When I was a Christian, I realized that my consent didn’t matter in the least about anything that happened to me. I didn’t own my own body–my father did until I got married, and at that point my husband would for as long as we were married. I never belonged Read more
Quick: How many Alka-Seltzer tablets does someone take at a time? Even if you’ve never actually taken Alka-Seltzer in your entire life, you know the answer to that question, don’t you? And you know it because an advertiser made a jingle (“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it Read more
Yeah, we’re going there. Strap in. Ask almost any Christian if Jesus really existed, and you’ll get an immediate and absolutely positive “yes, oh yes, definitely he did.” With all the 41,000-some-odd denominations of Christianity, it’s just about the only thing most churches’ doctrines agree on. I spent my entire Read more
Ready for something lighter? I know I am. If you’re a gamer or military type, you probably already know about The Skippy List, a large selection of military-related things that the eponymous Skippy is not allowed to do (anymore). You might even know about the similar list theglen has circulated Read more
Before I go much further, I also want to stop and talk a little about the idea of thought terminators, because in that Bible study I was about to do, I was going to run a lot of them through my own head. A thought terminating cliché is something that Read more
I want to stop and talk a bit about the idea I mentioned in my last post about compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is what every single one of us does to avoid having to come face-to-face with a painful truth. We block that information away into another part of our minds so Read more
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
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
I had been unchurched for a few months when a friend of mine from school, Angela, invited me to her church. She was quite straightforward, unlike Jennifer who’d called her church’s proselytization effort a “pizza blast” and pretended it was just some hangout thing. Angela said there was a revival Read more