFs) and the people who champion their eradication are fascinating. For Dr. L. Lewis Wall’s Christianity Today piece “Jesus and the Unclean Woman,” I spent a lot of time learning about VVFs for the accompanying news article, and enjoyed a refresher course for documentary review of A Walk to Beautiful for Her.meneutics. But I finally got to the heart of the story when I met Dr. Catherine Hamlin last month.

The world knows Hamlin’s name. The Australian obstetrician-gynecologist has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof dubbed her “the Mother Teresa of our age,” and Oprah has featured her story. However, Hamlin’s most striking quality is her Christian faith. It has driven her life’s work in healing women with VVFs in Ethiopia and her goal to end VVF worldwide by the end of the century. During her trip to launch Hamlin Fistula USA — the newest member of Hamlin Fistula International — 87-year-old Hamlin sat down with me to talk.

Hamlin and her late husband, Reginald, also an obstetrician-gynecologist, were initially hired to work at an Ethiopian government hospital in 1959. “I believe God put us there. We came across these patients soon after we got there. They touched our hearts so much we stayed working with them.”

However, they soon found themselves overwhelmed by VVF patients. VVFs are holes or tears that occur during labor where the baby cannot be delivered without intervention, such as a cesarean section. The child usually dies, and the women are incontinent and become outcasts because of their condition. It is unknown how many women suffer from VVF as it usually strikes those in poor, rural areas, but one estimate puts the figure at 3 million women worldwide.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:48 AM | Comments (10)

Catherine Clark Kroeger, Remembered

It’s hard to do justice to a lifetime of Christian service in just over an hour. But for a group of 75 professors, students, and family who gathered this weekend at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Kaiser Chapel for the memorial service of Catherine Clark Kroeger, we came close.

Surprise and disappointment lingered over Catherine’s sudden death February 14 from complications due to pneumonia, Lyme disease, and grief over the death of her spouse of 60 years, Richard Clark Kroeger Jr., who died three months ago. Yet the service focused not on her untimely passing but on her God-honoring life.

Scott Gibson, director of the Center of Preaching at Gordon-Conwell and professor of preaching and ministry, gave the call to worship and prayer. As a bulk of Catherine’s work was dedicated to espousing the equality of men and women in both Christian ministries and homes — notably in The IVP Women's Bible Commentary and No Place for Abuse — it was especially significant that teachers and students of homiletics were touched by her work.

Kroeger's work impacted Christian theology, but her academic focus was the role of women in the early church, classics, and human sexuality and relationships. Aida Spencer, one of her colleagues in the New Testament department, read one of the most cited passages on men and women in the Bible, Galatians 3:23-29: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Aida, with her husband, William David Spencer, who also gave remarks at the service, work for the Priscilla Papers, a journal that serves the academic community on issues of biblical equality and is an outlet of Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), the organization that Catherine founded in 1988. She served as the Minneapolis-based organization's president until 2001, when Mimi Haddad stepped in.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:44 AM | Comments (13)

Carla Barnhill, America's Next Advice Columnist?

Two months ago, Carla Barnhill was just a multitasking mom from Minnesota who did freelance writing and editing on the side. After working at several Christianity Today sister publications in suburban Chicago — editing Campus Life for several years before helming Christian Parenting Today magazine — Barnhill returned to Minneapolis to raise a family, continue writing and editing, and teach a writing class as a Bethel University adjunct professor.

Today, Barnhill is on the brink of becoming a celebrity of sorts, as one of the final four candidates for the new “advice guru” for ABC’s Good Morning America (GMA). More than 15,000 applied for the gig, and Barnhill has impressed the GMA producers enough to make it to the final round. While viewers have been voting online (Barnhill and Cooper Boone are far ahead of the other two finalists), the final decision, to come in the next couple weeks, rests with GMA.

Barnhill was interviewed live on GMA last week by hosts George Stephanopoulos and Elizabeth Vargas. While the appearance went well, Barnhill emphasizes that the “advice guru” gig is a writing job. That’s what attracted her in the first place: “It’s a journalism job. It’s writing about people and their lives, in a way to help them out. That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s what I love to do most.” (See her latest advice on fear-filled parenting here.) CT senior associate editor Mark Moring spoke with Barnhill about the competition — and broke the glass ceiling as Her.meneutics’ first male contributor.

What are your strengths for being an advice guru?

The writing part. That’s what I’ve been doing for 15 years. I’m a pretty intuitive person. I have a good sense of people, of what makes relationships work. Every problem is really a relationship problem, when you get down to it. I’m good at helping people get to the root of their relationship challenges.

You told GMA that most people know what they should do, but that they just need a nudge.

