Saturday Link Love: A Retreat, Sex Ed, and Jesus Land

Saturday Link Love is a feature where I collect and post links to various articles I’ve come upon over the past week. Feel free to share any interesting articles you’ve come along as well! The more the merrier.

A Retreat’s Risky Lessons, on San Francisco Chronicle—“The programs are unsupported by research, misguided about the safe handling of trauma, and generally lack adequate on-site mental health care. Some camps have a social worker or trained counselor on hand. But mostly they rely on camp staff, volunteers and teachers with little expertise to care for distraught students, such as two teens at Camp Diversity who were so overcome they collapsed.”

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Have Another Mission: Public School Sex Ed, on HuffPost—“In classrooms across the United States, crisis pregnancy centers — faith-based organizations that try to counsel women away from abortion — have branched out, entering public schools to encourage teens to remain abstinent until marriage. And these virginity demonstrations, which compare the “ick” factor of being faced with someone else’s chewed-up food to having sex with someone who has previous sexual partners, are drawing the alarm and ire of a growing number of parents.”

Escape from Jesus Land: On Recognizing Evangelical Abuse and Finding the Strength to Reject the Faith of Our Fathers, on Not Your Mission Field—“At Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis, where as elementary students my classmates and I said pledges to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible every day, the principal kept a paddle in her office, and she sometimes used it.”

Gwyneth Paltrow and GOOP say the joke is on you if you followed their advice, on Dr. Jen Gunter—“As far as I can tell with the GOOP rating system “enjoyment” means second-hand information from a ghost; “ancient” is code for biologically implausible, but sells well; and “speculative, but promising” is the fringe hypothesis of a naturopath or “Integrative” doctor. I am pretty sure we won’t see too many “backed by science” posts because there aren’t many complementary products to sell alongside in the GOOP shoppe.”

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