Month: February 2018
when sex hurts
This essay from Joy Pedrow Skarka about pain and sex says some things that need to be heard: After our wedding, riding the elevator up to our hotel room, I looked into my groom’s eyes and saw excitement. We had...
song post: Emmylou Harris (Bob Dylan), “Every Grain of Sand”
I don’t have much to say about this song except that the last line always makes me think of Sister Veronika. That, and the fact that the original album version from Shot of Love has the wrong lyrics there (Dylan...
preventing child deaths in America
America Magazine asked me to write a short piece about America’s shameful discrepancies in child deaths. It wasn’t easy to squeeze 3 very different causes of death into 750 words, but I did my best. It was interesting (for me,...
experts shooting themselves in the foot with conflicts of interest
Skepticism of medical authorities is, at least in terms of vaccine refusal, becoming worse and worse. I think this is a bad thing, and have previously commended Ari Schulman’s essay on the politics of medical denialism to help understand why this...
denying admission to Christian refugees
The U.S. recently denied asylum to about 100 Iranian Christians who had previously been invited to apply for refugee status, reports Mindy Belz at WORLD. Some, apparently, did not meet the security requirements. Sadly, while a lot of opposition to...
song post: Steve Taylor, “Cash Cow”
Steve Taylor is a legend in Christian music. (I highly commend to you two great podcasts, The Pivot & Cultivated where he tells his war stories about saving Sixpence None the Richer from an evil lawyer and directing Michael W....
can evangelicalism’s corpse be revived?
Alan Jacobs has a grim prediction for the future of evangelicalism: There will of course continue to be vibrant congregations that define themselves as evangelical, but fewer and fewer as the years go by, I think. Most churches that would...
questioning brain death
This devastating story about Jahi McMath, a young woman who suffered a terrible complication of surgery (and might not have had she received closer attention) is worth reading in and of itself, but the questions it raises about the commonly...
that’s how all good comedies go
Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day this year, and Barbara McClay has some good thoughts on the matter: If Valentine’s Day is about the incommensurability of feeling and gesture, Ash Wednesday presents us with the ultimate...
Song Post: “Mary Consoles Eve”, Rain for Roots
I have written before about Rain For Roots’ album Waiting Songs, but I just have to recommend it again. [I was originally hoping to publish this during Advent but didn’t. It’s still a great year-round record.] Yes, it is technically categorized...