Recent Posts

PODCAST: When Evangelical Marriage Advice Mimics Coercive Control
What if evangelical marriage advice actually mimics coercive control? A few months ago I was emailed by Bethany Jantzi when I started talking about The Excellent Wife online. She had just done her dissertation on how The Excellent Wife actually has the same advice and...

How Facebook Gave Me a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
You know when something happens and your heart stops and you start shaking? I had that experience yesterday when someone was able to hack into part of my Facebook business profile. I got sucked in by someone faking an email from a big podcast and pretending to want to...

Why Youth Pastors Shouldn’t “Date” Youth Group Members
Does it really matter if a YOUTH PASTOR dates & marries a GIRL in his youth group? After all, an age difference of 23 and 17 isn't that big a deal, right? It's illegal for a youth pastor to have sexual contact with a girl or boy in the youth group. Most of us know...

How Reading The Excellent Wife Affected Me Personally
The Excellent Wife is a horribly depressing book to read. It was profoundly heavy and sad. When I started writing these onesheets, they didn’t really affect me that much. Most of the books I was going to be reading were ones I had read already, or were ones I had read...

PODCAST: The Problems with The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace
There are few books as harmful to women as The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace sells like hotcakes in biblical counseling/ fundamentalist/ homeschooling circles, and even though it seems like a “fringe” book, it’s affecting tens of...

Problems with The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace: A Review
ONE OF THE THINGS WE’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT ON THIS BLOG IS MAKING SURE THE SELF-HELP AND RELATIONSHIP ADVICE IN THE EVANGELICAL WORLD IS HEALTHY. Over the last few years, our team has surveyed over 32,000 people, measuring how certain teachings common in the evangelical...

10 Reasons Christian Parents Have a Hard Time Giving up Spanking
Spanking your children is not good for them. A huge meta-analysis by Elizabeth Gershoff, done in 2016 of 160,000 children, found that spanking was either a net negative or neutral, but not positive. There are other discipline techniques that work better. In other...

A Review of the Kingdom Girls’ Bible–It’s Awesome!
With thanks to Zonderkidz for sponsoring this post. When my girls were small, one of their biggest pet peeves with church was that they always did the same Bible stories. Whenever they went to summer camp, it would inevitably be: Daniel and the Lions’ Den David and...

PODCAST: The Well-Trained Wife with Tia Levings
What happens to your marriage when you get dragged into fundamentalism? Tia Levings went to a flagship SBC church. She wasn’t supposed to get sucked into fundamentalism. But Tia ended up being stuck in an abusive marriage, trying to fix things by following advice from...

How the Conversation about Lust Has Changed in Seven Years
Seven summers ago I told the truth about lust for the first time. I broke with the program. Up until then, my main focus on the blog had been how to have a good marriage and how to have a good sex life. But in June of 2017, I wrote a week on the blog about the...