I think most people are good and want their relationships to work. But we don’t always know what to do. We let other things get in the way, or we let ourselves get talked into something that we don’t want to do. Sometimes you’ve just got to weed through the muck with people and help them see, “This is the right thing to do. It’s not going to be easy, but here’s how you can do it in a way that will work.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:25 AM | Comments (1)

The American Red Cross's Knight in Shining Pearls

The chairman of the American Red Cross — the humanitarian organization founded by Clara Barton in 1881 — is, actually, not a chairman. Bonnie McElveen-Hunter was appointed the first woman to the position by President George W. Bush in June 2004. Before that, the North Carolina native served two years as the Ambassador to the Republic of Finland, where she was knighted for starting a women business leader’s summit and an anti-trafficking campaign. In all her spare time, she is the founder-CEO of Pace Communications, and served as finance chairman of Elizabeth Dole’s bid for the U.S. presidency. (Dole became the first female president of the American Red Cross in 1996.)

But the work McElveen-Hunter believes God has called her to is with the American Red Cross, which deploys over 1 million volunteers annually to people devastated by natural disasters and political conflicts. McElveen-Hunter, who recently began her third term as Red Cross chairman, spoke with Her.meneutics editor Katelyn Beaty about women in business, Haiti’s cholera outbreak, and why she is handing the John M. Templeton Biblical Values Award, recently awarded her by the National Bible Association, over to her mother.

While in Finland, you established the Women Business Leaders Summit in Helsinki. Then you founded the United Way Women’s Leadership Initiative and a women’s initiative in Greensboro. Why are women so invaluable in today’s economic sectors?
I believe commerce is the most important force in the world today. It’s what ushers in the social, economic, and political change. And if you can create opportunity for women, guess what they do? They help each other. They help their families, and it creates dignity of purpose. The money that’s generated goes to improve people’s lives as opposed to sometimes, with the other gender in some nations, you find that it’s pretty much squandered. So women are really good investments.

I also think women are . . . focused on nurturing and are focused on others. We’re focused on common goals, so we unite and work together. All of those are traits that are so appropriate in the world today, whether it’s business, Wall Street, [or] philanthropy — [they require] the ability to build relationships to do anything in this world, to be successful in business. In the publishing business, you have to build relationships with your readers, with advertisers, with colleagues. And women are uniquely gifted in this arena, for this time.

If you want to look at nations that succeed in this world, they are nations that recognize that destiny requires 100 percent of their resources, both male and female. The nations that are not succeeding, in many cases they are utilizing only 50 percent of their resources. You can’t compete in a global market today without the full utilization of your citizens.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:15 AM | Comments (2)

The Great Chinese Orphan Rescuer

Siew Mei Ang Cheung knows what it's like to be marginalized. Growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, she was subject to an educational quota system that she says limited ethnic minorities’ opportunities. The precocious youngster was undaunted by the challenges, however, and earned a Kentucky Fried Chicken scholarship to attend high school in England. There, she keenly felt the sting of isolation, but it caused her to reevaluate her priorities and dig deep into the Word of God.

As a 21-year-old college student, Ang Cheung sensed a call to use her talents to address injustice, inequality, and exploitation. At 23, she began working with Vietnamese refugees in Liverpool. Today Ang Cheung is executive director of Christian Action, a 25-year-old, Hong Kong-based organization with a multimillion-dollar budget that provides vital services to refugees, foreign domestic workers, and abandoned children.

Ang Cheung so identifies with the immigrant experience that she never saw herself as Chinese. After many years of working with refugees, she had a dream about an abandoned baby girl in a Chinese hospital whose situation was hopeless. She woke up in tears. The dream involved a friend who refused to help the baby. When she told him about it, he said he and his wife had thought of adopting from China but had decided it would be too difficult. “God revealed my heart to you,” he told Ang Cheung.

She says this was the first confirmation that God was calling her to direct her energy (and Christian Action’s resources) toward the plight of Chinese orphans. The second was when a Chinese national who lived in Australia smuggled an abandoned baby girl out of China and asked for Ang Cheung’s help in adopting her. The third was visiting a state-run Chinese orphanage for herself and seeing how desperate the situation was in the early 1990s.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:20 AM | Comments (5)

Mildred Jefferson: 'A Physician, a Citizen, and a Woman'

There are few who can discuss abortion from as many perspectives as those held by Mildred Jefferson — the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a lifelong pro-life activist, who passed away on October 15 at age 84.

She could talk about it as a doctor. She could talk about it as a woman. And, she could talk about it as a black woman.

Born to a Methodist minister in east Texas, Jefferson earned degrees from Texas College and Tufts University before graduating from Harvard in 1951. A surgical internship at Boston City Hospital eventually led to another trailblazing accomplishment: becoming the first female doctor at the former Boston University Medical Center.

Jefferson's involvement in the pro-life movement was prompted in the 1970s by a resolution passed by the American Medical Association allowing members to perform abortions if the procedure was legal in their states. She helped to found the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and served as its president for three years, along with serving in several other pro-life groups.

Darla St. Martin of the NRLC told New York Times reporter Dennis Hevesi that no one spoke for the pro-life movement better than Jefferson: “She probably was the greatest orator of our movement. In fact, take away the probably.”

