Laura survived a rigid and abusive fundamentalist upbringing, then married a Baptist minister who sexually abused her. Now she's an atheist. Vyckie was a wife and mom in the Quiverfull movement who now also leans toward atheism, believing that the Bible necessarily ...

Across most cultures and throughout time, parents have wanted boys more than they have wanted girls. Recently developed technologies are allowing parents to reject their girl children before they are even born.

In India and China, the world's two most populated ...

According to the first single from Beyonce's highly anticipated album 4, girls indeed run the world. Thanks to her musical contribution to First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, her recent Billboard Millennium Award, and surprise farewell performance ...

Give beauty back,
beauty, beauty, beauty,
back to God,
beauty's self and beauty's giver.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.")

"Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"

That's the title of a recent (and promptly removed) ...

Dear Donald,

First of all, I'm a fan. I'll admit I'm not young enough or hip enough to have discovered you on my own, but the college students I teach help me to keep up with the times, and they introduced me to your work some years ago. I love it all, especially ...

For all the ways reality television star and Hollywood socialite Kim Kardashian and I differ from each other, we do share one striking commonality: We both turned 30 this year. And for both of us, our entry into this new decade sounded an alarm on our biological ...

In honor of the official start to summer and my plan to read many books by the pool, I picked up Alan Jacobs' new The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction this past weekend. The book is full of reminders of the joys of reading in the midst of Twitter ...

Nobel-winning novelist V. S. Naipaul recently started a firestorm with his remarks about female writers in general and Jane Austen in particular. According to the Guardian:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who ...

The year Diana Ross's hit song "Love Child" hit the top of the pop charts, I was born to a single mother who was unable to care for me. At three weeks, I was adopted into a family who raised me in an affluent suburb outside of Chicago. The view from the curb was ...

Baptist theologian Russell Moore recently warned, "On the nightstand of a woman in your church, there's a Christian romance novel and a Bible." Yet if The New York Times is to be believed, he should have been more concerned with a vibrator on the nightstand.

Cultural ...

"It's ironic, but I feel that my kids are safer here than living in the U.S.," said Ariella B. I met Ariella nearly two decades ago when we were attending the same Chicago-area congregation. Recently I had a chance to visit her on a recent trip to Israel. She ...

Chances are you know of someone who has lost their sight or hearing wholly or in part. Helen Keller could neither hear nor see but found brilliant ways to articulate her experience. Countless other writers and artists have made their experiences accessible to ...

The technology is new, but the sin is so, so old.

The latest "victim" betrayed by the very technology he thought to have harnessed for his own nefarious ends—in case you've been fast asleep under a rock somewhere—is Rep. Anthony Wiener (D-NY), busted ...

A move to Spokane, Washington, in the summer of 2004 brought many expected changes to our young family of four. There was a new call to pastor a congregation, new schools, a new house. But our home's ready-to-harvest vegetable garden came as one of our biggest ...

I slink into bed, click on my light, and grab the book. Guilt shakes me a bit. After all I've read about these sorts of stories, I figure by the end I'll hate my husband or hunger for more of the escape they offer.

So why do I risk this? Because the night before, ...