How do you find the best Bare Marriage episodes? What if you're trying to introduce our podcast to a friend, but you don't know where to start? Or what if you desperately want your husband to listen and understand what you've learned, but it's hard to tell him to...
Safety is the precursor to everything that helps us thrive. Often as the year changes I spend some time between Christmas and New Year's in contemplation and listening, trying to discern what's important to concentrate on in the year ahead. You've all likely seen the...
We're coming full circle for the last podcast of 2025! We started this "season" (I never know how to count the seasons really!) since we came back from summer break talking about right wing authoritarianism, and how it overlaps almost completely with religious...
With thanks to Brazos Press for sponsoring this post. Forgiveness is possible only after we’ve had the opportunity to name our losses. That’s how Susannah Griffith opens the chapter on lamentations in her book Forgiveness After Trauma. We talked about the book on the...
Why does our doctrine of forgiveness and healing often cause so much pain? We’re told the problem is our hearts, that we’re just bitter. But what if it’s not that? What if our teaching on forgiveness has gotten things all wrong? This week, on the podcast, I introduced...
Forgiveness is a concept that has often been weaponized against victims. Whether it's people married to abusers, or people married to someone who has cheated on them or hurt them in some other way, often in the church as long as that person apologizes, the onus is now...
Separate but equal has been tried and failed. So why is the church still using the same arguments about gender? It's International Women's Day, and I thought I'd sum up some of what we said in a podcast yesterday, combined with some great input you all gave me on...
Who is really a complementarian? Just when we think we're finished arguing something, another critique pops up. And honestly--we had SUCH FUN doing this podcast! Keith and I planned it for several days beforehand, going over all the arguments we wanted to use. But it...
The 72 Hour Rule is Made Up by Evangelical Authors. Yep. This month on the blog we're "fact checking" common sex beliefs, and one of the biggest ones in evangelical circles is the 72 hour rule: the idea that a wife must have sex with her husband every 72 hours,...
A few weeks ago, a North Carolina pastor went viral for saying men can’t help but rape. Here's Julie Roys' first tweet about it, with the embedded video, that blew up: Talking about women dressing in shorts: "If you dress like that & you get raped & I'm on the...
Do the 5 Love Languages stand up to scientific scrutiny? In January of this year, an article was published and was called Popular Psychology Through a Scientific Lens: Evaluating Love Languages From a Relationship Science Perspective in the Psychological Science...
Scott was a seriously cute Australian whose accent made me swoon. I was 18-years-old, and attending Capernwray Bible college in England for a semester before I started at Queen’s University the following year. And I spent the first few weeks trying to get Scott’s...
Not everyone who ends up dominating their wife is actually an abuser at heart. What they are doing may be abusive; the same dynamics may be at play, and the same harm may be being done. But it doesn’t always come from the same place. Over and over again since we have...
We're back with Lies Women Believe, Part 2! Last week Natalie Hoffman and Gretchen Baskerville joined us to look at the problems in Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth's book Lies Women Believe, specifically about marriage. But to be honest, there was so much more about this book...
What if marriage isn't supposed to be that hard? This is one of those weird years where Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday land on the same day. For non-liturgical folks who don't follow the church calendar, Ash Wednesday is the day that Christians confess their sins...