Hevesi also recollects Jefferson’s 1981 testimony before Congress in favor of a bill that would have turned abortion into legal murder:

Dr. Jefferson, a surgeon, was speaking in support of a bill, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, that sought to declare that human life “shall be deemed to exist from conception.” Had it passed, it would have allowed states to prosecute abortion as murder. “With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family,” Dr. Jefferson continued to testify, “the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn.”

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:43 AM | Comments (12)

Freed by Bill Clinton, Saved by Jesus

Three Christians in the past year have drawn attention to North Korea’s repressive regime by crossing the river that divides the Communist nation from China. But unlike activists Robert Park and Aijalon Gomes, who wanted to get arrested, Euna Lee was just trying to do her job: reporting for Current TV on the plight of North Korean defectors. On March 17, 2009, she and fellow journalist Laura Ling were dragged by soldiers across the frozen Tumen River, then separated, interrogated, and imprisoned for five months.

In month four, Lee, a South Korean Christian, began walking and praying seven hours every day. And the walls of Jericho came tumbling down: After mounting pressure from human-rights groups and the intervention of Bill Clinton, the women were sent home on August 4. Days later, Lee was worshiping alongside husband Michael and daughter Hana at The Rock Church in San Diego.

In The World Is Bigger Now (Broadway), Lee recounts her efforts to retain hope and trust in God amid a 12-year prison sentence and threats of never seeing her family again.

You start the book by describing being dragged across the Tumen River by North Korean soldiers. You write, “As a Christian I always believed God would protect me. But where was he now? Why wasn’t he helping us?” As you look back on your hardships in prison, where was God?
When we were violently dragged by the North Korean soldiers from the Chinese side, I screamed for help, and I hoped that God would send somebody to rescue me from the situation. When I realized that no one was coming, I was desperate, and I felt so defeated.
I prayed every day crying out for help, but at the same time I was trying to figure things out by myself — what I could do, what I could not do. But whenever I told God, “Okay, it’s in your hands, I trust you,” all the burdens lifted from my shoulders. And there was a period of time that I got letters from my husband and friends and brothers and sisters from church, and all the letters told me that my husband and my daughter were okay. It felt like God telling me, “Don’t worry about them. They’re in my hands.”

Even though there were times I was impatient with God’s answer and was mad at him — I yelled at him and [called him] a liar — he sustained me. I journaled almost every day, and I made a wish list of things I wanted to do when I got home. One day recently, my husband and I realized we had done a lot of the activities on the list without planning. We were talking at our dining table, and we said, “God is so good. He is good.”

How did your faith inform your journalism work and your decision to go to North Korea on assignment with CurrentTV?
I believe God gives people different talent and wants to use them. As an editor, I was always looking for a bigger purpose [for] why God would put me in this position. When I learned about the North Korean defectors' situation from the documentary Seoul Train, I knew I had to something to help those people. And then when I was given the opportunity to tell their story, I was excited. I felt I finally found something that God wanted me to do.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:40 AM | Comments (9)

Iranian Christian Women Acquitted

Two high-profile Christian women were acquitted by judges in Iran in May after they were arrested in March of 2009 on charges of anti-state activity, spreading Christianity, and apostasy.

Maryam Rostampour, 28, and Marzieh Amirizadeh, 31, are both Iranian converts to Christianity. The women, who evangelized and passed out Bibles, were jailed after authorities raided the apartment they shared and found Christian literature. They spent about eight months in prison, and another six months on conditional release while waiting for their trial.

Iran acquitted the women on the charges of spreading Christianity and apostasy. (The anti-state activity charge had been dropped earlier.) But the women were warned that any further actions would be dealt with severely.

The two fled the country, and were reunited with Sam and Lin Yeghnazar, their spiritual parents and founders of Elam Ministries, a ministry to Iranian Christians.

“It was very emotional when we first saw them,” Lin Yeghnazar said. “Now, we want to see them rest and recover.”

The women said they were grateful to everyone who prayed for them. “I believe our arrest, imprisonment and subsequent release were in the timing and plan of God, and it was all for His glory,” Rostampour said. “But the prayers of people encouraged and sustained us throughout this ordeal.”

The ordeal included pressure to recant their faith, repeated interrogations, weeks in solitary confinement, and unhealthy prison conditions, according to Elam Ministries. Both also became seriously ill while imprisoned and did not receive proper treatment.

“We have seen the Lord do miracles over and over again,” Amirizadeh said. “He kept us and gave us favor in prison, and sustained us during a very difficult period of waiting for our final trial.” The women could have been sent back to jail, or even sentenced to death, for apostasy.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 10:28 AM | Comments (2)

The Brave Women of the Catholic Church

In the second NPR essay, novelist and poet Julianna Baggott writes of leaving the church but retaining her Catholic identity. She honors the nuns and priests who welcomed and educated her mother during a troubled childhood and who schooled Baggott in a radical, inclusive faith. Baggott credits the church for shaping her as a writer, for “the basic rule of storytelling is show, don't tell. Christianity shares this idea — the word made flesh. Of all the Christian denominations, no one does more bloody, impassioned showing than Catholicism.”

