I was finally in Sapporo, Japan, and in the earliest days of the trip. It had been a really long, hellish, topsy-turvy day. But now we were approaching the tail end of it; as my mom would have put it, Read more
It’s hard for me now to even think about all the different ways that I was a fish out of water when my preacher husband Biff and I moved to Japan to teach English. You’d be hard-pressed to find some additional ways than the ones I went through all at once. Not for nothing do people call what I experienced culture shock.
I once had an apartment in Sapporo… Sorry, I share with Betty White an unreasonable fondness for the movie Out of Africa. But that’s how I always think about my short time in Japan–this huge journey to another land, a Read more
Housekeeping stuff– * For some reason a slew of feedback comments just came in. Some of them are a few days old. I’ve got no idea why I didn’t see them before here or in my email, but I think Read more
Have you ever talked to somebody who tells you one thing but tells someone else something entirely different? We call such a person two-faced and we don’t generally like or trust somebody like that. Mitt Romney very famously “flip-flopped” his Read more
Sometimes it happens that two people have two completely opposing opinions about something. We can take identical lists of objective facts, filter them through a big variety of cultural conditioning, expectations, mores, and personal inclinations, and come out with an Read more
I remember seeing Heaven is For Real at the checkout stand somewhere a while ago and just groaning inwardly at yet another attempt by Christians to cash in on humanity’s ignorance of whatever lies beyond death (if anything–which we’ll talk Read more
When Rachel Held Evans wrote her beautifully moving piece in the wake of the World Vision brouhaha, How Evangelicals Won a Culture War And Lost a Generation, it was a cry from the heart: she, like many other evangelicals, has Read more
I talk about my past in the Christian faith a lot, and I know that what I say can sound kind of outrageous sometimes. That’s why I want to go over a bit about what I do to ensure that Read more
We may joke about Jesus being a Jewish zombie, but I’m sorry to tell you: he’s not a zombie.