When my eldest was thirteen months old, my parenting research brought me across the concept of a “yes space.” A “yes space” is an area of the house that you create to be completely and utterly child-friendly. Everything they shouldn’t reach is out of reach. Everything...
Emerson Eggerichs does not handle Scripture appropriately in Love & Respect. So many people defend the book Love & Respect, saying that it is biblical and rooted in Scripture. And, indeed, Emerson Eggerichs has 230 Scripture references in his book. This does...
It is not just that the book Love & Respect contains toxic teachings. It is also that the book doesn't handle the Bible properly, twisting passages, prooftexting, and at times even deleting whole words and phrases so the verses appear to suit his thesis. For the...
Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs is a best-selling, but problematic, book. Love & Respect is the most-used marriage curriculum in North American churches. It came on our radar in 2019, and when we read it we saw some major problems. After posting about those...
Christian leaders should not be trying to convince women to send nude photos. This doesn't seem like it should even have to be said, but earlier this week I put up a Fixed It for You of Gary Thomas' and Debra Fileta's book Married Sex, which had this sentence: Here's...
It's a new year of podcasts--and Lucy Maud Montgomery joins us for the first one! In her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Beth Allison Barr makes the case that the idea that God created the genders with different roles, where men are to lead and women are merely...
What is a biblical woman? When you think biblical woman, do you think gentle and quiet and meek? Do you think someone waiting on the men in her life? There certainly are biblical women like that--but they're the exception. When we look at the actual women in the...
You will never have a healthy sex life if you don't have autonomy over your own body. You just can't. Unless you are free to say yes or to say no, desire can't build, because desire and obligation are at odds with each other. Just as you can't force someone to love...
When it comes to judging marriage advice, how do we figure out what's right? I've been following Robin on Twitter for a while now, blown away by her really insightful threads. She has a great substack where she writes thoughtful articles, and she's recently done some...
A look at Ephesians 5, and how Paul isn’t prescribing hierarchy in marriage. He’s actually showing what mutual submission looks like.
What does the good fruit test that Jesus gave us look like when it comes to marriage and sex advice? How do we know what’s healthy and what’s not? A look at how we often misjudge what good fruit is.
You don't have to have a destructive marriage to be hurt by bad marriage advice. We're ending up our series on Marriage Misdiagnosis, looking at how all too often Christian marriage advice misdiagnoses the problem, and gives the wrong solution. We've talked a lot...
When Christian marriage advice goes wrong, we can end up following it to the letter--and failing our spouses. In the summer, when Rebecca and I were talking about this, one long-time reader sent me in her story, which illustrates this well, and I saved it to run...
If you just have enough faith, and if you just pray enough, then shouldn't God save your marriage? The first women's Bible study I ever went to, I think right around the time Rebecca was born, was for the book Power of a Praying Wife. The book has sold 8,000,000...
We have an addiction to fairytales--even when it comes to marriage. We love the Disney princesses who are rescued by the princes. We love stories of redemption. And we love our miracles! But sometimes I fear that our love and longing for the extraordinary is used in...