Finally, religion scholar Donna Freitas, who has published a guest essay on Her.meneutics, debuted her new Washington Post column called “Stubborn Catholic” this week. Her first post revealed her own experience with priestly sexual impropriety. That experience left a scar, but that scar is only one piece of her Catholic identity. Catholicism “is my family, my friends, my professional life as a theologian and scholar of religion. It's the way I mark time during the week and the year and the food I cook depending on the holiday. It is a childhood and a lifetime of experience.”

These women are so brave. To understand why, just read the comments following their essays (although really, I want to say don’t, because the vitriol is discouraging, sometimes sickening). There is so much scorn, from those who accuse the writers of delusion for believing in any kind of religion, of sheep-like stupidity for their allegiance to such a damaged old institution, or of traitorous malice for speaking publicly of their church’s faults.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 8:53 AM | Comments (13)

Would I Have Hid Jews During the Holocaust?

This Monday marked the passing of Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group that hid Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust. Gies, the Christian Dutch woman who died at age 100 after a fall, is credited with preserving Anne's diary and giving it to Anne's father, Otto (the only member of Anne's family to survive the death camps), after the Holocaust.

Reading about Gies's death reminded me of falling in love as a teenager with The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom's story of hiding Jews in Holland during World War II. Despite the horror within its pages, I read the book over and over, moved by ten Boom's incredible faith. "I would do that," I told myself as I read the book. "If I had lived then, I would have done exactly what her family did. I would not have stood silently by."

In college I cried my way through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and attended a lecture by a woman who had been active in the movement to shelter Jews in Poland. I had impassioned conversations with friends about what we would have done, had we lived then. "We would have helped," we said. But what if such helping endangered our parents, our loved ones? Well, then we didn't know. We weren't quite sure. We hoped we would have found it within ourselves to do the right thing.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 4:01 PM | Comments (11)

The Real Problem with Mary's Baby Bump

This Christmas you may hear a sermon or two comparing today's unwed mothers with a well-known one from the ancient Mideast: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Reflecting on the alleged public shame Mary endured as an unmarried mom-to-be, we hear, the single moms in our midst deserve our special compassion and care. (Christianity Today's most recent issue featured Bob Smietana's reported piece on churches' support for single moms.)

Without discounting the crucial need to support single moms and their children and stand against the shame that our culture can dish out to them, Lynn Cohick, associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, suggests a different read of Mary’s story. In her recent book, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, she researches the historical context of marriage and motherhood in the first century A.D., and believes that Mary did not experience shame during her pregnancy. Cohick explains.

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Mary was betrothed to Joseph, which was a legally binding arrangement in the Jewish culture. All that awaited the couple was the wedding. If they engaged in sexual intercourse with each other, that was not seen as a violation of any cultural norm. Later rabbinic writings allowed that a future groom who had sexual relations with his bride-to-be at her father’s house was not guilty of immoral behavior.

If pregnancy occurred before the wedding, this was not a problem because the parentage of the child was secured. What is shocking is that Mary is pregnant and Joseph knows he is not the father. The problem is not that a betrothed couple had sex, but that presumably Mary had sex with another man — she committed adultery.

This explains Joseph’s reaction to divorce her, for that was the legal remedy when faced with infidelity during the betrothal period. And as Matthew tells us, Joseph wanted a quiet, “no fault” divorce (Matt. 1:19). This probably reflects the current perspective on divorce that was promulgated by at least one group of Pharisees, the Hillelites. They argued that Deuteronomy 24:1 should be interpreted that a man must divorce his wife for infidelity/adultery and also for any matter that seemed right to him. Another group of Pharisees, the Shammaites, held that Deuteronomy 24:1 taught that only for adultery could a husband write divorce papers.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 8:01 AM | Comments (10)

Iranian Christian Women Freed from Evin Prison

Coming on the heels of the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (Nov. 8), Christian religious-freedom groups celebrated a victory yesterday in Iran. Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad, 30, and Maryam Rustampoor, 27 — two Iranian converts to Christianity — were freed after being imprisoned for 259 days.

Authorities raided the women’s apartment, which contained "Christian literature," on March 5. The women were charged with anti-state activity, spreading Christianity, and apostasy (deserting one’s faith), and were placed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

In Iran, apostasy alone is punishable by execution or life in prison. The country has been placed on several watch lists of places that repress religious freedom. Recently, Iran has come under fire for jailing believers following raids on churches and homes belonging to Christians.

While in custody, reports came that the two women endured “intense interrogations which have reportedly included sleep deprivation and other psychological pressure.” In the past, Evin in particular has been accused of denying its inmates basic rights, and both women suffered from poor health that went untreated. Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari just released a memoir about her hellish eight-month stay in Evin following a routine visit in 2006 with her elderly mother.

