Hi y’all! We’ve been talking lately about how quite a few Christians base their marriages on a shared belief in their religion, making the whole marriage quake when one partner loses that belief. I made the point that it really doesn’t have to be that way. Today we’re going to Read more
Welcome back, R2Ders! We’re heading into the Unequally Yoked Club today. One thing I was taught from my earliest years as a Christian–and see stressed even more nowadays–is this idea that Christian couples should base their relationship with each other on a shared faith in Jesus. So I want to Read more
Good news for folks in the UYC! Dale McGowan’s newest book, In Faith and In Doubt: How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families is coming out soon. I wanted to start talking about it, since I have a personal connection to this book due to Read more
Have you seen this blog post, An Open Letter to My Future Wife? We’re going to tackle it today and talk about reality vs. fantasy in marriage. Remember how I complained a while ago about how it seems like there are all these baby-Christians out there who’ve just gotten married Read more
We haven’t waltzed together into the Unequally Yoked Club for a while, have we? Strike up the music: today I want to talk about something sparked in me by a comment on a progressive Christian blog. My thoughts aren’t particularly aimed at the person who made the comment; she seems Read more
We haven’t waltzed together into the Unequally Yoked Club for a while, have we? Strike up the music: today I want to talk about something sparked in me by a comment on a progressive Christian blog. My thoughts aren’t particularly aimed at the person who made the comment; she seems Read more
The opposite of love might not be hate, but contempt. I once heard a marriage therapist say that once she sees a couple treat each other contemptuously, she knows their marriage is over. That’s some pretty serious stuff, right there. And I don’t think we as a society really understand how to avoid doing that. Today, I want to show you why contempt is disastrous for a marriage–and how Christian rules for marriage all but guarantee that it will develop.
I want to introduce y’all to Christian leader Bill Gothard. He’s got a folksy good-ole-boy crooked smile; he’s just the right age where an old white dude gets a lot of cachet in certain fundagelical circles, and he’s a rock star in the homeschooling/”purity culture” crowd that thinks the best Read more
Valentine’s Day is coming up, and with it, a middle-aged married person’s thoughts turn to love. I’ve changed a lot regarding how I think about love and relationships. It’s astonishing to me to think about some of the bizarre notions I used to hold about how to conduct a good Read more
A social experiment is technically just an experiment run on people, to study how groups relate and react to things. The term is also used more informally to mean a poorly-thought-out, self-serving conceit that gets pushed onto an unwitting and unknowing group to enact. Typically the idea is that the Read more