You can’t honor your husband into greatness, people. Do a thought experiment with me today. Imagine that you had recently moved to Louisiana, and you hadn’t made a lot of friends yet. Your kids had been playing with some kids down the street who went to a church...
Can there be justice for how the church has hurt people around marriage & sex? I was thinking about that question yesterday after episode 239 of the Bare Marriage podcast dropped, looking at the phenomenon of deconstruction. Specifically I was thinking about the...
Why do people deconstruct and become exvangelicals? Today on the Bare Marriage podcast author Sarah McCammon, an NPR journalist, joins us to talk about her experience with deconstruction, and what she learned interviewing so many people for her new book explaining the...
Some awfully bizarre things happened at the recent Strong Men’s Conference–and Jezebel made an appearance. I don’t even know where to begin, and I don’t want to talk about the conference itself because so many have already done a good job. To sum up, there was one of...
Josh Howerton has made terribly degrading comments about women and sex from the pulpit. His teaching on sex and marriage has been problematic. And I seem to be in the middle of it. Because of that, I've been sent a ton of problematic things about Lakepointe from a lot...
with thanks to Brazos Press and the book Forgiveness After Trauma for sponsoring this post. Divorce is one of the most painful things a person can go through. But often, right when people need help the most, the church abandons them. A few weeks ago on the Bare...
Accountability is a necessary part of forgiveness and reconciliation. And yet often it’s downplayed, where even asking for accountability is somehow proof that you haven’t forgiven. Over the last few weeks we’ve been walking through some amazing truths from Susannah...
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...