Some years ago, I ran a series called the Unequally Yoked Club (UYC). It was one of my most popular series–and also one of my longest-running! It was about how Christian couples navigate when one partner deconverts from the religion. Today, let’s return to that topic. Together, we’ll see what’s changed Read more
I’ve been wanting to return to the UYC lately, since I’ve seen new developments on that front in recent months. So today, I want to show you what happened after I deconverted from Christianity, and the ups and downs of how I handled sharing the news of that deconversion with my then-husband Biff. I didn’t do everything perfectly, but then, I reckon almost nobody ever does.
Mark Driscoll’s blog has been a treasure trove lately, as he struggles to resolve one of his religion’s greatest failings: its defective and faulty teachings about marriage. One can see why half his his blog appears to be composed of advice regarding marriage–Christians labor under a divorce rate that screams out the truth about their religion’s poor teachings, and the further right into the religion one progresses the worse marriages get and the more acrimonious and frequent the divorces seem to be. Mark Driscoll happens to stand way to the right in his religion, so one can easily excuse him for being thus concerned. Today Lord Snow Presides…. over Mark Driscoll’s terrible not-good ineffective guaranteed-to-fail marriage advice.
Today I’ll show you what this problem looks like, what the women dealing with the problem make of it, and what it means for the religion as a whole.
The ironic thing is that out of all the made-up, manufactured terrors that Christians burden themselves with, this one actually is a problem. Today I’ll show you why Christian leaders put so much emphasis on never being unequally yoked–and why they should fear it.
That brand of Christianity makes some distinct promises to its adherents. If you do this, then you will get that. But it doesn’t actually follow through on those promises. Indeed, it really can’t. Instead it gives people something totally different. Today I want to talk about promises and Fireproof, and how this viewpoint stands up to reality.
This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.
(This is part of our Fireproof review week–here’s the review itself and here’s where I talk about how the movie assumes that only Christians can make marriage work. Consider this, like all my movie posts, full of ALL THE SPOILERS. Also, I’m popping this into our Unequally Yoked Club series Read more
While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.