Additionally, the women were heavily pressured to reclaim Islam. Back in August, a judge urged them to renounce Christianity. When Esmaeilabad and Rustampoor would not do so, they were sent back to jail “to think about it.” According to BosNewsLife, at one point in the hearing, one of the women said God had spoken to them through the Holy Spirit:

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:40 AM | Comments (4)

Wheaton Students Advocate for Woman President

Out of the 111 members schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), six are led by female presidents. Some current and former Wheaton College students are hoping their alma mater becomes the seventh, once president Duane Litfin retires in mid-2010.

An “Open Letter to the Presidential Selection Committee” — penned by ’05 male graduate Ariah Fine and posted online Friday, October 23 — “strongly encourage[s] the committee to search diligently for a female or minority candidate to be in the final pool of candidates.” Circulated primarily on Facebook, the letter calls on the committee to uphold its stated commitment to hire someone who will “champion ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.”

As of November 2, the letter has garnered 351 signatures, and was sent to the committee right before the application deadline of November 1. Fine said he received confirmation that the committee had received this letter and a similar one he sent this spring, but hasn't heard from any of the committee members.

The letter claims that the number of white male presidents leading CCCU schools is much higher than those leading secular U.S. colleges, citing the statistic that only 2 percent of CCCU schools are led by females, compared with 21.1 percent of secular schools. Fine said he found these statistics from a 2005 Christian Higher Ed article summary available online, and makes this screenshot available.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 11:50 AM | Comments (21)

Reforming a Girls' Reformatory

In August, Beloit Juvenile Correctional Facility in northern Kansas closed its doors. Heather Hollingsworth’s coverage for the Associated Press highlights the triumphs and downfalls of one of the country’s longest-running girls’ reformatories.

Beloit was started in 1888 by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which ran it for a year or two before handing it over to the state. A separate reformatory for juveniles was still a relatively new concept; up until the mid-19th century, children and adult were jailed in the same facility.

Beloit's WCTU had good intentions to shape “incorrigible” youth into morally upright women. Like other reformatories, girls at Beloit worked in the gardens or at nearby farms and took care of the institute’s animals.

“But with the high-minded ideals of the reformers, there was a dark side as well,” explained Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council for Juvenile Correctional Administrators in Braintree, Massachusetts. “These kids were an eyesore for the upper classes of society. The solution wasn’t to change the conditions they were growing up in, the poverty and lack of parental supervision. The view was to get them out of sight. Then people forgot they were there, and abuses crept into the system.”

One of Beloit’s worst times took place between 1935 and 1936 under superintendent Lula Coyner. With a growing belief in eugenics, Coyner forced 62 girls, nearly half of Beloit’s inhabitants, to be sterilized. The girls had to go to the police to stop Coyner, who was planning for more residents to have their fallopian tubes removed. Under other superintendents, girls had been physically and emotionally abused in other ways.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:04 AM | Comments (2)

Signs of Faith in Sarah Palin's Book?

Sarah Palin may not be writing a second autobiography for Christian audiences as previously reported, but perhaps her evangelical co-author will persuade her to include more details about her faith.

Shortly after she was nominated as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, media outlets seemed to dig for details about her Pentecostal background. But the focus on Palin's faith appeared to fade after the election as she became a grandmother, battled with her daughter's ex-fiancee, and resigned from her Alaska office.

Palin's 400-page memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, is due out from HarperCollins and Zondervan November 17. (Coincidentally, it's the same day Zondervan releases Rick Warren's The Hope You Need. Warren became the target of criticism after he was chosen to lead the benediction at President Obama's inauguration.)
Going Rogue's product description suggests that Palin will write about "the importance of faith and family," but is still fairly vague. She chose to work on her book with Lynn Vincent, co-author of Same Kind of Different As Me (which is becoming a movie starring Samuel L. Jackson), and a former writer for World magazine.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 12:19 PM | Comments (27)

Keri Wyatt Kent: The Priority of Neighbor-Love

Keri Wyatt Kent, a Chicago-based author known for her writing on spiritual formation, wants her most recent book, Simple Compassion, to connect readers’ inner world to the larger world and its need for justice seekers. In each of the book’s 52 devotions, Kent provides Compassion Steps (looking inward) and Community Steps (providing tips for group discussion and outreach efforts). In the end, Kent says, she wants her readers to remember the small but effective steps they can take to serve Christ in others. Christianity Today intern Elissa Cooper recently spoke with Kent.

How does Simple Compassion relate to your other books?
My other books are about spiritual formation — about connecting your faith with everyday life. If we are being formed in the image of Christ, then we have to look at what Christ was like. He was a compassionate person. He reached across social lines, he associated with people who were poor, and he associated with people of different social standings than him. If we are being formed in the image of Christ, then we are developing a heart for the poor and for those on the margins of society. Compassion is the logical next step in spiritual formation.

