I got up at 6 in the morning to watch Lady Diana Spencer marry Prince Charles Sixteen years later, I watched her funeral three times in succession in one day, starting at 4 in the morning (I was up anyway with a baby who didn't sleep). I have tried to expain to my...
Learning how the sausage is made is not always a pleasant experience. But ignorance isn’t always bliss. And knowing the truth is fascinating, and maturing, and mesmerizing even as it evokes horror and disgust. In the last few years there have been a plethora of books...
Fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Those are the common responses we have to trauma. When we face a threat, our body may go into fight mode. We may try to run away (or desperately want to!). We may freeze, feel unable to do anything. Or we may fawn. That last one is a...
A funny thing happened last week for Mother’s Day. The Gospel Coalition, a rather mainstream evangelical organization founded by the late Tim Keller and having entirely male leadership, published a Facebook post. And what was their message for Mother’s Day? Was it...
I’m often accused of swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. Note: this article appeared on my Substack last week, and I wanted it here to to preserve it on my website! Plus I added some good stuff to it! I remember a commenter writing about how her husband was...
Yesterday I had a message from a woman being summoned in to defend herself to a toxic elders' board. She had been going to a very hierarchical, controlling church and had realized it wasn't healthy and had decided to take her family and go elsewhere. The elders' board...
What if pity is actually a good strategy? And what if pity reveals a bit of God's heart too? Let me tell you about something that blew my mind yesterday, and I was dreaming about all night. I saw a reel last night where Jameela Jamil was talking about our reaction to...
How do yo find yourself again after emerging from fundamentalism? Many of us have had religious trauma from our church upbringing, or a dysfunctional marriage where we've stayed because we thought God wanted us to. We've endured so much, and have been taught that our...
Sometimes Jesus shows up in weird places--like cleaning shows. I want to do something different today and let you in a bit on my personal faith reflections. I'm currently on Day 9 of a really bad cold (likely COVID) and my husband is on Day 11 and I think has finally...
Can you tell if a church is healthy using its website? Absolutely! Or at least you can make a pretty good start and eliminate a lot of obviously unhealthy churches. And you can do it in under five minutes! One of the big things we've noticed in our surveys of 40,000...
I've been thinking about the lectionary this Easter holiday. It's still a holiday here in Canada, and I'll be taking most of the day to relax and recuperate from a cold, but I thought I'd write some thoughts I had after all the services at my Anglican church this...
Teaching modesty messages makes church more dangerous for teen girls. That's what our newest paper, out in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, shows. It's based on our dataset for our book She Deserves Better, and the lead author on it (Nicole Gallego)...
I've seen so many social media complementarian messages telling women to take the initiative to fix things. One particular one accused women of pride if they saw a problem in the relationship, but then thought: "he's the leader, go fix it." Women were told to take the...
Preston Sprinkle's new book comes out in favour of egalitarianism! I'm honestly so relieved. I heard about From Genesis to Junia a few months ago, and assumed the worst. He claimed that he was going to take an unbiased look at the scholarship about egalitarianism and...
With thanks to Zondervan and the book To Heal or Harm for sponsoring this post.My husband Keith is in the middle of a 4-part series about why complementarianism has such bad outcomes. He started last week looking at the analogy that complementarians often use when...