Sexuality
Thoughts about how faith affects our approach to gender and sexuality
Fifteen months ago, this blog began with a conversation with Katelyn Beaty about my hopes and dreams for Thin Places. As I conclude this blog, we thought it fitting to have a concluding conversation as well. Katelyn and I had a chance to talk about the most exciting and most challenging aspects of ...
One of the wonderful aspects of blogging is that I get to write about pretty much anything that is on my mind and might connect with readers. Over the past 15 months of blogging for Christianity Today, I've written or edited nearly 200 posts. As I wrote last week, many posts soar to the top of ...
I've been interested in the topic of contraception and faith for quite some time, both in light of my own unwillingness to think about contraception in theological terms in the early years of my marriage (an unwillingness I have observed in others as well), and also in the way decisions about ...
As this series on contraception comes to a close, Emily Heady offers a Protestant perspective on Natural Family Planning.
When my husband and I married in 2001, we were graduate students with tiny salaries, tiny living quarters, and gargantuan workloads. It was not a good time for a baby. So a few ...
My her.meneutics colleague, Liuan Huska, joins the conversation today in describing the choices she and her husband have made to first use NFP and then a barrier method as forms of contraception. I am so grateful for Liuan’s gracious approach to this topic:
When my husband and I first married, ...
As I mentioned last week, we will be offering a variety of personal essays about the choices Christians have made about the use of contraceptives. Today, Matthew Towles, PhD, explains why he decided to have a vasectomy:
I wonder how many life-changing conversations happen in the parking lots of doctors’ ...
Last week, I began a series of blog posts about contraception and faith. Rather than rehashing the debate that ensued, please refer to Friday's post that discusses contraception, Margaret Sanger, and women's health in the developing world. Last week also featured a doctor's perspective on ...
Mary Alice Teti offers the first of a handful of personal Christian perspectives on contraception here in the United States. She writes about how her Catholicism has shaped her view of marriage, and next week we will hear a diverse series of Protestant views:
Any young person who was raised in a Christian ...
Dr. Emily Gibson has written about contraception for her.meneutics in the past, and I asked her to offer her perspective as a physician when it comes to the questions Christians might want to ask about hormonal contraception in particular. I appreciate her measured tone and informative approach:
As ...
To begin our conversation about contraception and faith, I asked my friend and colleague Rachel Marie Stone to reflect upon her time working as a doula in Malawi. Here are her reflections on contraception and global health:
The young nurse was one of eleven living children -- one of eighteen, if you ...
The Christian response to contraception tends to make news headlines, particularly in recent years. When the Affordable Care Act mandated employers pay for contraceptive methods, both Protestants and Catholics objected. Lawsuits ensued. Decades after the introduction of “the pill” to ...
I had been married for a few years when an engaged friend asked me about sex. She wondered if I had any advice for her wedding night or beyond. I told her two things. One, that sex is more wonderful than our culture ever admits. Two, that sex isn’t nearly as dramatic as our culture (including ...
I had been at Azusa Pacific University for less than a semester when I found myself riding along with my mentor, Sarah Sumner, to a speaking engagement in downtown L.A. Once we arrived, I was floored by the depth of her knowledge and by her captivating teaching style. She taught for five hours with ...
In anticipation of my new book, Small Talk: Learning From My Children About What Matters Most, each week I'm featuring a different writer for a guest post. These posts dicuss the ways children's questions, comments, or actions have prompted deeper reflection for the adult. The series began with ...
When the COO of Facebook writes a book about women and leadership, the world takes notice. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, turned heads when it came out in March of 2013, and it sparked heavy criticism (see, for example, the Washington Post’s Recline, don’t ...
Last week I wrote a post called "Let Kids Be Kids Instead of Sexualized Little Adults," in response to a YouTube video about a "transgender" girl whose parents helped her "transition" into a boy at age 6. I cautioned against the idea that children's gender identity ...
For a long time, my little sister Elly was a boy. It started on her second birthday, when she received her gift from Kate, another of my sisters (I'm the oldest of four girls). Elly opened the box—a blue corduroy dress Kate and my mother had stitched themselves—and threw it down: ...
I've heard Christians say that if we still lived in the Garden of Eden, we would all be walking around naked. The story in Genesis 2 seems to support this idea. It was only after God confronted Adam and Eve about their tragic and rebellious decision to eat the fruit that they realized they were ...
I've been thinking about the nature of friendship.
It started, oddly enough, with House of Cards, a show in which no one has any true friends. But as the season progressed Rachel—a former call girl who is trying to keep her head down and create some stability in her life—was befriended ...
I have always been an overachiever and a perfectionist. It might be because I'm a girl, or because I'm the firstborn of four, or because my parents are type-A personalities or just because. But either way, I remember the panic that shot from the center of my torso in every direction when ...
