Note to self: Write about this when I get home from India: Because HOLY CRAP THIS IS EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH THE WAY WE DO YOUTH MINISTRY IN THE UNITED STATES. h/t Matthew Paul Turner Note: This content is being published while I am out of the country, so my involvement in the comments may be limited until I return.
Tagged: evangelism, fundamentalism, persecution, teenagers, youth group, youth ministry
Lauren Whalen is a freelance writer and performer living in Chicago. She reviews books for Persephone Magazine, movies for The Film Yap and plays for Chicago Theater Beat. Lauren’s work has appeared on The Huffington Post, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago’s award-winning Inside Story blog, and the ‘Hoods blog for RedEye, a supplement of the Chicago Tribune. Check out more of Lauren’s writing on Facebook and Twitter. *** I’ve been thinking a lot about religion. For many years I tried to avoid the topic. I grew up Catholic, have 13 years of parochial education, and a degree from a Jesuit university. I felt done. But this is a year of my past coming back, through old friends, hometowns, religion, and the reevaluation of everything.…
This content was originally posted in the summer of 2012. I got through the first season last summer before things got a little overwhelming. I’ll be returning to the series of posts this summer to see how much farther I can get, but first I’ll re-post the old content. In high school, I was an X-Phile. I started watching the show in 1997, when episodes were airing nightly on FX. I was a good Christian missionary back then, and I had it ingrained into my supple, evangelical brain that “things of the world” were bad, and that the X-Files was probably a thing of the world. My spiritual leaders had taught me that secular music and R-rated movies were a sin, so I definitely…
Tagged: blogging the x-files, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, the 90s, x-files
Dear Greg Garrison, I listened to your radio show the other day. You were talking about Jason Collins’s decision to come out of the closet. You talked about how you don’t begrudge anyone the right to love anyone who they want to love, but you really don’t want to know who someone else is having sex with. You also said that Collins coming out of the closet was a selfish move of him and an attempt to get attention, which he got because the media is obsessed with him. You suggested that he’s trying to overshadow the rest of his team. You said you just don’t need to know that he has sex with men. You asked how parents are supposed to explain to…
Tagged: Greg Garrison, Jason Collins, LGBT
I met with my co-leader for the India trip last week to finalize details. Because he was added to the trip just a month ago, we hadn’t really sat down to talk until that afternoon. I think Tom and I will work together really well as co-leaders for this trip. We only have seven students, and our main responsibility is to make sure they are stay safe and are able to process the things they see and experience in Kolkata. I’m trying to think back to the positive lessons learned by the leadership of my trips as a teenager. I may have written an entire book about the conflict caused in my life by the terrible teachings that came out of those organizations, but…
Tagged: India, leadership, Returning to India
I’m not a cynic. I’m not a pessimist. I am, however, a skeptic. I am critical, sometimes to a troubling level. I tend to furrow my eyebrows in disbelief a lot. In fact, this is what I often look like: What makes me skeptical and critical and eyebrow-furrow-y? As a liberal, a feminist, and a Christian, the list is long. Oh, boy. Really long. Here are some basics. As a liberal: I am skeptical of any legislation or policy that almost exclusively benefits people who already have a ton of privilege in society. Rich people, White people, Christians, etc. If someone is passing legislation to improve the lives of a group of people, and that group of people already has it really really good,…
Tagged: Christianity, LGBT, patriarchy, politics, poverty, racism, social issues
There are few people who are as widely adored as Mother Teresa, but love for her is far from universal. Mother Teresa and her order, the Missionaries of Charity, have come under some serious criticism for some of their practices, especially in India. The biggest critic of Mother Teresa was the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote an entire book detailing his concerns about what she believed and how she behaved in Kolkata. Full disclosure: I have not read the book. What I understand is that he bases most of his criticism on some of her statements like: “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being…
Dear Governor Pence, This week you signed into law SEA 371, a bill that places several new restrictions on abortion providers. Specifically, the bill requires any facility that prescribes pills that induce chemical abortions to meet the exact same requirements as any facility that performs surgical abortions. Women being prescribed RU-486 must undergo a gynecological examination by the provider who will be prescribing the pills, and if they don’t want to hear the fetal heart beat, they must sign a document written by the state department to prove that they turned down the ultrasound. I’m sure you have heard the reasons for opposing this bill, such as: Requiring a surgical setting for what essentially amounts to a consultation is unnecessary and is only designed…