What exactly is compassion, and why is it so challenging?
Compassion is caring about the welfare of someone else as much as you care about your own welfare, which is what Jesus calls us to do. It’s challenging because we are naturally hardwired to look out for ourselves. That’s one thing we in 21st-century America have lost sight of: the Christian life is not the life of health and wealth and ease. It’s challenging to live a life of compassion, but I think it’s more rewarding, just like anything that’s challenging.

You write that many Christian women believe they can’t make a difference, or that others don’t want them to use their gifts. Do women have a more difficult time acting on compassion than men do?

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:50 AM | Comments (1)

In Their Own Words: Laura Ling and Euna Lee

Much has been written about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists captured this March, imprisoned for five months in North Korea, and released on August 6. But on Wednesday, for the first time, their story was told in their own words.

Lee and Ling’s story has unfolded over the past few months, and I have watched with interest, both because they are journalists and because they are women. I have tried to see myself in their situation in order to understand what they went through. But I have to admit, it is difficult to imagine myself hiking at sunrise across the border from China into North Korea, living in a third-world prison — or flying on a jet with Bill Clinton. It is even hard to imagine how they felt, behind the scenes, when they taped the “thank you” video posted the week after their return, much less during the ordeal in prison.

Instead, as I followed the story, I kept coming back to unanswered questions: Who are these women? What motivates them? And how did they survive?

Their statement didn’t do much to answer these questions, but this sentence at least provides a clue: “One of us, Euna, is a devout Christian whose faith infused her interest in the story.” Slowly, a new mental picture forms that is based on our shared faith.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:21 AM | Comments (3)

Juanita Bynum Returns to Conference Stage

“This too shall pass,” Pentecostal teacher Juanita Bynum wrote to fans after months of intense media attention following a 2007 parking-lot assault by her husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks. Now, it appears it has.

Renaming herself “Juanita Bynum II” on her website, Bynum has signaled a return to speaking at conferences for Christian women. Now, with media attention swinging her way once more, the question is how — and how long — Bynum, who first gained notability for drawing large crowds at T. D. Jakes’s “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” conferences, will be defined by her past.

In a strange case of symmetry, last month Paula White, a high-profile Pentecostal teacher whose marriage unraveled around the same time as Bynum’s, made news when she took the helm of Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Florida. The two break-ups made headlines in part because they seemed to reveal a pattern, leading Charisma and Time magazines to ask, “Is Marriage Still Sacred?” and “Are Mega-Preachers Scandal Prone?” Time interpreted the incidents as proof that “divorce, once a taboo in evangelical culture, is now a fact of life.”

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 11:55 AM | Comments (35)

Jenny Sanford Offers Forgiveness After Husband's Affair

You have to dig a bit, but Vogue's feature story on South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford is sprinkled with hints at the importance of her faith. The wife of Mark Sanford left the governor's mansion earlier this month to live in their home on the coast after her husband admitted to having an affair with an Argentine woman.

Unlike other women in high-profile political scandals, Jenny Sanford was praised by many for not standing idly by her husband during press conferences to save him face. She gave her first post-affair interview to Vogue, explaining how startled she was about the affair. "The person I married was centered on a core of morals," she says. "The person who did this is not centered on those morals.”

The reporter's first description is a bit odd (the Sanfords have wine on the kitchen counter!), but it sets a scene for the rest of the article.

The Sanfords are conservative Christians, but they’re not the teetotaling, proselytizing sort. There are bottles of wine on the kitchen counter. Ayn Rand is on the bookshelf, but so is Gabriel García Márquez. The Bible sits front and center on the coffee table, alongside Forbes magazine. “You could be friends with her for 20 years, and she would never bring up the religious stuff,” says her friend Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina and a self-described liberal who once worked for The Nation.

So we discover that Christians can drink wine and read and be friends with liberals. Moving on.

The author explains that faith was an important part of Sanford's childhood, but only touches on it briefly. "As a girl, she saw her father kneel next to the bed in daily prayer," Rebecca Johnson writes. "Faith also helped the Sullivan children cope with their mother’s longtime battle with skin cancer and the debilitating treatments she underwent to fight it."

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 4:27 PM | Comments (35)

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 1921-2009

I saw Eunice Kennedy Shriver once, in December of 1963. I was standing at the back of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., waiting for a Mass in honor of her brother, John F. Kennedy, to begin. Most of the Kennedy family was seated in front when Mrs. Shriver arrived. She rushed past, so close I could have reached out and patted her full-length fur coat.

She was tall, with disheveled brown hair and hastily applied red lipstick. Her face was lined with grief. I saw other Kennedys that day, but Mrs. Shriver is the only one I remember — a 42-year-old, very pregnant force of nature, a woman in pain who knew exactly where she was going. That brief image keeps flashing across my mental screen as I read tributes to one of America’s truly great women, who died Tuesday at the age of 88.

