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...
Do you find that women's events are often boring--or irrelevant? Every now and then I write something on social media to just start a conversation and it blows up in ways I totally wasn't expecting. That happened last week, when I really hit a nerve, and hundreds of...
Our new marriage survey is all ready to go, with ethics approval and everything! And here’s Joanna Sawatsky, our intrepid stats person and co-author of The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, to tell you all about it and invite you to take it!For years, Sheila...
What if you’re not a stay-at-home mom? I’m processing a lot about the book Stained Glass Ceilings by Lisa Swartz that we talked about yesterday on the podcast. In it, one of Lisa’s big questions was how different faith expressions handle gender, and she studied two...
How do egalitarian and complementarian seminaries differ in how they do gender? Stained Glass Ceilings by Lisa Weaver Swartz is a fascinating book. She interviewed people at two different seminaries--Asbury Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary--to see...
The ESV is a sexist Bible translation. And they even said that when they were translating it! It was commissioned in order to counteract the TNIV translation, which tried to be gender neutral in all places where the Greek was gender neutral, replacing words like "men"...
Sin isn't the cause of all the bad or counterproductive things we do. And blaming it on sin does harm. When you have the wrong diagnosis, you're going to have the wrong solution. And that can actually compound the problem. One of the issues with Christianity over the...
What happens to marriage when a couple becomes egalitarian? On our October 5th Bare Marriage podcast episode (episode 208), I had a fascinating conversation with pastor Terran Williams and learned about how he changed his mind on complementarianism. He was working at...
Has modern Christianity become an echo chamber? And is that leading us to have super bad takes on many issues that are really important? Today we're taking a look at a theme that we've noticed in evangelicalism: anti-intellectualism, and a denial of science and...
Every Friday, 46,000 people receive our weekly email, linking to all of this week’s posts and podcasts, with a summary, so people can make sure they don’t miss anything they’re interested in. But the email also has a big thought authored by Rebecca–not me. And these...
Terran Williams is a pastor whose life was upended when he was assigned a "simple" task. He was working at a large church in South Africa when he was assigned the task of writing up their position paper on complementarianism. They all believed it, but they didn't...
Could the rose-colored glasses effect be masking marital unhappiness? Last month, one of our podcasts worked through some of the issues with claims that complementarian, conservative women had the best marital outcomes. We also wrote a long opinion piece detailing...
Has sex ever become super disgusting to you? I sure hope not, but as we’ve been talking about obligation sex in our current series, I’ve had several comments along those lines, and I’d like to talk about this one in particular today. A woman wrote:I have no idea how...