Tagged: abortion, birth control, Mike Pence, pro-choice, pro-life, SEA 371
I’ve written before about the fact that I was just a teenager when I was last in Kolkata. In the first post I wrote about this upcoming return trip to Kolkata, I explained: I was eighteen when I was last in Kolkata. I was eighteen, and I was there with a group of young missionaries. After that trip, which was cut short by my grandmother’s impending death, I swore I was done with short term missions. There were numerous reasons: I was sick of unethical evangelism practices, I was too old and too experienced a traveler to be involved with organizations that enforced such strict rules, I was skeptical of the evangelical Christian mindset, I had seen too many disturbing things done by eager…
Tagged: missions, Returning to India, rules
Two book-related posts in a row? But I can’t resist. Check out this book I just read about in the May 1 edition of The Christian Century. It’s called The Myth of Christian Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss. What a perfect thing to read after writing my series on The Safety of Being Christian in America. Although I was focusing on the fact that the present-day American church is not being persecuted, Moss argues in her book that there are very few times in ancient history during which Christians faced systematic government oppression or persecution. According to Greg Carey’s review in The Christian Century, she argues that a few of Christianity’s generally accepted stories of martyrdom are…
Tagged: Candida Moss, persecution, The Myth of Persecution
I listen to a lot of talk radio. I like NPR news shows best, but I also enjoy a good morning show. As a guilty pleasure, when I’m feeling thirsty for that sweet feeling of righteous indignation, I listen to conservative talk radio. I only have one rule: No Rush Limbaugh when Ruthie is in the car. I don’t want her to have some weird, misplaced nostalgia for his voice when she’s older. I also don’t want to swear around her, and sometimes when I listen to Rush, it just slips out. On Friday, radio personality Mark Steyn was filling in for dear old racist, misogynistic, homophobic Rush. I don’t know anything about Mark Steyn. It took me a full three minutes of Google-fu…
Tagged: coexist, Mark Steyn, Rush Limbaugh
I emphasized yesterday that empathy is something we have to practice. It doesn’t come naturally to us because often, it’s not in our own self-interest. Meanwhile, my most popular post this week (actually, most popular post to date) dealt with the times when Christians show disdain and disgust for the poor either in conversation or through vicious anti-welfare memes shared on Facebook. I got some well deserved pushback on that post–did I mean that ALL Christians despise the poor? Did my title make Christians look bad across the board? What did I mean when I said in the comments that Christians are perceived as stingy when there is such a rich history of Christian charity and giving? Those questions fit really nicely into the…
Tagged: Bob Goff, Christianity, Church of the Brethren, empathy, poverty, Quakers, Sara Miles, scripture, Troy Polamalu
I’m sure you know the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is what you feel when you are genuinely sorry for someone’s experiences. It’s when you acknowledge the difficulty in someone’s life at a given moment. When you sympathize with someone, you may try to comfort them because you know they need it. Empathy is what you feel when you’re not just sorry for a person, but you can actually relate to the things they are experiencing and feeling. Either you have gone through the same experience, or you have experienced something different that has created in you the same sort of emotions and reactions and conditions that they now find themselves in. I suspect that empathy does not come naturally to humanity. It…
Tagged: Bobby Kennedy, Clementi, current events, empathy, moral imagination, rape jokes, Steubenville, Trayvon
It’s been a big week for my little blog. Since January 1 of this year, I have blogged every single weekday about faith, feminism, politics, teaching, writing, and parenting. The factor linking all of this together is the fact that I am a liberal feminist Christian, and I’m trying to sort out the different ways that affects my life: as a parent, a partner, a writer, and a professor. (Darn. I wish writer started with p. That would have made a great alliterative list.) Before January, I had written more than 2000 posts in a ten year span of time. Those have all been unpublished, because I honestly have no idea what I wrote in some of those early posts. In my long history…
I don’t like revealing negative emotion to people. Okay, maybe annoyance and irritation are fine–I don’t mind showing those. But real anger? Sadness? Grief? Embarrassment? Those are things I prefer to keep to myself. That’s why it’s too hard for me to start this blog post with the sentence that I feel should start this blog, which is this: I cried tonight when I saw this image pop up in my Facebook feed. “Don’t forget to pay your taxes this year so the government can give it to people who don’t work as hard as you.” The vitriol I see spewed at the poor finally got to me tonight, and here I am, sitting in my living room with tears on my cheeks because…
