(Update: All the posts of this series have been collected into one piece, Seven Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships, and How to Defeat Each One of Them.) In Women in Abusive Relationships: The Good Daughter Syndrome, we nailed down two ideas: that spiritual health without psychological health is like a gym without exercise equipment, and that one’s psychological health has a great deal if not everything to do with how and by whom one was raised. The great difficulty... Read more
Sometimes I think that in our efforts to be all that we can be when it comes to Christ, we make Him entirely too complicated. As a means of proving that he loves and cares for us, God became a man, absorbed into himself the full cost of every wrong we and any other human would ever do, and then let that eternal debt—all that negative karma—be obliterated along with the corporeal form he’d assumed. And then—just in case we... Read more
(Update: All the posts of this series have been collected into one piece, Seven Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships, and How to Defeat Each One of Them.) Over lunch I once told a pastor of mine that I had started seeing a psychotherapist. Pastor Mike stopped his tuna sandwich halfway in the air toward his mouth. “A what?” he said. “A psychotherapist.” He looked at me as if I’d said “Psycho the rapist.” “You know,” I said. “A shrink.... Read more
A while back I posted a piece about a superb painting that I bought at a thrift store. Alejandro Debonis, who painted that picture, just wrote me! “Hi John! [he wrote] I’m the artist who painted the picture you wrote about. I really appreciate your comments about the picture, and would love to know when, where and how you got my picture—just because I painted it in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a long ago. I’ll wait for your answer, and I... Read more
Brain: Wake up! It’s morning! Time to arise! Body: I hate you. And I’m sleeping. Go away. Brain: No can do, Sludge Boy. Time to get up! Body: No, it’s not time to get up. It’s time for you to muffle yourself. Brain: You know I’ll win this. You know it’s time for you to get up. Body: No! It’s only 5 a.m.! Brain: Hmm. That’s funny. Because the clock says 6 a.m, Lumpy. Get up! Body: Why?! Why?! Why... Read more
As you might know, most everything I post on this blog appears simultaneously on Crosswalk.com, the largest Christian website in the world (with 3 million views a month, and some 250,000 subscribers). In the two years I’ve been writing it, Crosswalk has only twice asked me to remove something I published on my Crosswalk blog. Yesterday’s piece, Do You, “Average Christian Reader,” Need God to be a “He”? is one of those times. Crosswalk has always treated me very well,... Read more
“Christians go crazy if you in any way suggest that God isn’t a man,” said the first big-deal person in Christian publishing to read the manuscript of my book, I’m OK–You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers and Why We Should Stop. He was advising me to cut the passage below from that book’s introduction. “Really?” I said. “But no one thinks God actually has an a gender, right? Nobody’s that dense.” “Trust me on this,” he said. “The average... Read more
(The article below, written by John Ridley, is on today’s The Huffington Post. You can see the original here.) If you said Kabbalah, you spend too much time reading People magazine. If you said Muslim, you’ve probably read the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies “first comprehensive study of the Muslim American community and its habits, perspectives and beliefs.” Comprehensive is pretty much the word. Not distinguishing between native and foreign-born Muslims, the center conducted more than 300,000 national household interviews... Read more
About two years ago I bought seasons 1-8 of “Seinfeld” from a guy selling them on Craigslist for $35. One of the great cheapo buys of my life. But I was crushed (well: I was semi-mooshed) to discover that the “Seinfeld” moment that for some 10 years I’d been replaying in my head and completely cracking up over wasn’t a moment anywhere in the first eight seasons! Aaaarrrrggghhhhhhh. So I waited, and waited, and waited for the final season of... Read more
In Christians, Non-Christians, and the “Fully Man” Problem With Jesus, I wrote that I equate having a sex drive with necessarily being sinful insofar as Jesus said, “Do not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” I then joked that virtually every man with a sex drive looks at a woman lustfully at least once a day—“maybe twice, if he’s had a good night’s sleep.”... Read more
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