A woman in an era when wealthy women did not work and almost no women went into politics, she may have achieved even more than her more famous brothers. Carla Baranauckas for The New York Times:

“When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” U.S. News & World Report said in its cover story of Nov. 15, 1993.

A child of privilege with personal connections to pomp and power, she worked tirelessly on behalf of the marginalized. J. Y. Smith for The Washington Post:

Her first job was with the State Department in Washington, where she was part of a program to help former prisoners of war become acclimated to civilian life. . . .

In 1947 and 1948, she was executive secretary of the Justice Department's National Conference on the Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency. Having gained control of a $1 million trust fund at 21, she accepted a salary of $1 a year.

In 1950, she became a social worker at the federal penitentiary for women in Alderson, W.Va. In 1951, she moved to Chicago and worked at the House of the Good Shepherd, a youth shelter, and with the city's juvenile court system.

A prominent Democrat who disagreed with her party’s increasingly pro-choice stance, she stood up for the unborn and protested the abortion-rights agenda. The Susan B. Anthony List:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an early supporter of the Susan B. Anthony List and its mission to advance, mobilize and represent pro-life women in the political process. She and her husband, Sargent Shriver, also lent their time and talents to the efforts and activities of Democrats for Life of America and Feminists for Life.

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

Nancy Guthrie: Hearing Jesus Speak Into Your Sorrow

Nancy Guthrie is no stranger to suffering. After her second child, Hope, died within a year of birth from Zellweger syndrome, a rare, fatal genetic abnormality, Guthrie began writing Holding On to Hope, a book about coping with loss and grief. She was in the final stages of writing when she became pregnant with a third child, Gabriel, who was also diagnosed with Zellweger. Gabriel lived for six months.

Since Gabriel's death, Guthrie has written many books and articles, and has traveled around the country speaking at conferences about the Christian response to suffering. Her latest work, Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow (Tyndale), which came out last month, is an expansion of themes introduced in her previous books, adding, as Nancy writes in the introduction, "the perspective of years and further understanding of the Scriptures." Her.meneutics contributor Ruth Moon talked to Guthrie about the health-and-wealth gospel and how to comfort friends who are grieving.

What place do you want Hearing Jesus Speak into Your Sorrow to have on the bookshelf of Christian books about suffering? What niche does it fill?

I hope this book is not a "grief" book. It speaks to people who are grieving, but I hope people see it as a theological book. I hope that the book would be that theological thinking through of suffering, but also an invitation to those of us who say that Jesus means everything to us and that we want to follow him, to live that out in the hardest, lowest places of life, that when we enter into unimaginable suffering, it's obvious that Jesus is still everything to us, that he is still the solid ground beneath our feet, and that he is who we're grabbing hold of and depending on and whom we love and treasure and trust.

You organize this book around 11 statements from Jesus on suffering, such as, "I, Too, Have Heard God Tell Me No," and "I Am Giving Life to Those Who Believe in Me." Do you feel you learned anything while writing those statements?

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 8:48 AM | Comments (4)

Women's Groups Lash Out at Letterman in Palin's Defense

Several women's groups have joined Sarah Palin's fight with David Letterman over his joke that Palin's daughter got "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez during their recent trip to New York.

"It's worse than poor taste; it reflects ugliness in him. He would never say something like that about a liberal woman," president of Concerned Women for America Wendy Wright said in a statement. "But rather than deal with issues and ideas, he denigrates her as a human being."

The Alaska governor characterized Letterman's jokes as a reference to "statutory rape" since the only child with her at the game was her 14-year-old daughter, Willow. Letterman said the following night that the joke was in "poor taste," but he says he was joking about 18-year-old Bristol Palin, not Willow.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 11:35 AM | Comments (19)

Q+A: Kaffie McCullough on Craigslist

The same feature that has made Craigslist so popular - namely, unlimited free advertising - has brought the decade-old website under heavy criticism for providing unmonitored forums for prostitution in its 570 city hubs. After several state representatives met with Craigslist attorneys Wednesday, the site agreed to remove its "erotic services" section and replace it with an "adult services" section, in which posts will cost $5-10 and be manually reviewed by staff before going up.

While adding oversight to the free-for-all forum is an improvement, it's simply not enough - especially for stopping the sexual exploitation of children. Kaffie McCullough, who for eight years has led a statewide campaign to stop the prostitution of children in Georgia, is one skeptic. Her initiative, the Atlanta-based A Future. Not a Past. program, a wing of the Juvenile Justice Fund, released a study just this week on Craigslist and child prostitution. It showed that out of the 334 known adolescent girls in Georgia's sex trade, about 53 percent are advertised through Craigslist's erotic services section - what McCullough calls the "ground zero for pimps to profit from children." Further, the number of girls being pimped on Craigslist rose dramatically from November 2008 (100 girls) to February 2009 (176).

McCullough spoke recently with blog editor Katelyn Beaty about Craigslist's decision.

