Questions Remain About the “Controversy in Candy Land”

Last updated on: April 29, 2013 at 3:00 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

On Saturday, Jana Riess posted a piece on her Religion News Service blog raising questions about whether, in a recent blog post about the feminization and sexualization of characters in the Candy Land board game, writer Peggy Orenstein used images and ideas, without attribution, from blogger Rachel Marie Stone’s post on the same topic. Jana raises three red flags: 1) the fact that Orenstein used three of Rachel’s images without permission or attribution, 2) the similarity of language/terminology between the... Read more

[Me & My Naturopath] On Being Unfixable in a World Obsessed with Fixing

Last updated on: April 25, 2013 at 9:59 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

A few weeks ago, I took a detour from my naturopathy focus to go see my orthopedist. My right knee (which I still thought of as my “good” knee, because unlike the other knee, it has never needed surgery) had become very painful, and I wanted to see if there was an acute injury that was causing the pain. There is no acute injury. There is, instead, a complete absence of cartilage. Bone is scraping against bone. No wonder it... Read more

On Silence and Simplicity & Their Opposites (Or, Why I Have Decided to Keep Writing Despite the Prospect of a “Real” Job and a Paycheck)

Last updated on: April 23, 2013 at 1:20 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

My blog has been silent for several weeks now, and perhaps some of you have wondered why. (Perhaps you haven’t, in which case this post might not suit your fancy. I promise more substance in future posts). There are straightforward reasons for my silence, such as the kids’ week-long school vacation, preceded by a week of early school dismissals for parent-teacher conferences, and a nasty virus that kept one child home from school just prior to the vacation and two... Read more

A Week When Families’ Stories Made the Difference

Last updated on: April 14, 2013 at 5:48 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that storytelling is necessary for having fruitful conversations around our culture’s most troubling questions and issues. When we focus on talking points and “issues,” we get talking heads and shouting matches. When we tell and listen to stories, we get empathy and complexity and nuance. This week, the stories that Newtown’s grieving parents tell, of sending their first graders off to school on a chilly December morning and learning later at... Read more

Meet David, as He Blogs His Way Through Alzheimer’s

Last updated on: April 2, 2013 at 11:08 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

At the Potter’s House Church in Washington, D.C. (part of the former Church of the Saviour, founded by the late Gordon Cosby and his wife Mary), I worshipped with a physician named David Hilfiker. David and I were not particularly close. I was intimidated by his intellect. He once gave a sermon series parsing Rene Girard‘s work on Biblical scapegoating, of which Daniel and I remember little other than David’s frequent allusions to “mimetic desire,” which we observe oh so... Read more

Last Night at Yoga

Last updated on: April 2, 2013 at 9:40 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

My teacher was showing us some really wild things she has learned to do with her abdominal muscles. She blows out all her breath, pulls her abs back toward her spine, then is able to release and contract individual muscles so that a wave ripples back and forth across her belly. It’s wild to watch. Fortunately, she didn’t ask us to try copying her. She was explaining that these exercises can help with digestion. Then she stopped. She looked up... Read more

Because I’m Not Funny Enough to Write My Own April Fool’s Post….

Last updated on: April 1, 2013 at 11:06 am By Ellen Painter Dollar

….I turn to my more humorous pals. My friend Rachel Stone (about whose new book Eat with Joy I blogged last week), covers the evangelical and Roman Catholic backlash to proposed measures to provide birth control to rats in the New York City subway. (The first paragraph—all true.) And fellow Patheos blogger David Hayward (a.k.a. nakedpastor) makes a big announcement on his blog today. A happy second day of Easter and much laughter to you this April 1. Read more

No, the Crucifixion is Not About Bloody Child Sacrifice Being Necessary for Forgiveness

Last updated on: March 27, 2013 at 3:26 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

In my post Message to the Nones, which countered some popular but wrong-headed notions of what Christians believe about suffering, one commenter said that his major beef with Christianity is the penal substitution theory of the atonement. The good news for that commenter, and many people who have struggled with that notion (including me) is that it’s not the only theory of why Jesus died on the cross. In so-called “emergent” church circles, challenges to the penal substitution theory are... Read more

Rachel Stone’s “Eat with Joy”: Why Healthy Eating Goes Beyond What We Eat

Last updated on: March 27, 2013 at 3:47 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

It is fitting that I’m writing this review of Rachel Stone’s new book Eat with Joy (InterVarsity Press 2013) while eating lunch at a local French café—an establishment that embodies why Rachel insists on seeing an authentically made French baguette as a gift to be enjoyed, white flour and all, in her generous, thoughtful, creative, challenging, God-centered vision of what food is, and can and ought to become. I cannot, in good conscience, actually call this a “review,” as Rachel... Read more

Is That the Whir of Helicopter Blades? On Lavish Maternal Love vs. Overbearing Control

Last updated on: March 25, 2013 at 12:13 pm By Ellen Painter Dollar

I had dinner the other night with my play group/moms’ group/book group. We are a bunch of late 30s to early 50s moms who met at a local community center when we each had our first child, 13 years ago. We spent years gathering on Friday mornings at each others’ homes for bagels, coffee, and rampant mess-making on our children’s part while we talked. When our kids’ school schedules and our work schedules got too complicated for that, we switched... Read more