Hope y’all had a lovely holiday! Are you ready for the last leg of my ascent into apostasy? Once upon a time, evangelical churches didn’t tend to care much about abortion. Some openly permitted it; others at least ignored the creature. Believe it or not, that’s how it was. The Read more
I guess every single ex-Christian out there’s heard this one: “You just left because some ‘bad Christians’ made you upset!” The accusation is all but a joke to some of us by now, it’s so threadbare from overuse. I hope by the end of this entry to convince Christians of Read more
It’s not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people were praying for Daniel’s recovery from brain cancer. He was one of the Big Name Fans in our denomination; we had ties to mission churches all over the world as well. I was one of the people who spent quite some time on her knees praying for Daniel’s recovery. Even Biff, who very rarely prayed anywhere but in church, prayed for him. We were absolutely convinced that God would heal him. Why wouldn’t he?
I’m really painfully new at this blogging thing, so I’m trying really hard to catch up and learn what I need to learn to make this place amenable to visitors. If you notice some shortcoming I should address or some feature I really need to have to be cool, please Read more
It was a bright fall day. I walked into a history classroom on the very first day of my junior year of college. The class was about the end of the Roman Empire and beginning of the Dark Ages. I’d had this professor before today and liked her style of Read more
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. This famous speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still stirs me to tears today. Read more
Communities get these ideas sometimes to live together and re-enact their ideals. It’s part of being human. But things can go hideously wrong in authoritarian groups, and I’ll show you how today.
I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I ever saw a tornado. I was in my late 20s by now. I lived in the smack middle of Kansas in a tiny town notable mostly for being a convenient stop on the highway Read more
I wanted to mention here that I’m going to be talking about evidence in a little while, so I thought it’d be useful to take a minute to consider just what evidence is–and isn’t. Evidence doesn’t care what frame of mind someone’s in. Doesn’t matter if I’m angry, happy, sad, Read more
All this time, despite my misgivings about the very un-Christlike people in my church’s leadership and in my own little family, I spent a lot of time at the church, as one might expect. My mother’d been downright alarmed when she’d realized I was spending five out of every seven Read more