What was your response to yesterday's announcement?
I'm grateful that Craigslist is trying to monitor what's happening, because their erotic services [section] was clearly a place where young girls were being prostituted. I have mixed feelings as to whether this is going to work. I'd want to know what they mean when they say they're going to "monitor" it. And without training staff, for instance, the research that we've been doing since August 2007 says that people were not accurate when they'd make estimates as to whether somebody is young or not. I'd like to think Craigslist would be open to having training so that staff can screen more effectively.

I realize that all of this makes it harder for the perpetrators, but . . . the reality is that even if Craigslist had totally taken it down, that wouldn't stop the problem of the prostitution of children - it would just spring up somewhere else.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 9:33 AM | Comments (2)

Artist Profile: Anna Kocher

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

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

Where do your faith and your art intersect?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Artist Profile: Anna Kocher" »

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

Elizabeth Lev Defends Mom's Decision to Turn Down Notre Dame

Politics Daily contributor Elizabeth Lev fired a smart defense this morning of Mary Ann Glendon's refusal to accept Notre Dame's Laetare Medal and to speak alongside President Obama at the school's May 17 commencement ceremony. Glendon sent a letter Monday saying she could not accept the medal because of Notre Dame's decision to give an honorary degree to someone whose pro-choice policies sharply contradict Catholic teaching. Lev, based in Rome, summarizes Glendon's consistent life ethic nicely:

Professor Glendon was to have been honored for not only for her scholarship, but for her second career, her pro-bono work - ranging from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the great civil rights issues of the present day - namely, the defense of human life from conception to natural death. Her concerns range from the aging and dying population to the unborn to the well-being and dignity of every life, regardless of race, religion, or economic status. Her outstanding work in this field has earned her the respect of the most brilliant minds of the international community, regardless of whether they agree with her position. So again, to see her merely as "strongly anti-abortion" instead of as a tireless defender of the dignity of life, is to reveal not only a lack of understanding of the subject's work, but also the writer's real interest in this question.

The person labeling Glendon "strongly anti-abortion" was Lev's Politics Daily colleague Kaitlynn Riely, whose Monday column criticized Glendon for not being more diplomatic and "engaging someone of an opposing view . . . [Glendon's] diplomatic style seems to be less suited for U.S.-Vatican relations and more for U.S.-Cuba relations," Riely quipped.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 3:14 PM | Comments (3)

Why Do We Love Susan Boyle?

If you haven't seen the viral video of Susan Boyle yet, take a few minutes to watch it.
It's worth it.

When Boyle appears on the American-Idolish Britain's Got Talent, she admits that she's never been kissed, tells the audience she's 47, and then shakes her hips playfully. The crowd snickers, the judges raise their eyebrows. Within moments of her performance, the crowd rises to their feet to cheer her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," from Les Miserables. Here are the lyrics from the classic piece:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

Several news outlets have referred to her as the church volunteer, and we know a little bit more from Mary Jordan's Washington Post article:

She always wanted to sing in front of a large audience, but mostly she just sings in church. On Easter Sunday, the day after her television debut, Boyle - dubbed "The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell" in one headline - received a standing ovation when she went to Mass.

"We let out a wee bit of a cheer for her. We are quite proud of her," Boyle's parish priest, the Rev. Ryszard Holuka, said in a telephone interview. He added that Boyle is a "quiet soul."

"At gatherings and anniversary parties, she'd stand up and give a song," he said. "She never flaunted her voice; this is the first time it's been publicly recognized."

As Jordan writes, "Many have said it was a poor reflection on both the live audience and others watching that they were surprised when a 'frumpy woman' turned out to have the 'voice of an angel.' "

Here are some other reactions to Boyle's performance from across the Web:

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam Bailey at 1:03 PM | Comments (21)

MIA: Evangelical Women in Public Life

Yesterday, a couple other CT editors and I were attempting, audaciously, to name the most influential evangelicals in public life today. These are people we were calling "bridgebuilders," those who have an activist impulse to reach beyond the walls of the church to shape the broader culture for Christ.

The ones that came to our minds first:
pastors Rick Warren and Tim Keller
political leaders Joshua DuBois, Richard Land, Jim Wallis, and Frank Page
conservative pundits James Dobson and Chuck Colson
apologists Dinesh D'Souza and Lee Strobel
the hard-to-categorize Richard Mouw and Joel C. Hunter

We then spent several minutes trying to find a woman to add to this list of fine leaders, and we left the conversation fruitless. Sure, we could think of a few who had tremendous influence within the church, writing books and teaching the Bible, such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Anne Graham Lotz. But in terms of women doing influential work in American public life, we came up short.

Perhaps our endeavor was based on a faulty premise, that Christians who appear in The New York Times and FOX News are more worthy of our attention here at CT than are those 'normal' Christians who go about the work of ministry in a down-to-earth, local context. Still, can you help us think of the women we have forgotten who are shaping the broader culture for Christ?

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at 10:25 AM | Comments (13)