Some pastors are not simply unsafe; they are downright dangerous. And some church elder's boards, church's women's ministries, and denominations in general are downright dangerous. We had a horrible example of that earlier this month when John Piper posted a terrible...
How do you know if you're being abused? One of the hardest parts of blogging is reading so many heartbreaking emails and comments that come in from people in truly destructive marriages. I find myself wondering, why do people treat each other this way? And even more...
We're in the middle of our Marriage Misdiagnosis series, talking about how often the church misdiagnoses the problems in marriage--and so offers the wrong solutions. Last week we looked at how often people are pressured to reconcile before trust has been rebuilt....
What if Christian marriage books are telling you that your destructive marriage is normal? We're in the middle of Marriage Misdiagnosis month, where we're looking at how some of the messages given in evangelical marriage books actually talk about marriage problems...
We know that women have a huge problem with sexual shame. Many men do, too, of course! But let's stick with women for a moment here, because when we were reading best-selling books to see trends of how they taught about sex, we noticed a pattern: Quite often men were...
Are you married to a controlling husband? I first ran this post back in 2016, but as we're moving over to our new domain next week, and taking only the posts from 2018 and forward, I wanted to make sure this one came with us! I refer to it a lot. If you're in...
My heart hurts when I hear stories of what happens when women (or children or men, for that matter) are made powerless. In about a week or so we'll be moving the blog over to a new domain, taking only the posts from 2018 with us. I have some posts from pre-2018...
There's been an alarming and disturbing conversation happening on social media lately about how women should choose death over being raped. An abuse advocate was talking to me about it, and how scary this trend was. I then began to see it all over Twitter, and became...
Can we talk about how our messages about a woman's role can actually undermine her safety? Just a quick catch-up for today's post! I want to share a few things I've seen on social media and then throw this open for discussion. I'm taking a bit of a downtime this week...
Unconditional respect isn't a thing. And yet we're often told that men need unconditional respect, just like women need unconditional love. It's summertime, so I'm taking a month off of recording new podcasts, and instead I'm going to highlight some of my favourites...
Let's face the fact that fundamentalist Christianity in North America is basically a sex cult. That's Alyssa Wakefield's conclusion in Part 2 of her story on the Bare Marriage podcast! Listen to last week's episode, where she explains how she was groomed to obey her...
On Friday on his podcast, John Piper told a woman married to a harsh husband to just be gentle with him. Pray more. Remember it might be his personality. Win him with kindness. Show appreciation and call out the good in him. And don't talk to other people about it...
Many of us grew up with toxic faith. I just hope you know you can heal and grow! Did you all see the Humans of New York posts yesterday? Everyone was sending them to me! It was a 15-post story about a woman who "wasn't the first preacher's wife to run away." It's all...
What if you grow up in what you now call a sex cult, and you marry because your dad told you to? Did you really consent to that marriage? And how does it even happen in North America today that girls are being pushed into arranged marriages? Today's podcast sounds...
This was one of those weeks that leaves everyone gasping for air and searching for hope. It started off with two things dropping on Monday: The Southern Baptist Convention report on sexual abuse, which was devastating, and the viral video from a church in Indiana...