It is no secret to anyone who reads this blog that I am a not a fan of birth control. I think it’s unconscionable that women have been expected to suppress or perhaps even damage a healthy, normal part of who they are in the interest of unrestricted sex. Contraception has led to an expectation…
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12 Years A Slave
There are times when you walk through the world filled with awe and joy and gratitude, aware of the wonder, the beauty, the innate goodness of all that exists on earth. Other times it’s like a veil is ripped from your eyes, revealing the brokenness of the world in all its heartbreaking clarity. A brokenness…
Read MoreItching For A Fight (a 7QT post)
___1___ It began Tuesday morning, when I pulled into a spot at the public library twenty minutes before it opened. I let Michael get in the driver’s seat and play with all those fun controls while we waited. We were not the only people killing time between school dropoff and library opening time. There were…
Read MoreChild Abuse in the Church: A Parent’s Response, Part 1
When I was twelve years old, a teenage kid working the ticket booth at the movie theater told me I could pass for seventeen. I developed early and I had the curves to attract attention. But although I may have looked older than some of my peers, emotionally I was far behind them. I was…
Read MoreWaiting
“Mommy, get me some dessert!” Nicholas stood at my right elbow. I looked pointedly at the pizza in my hand and back at him, but my coming-up-on-five-year-old is blissfully (or perhaps willfully) immune to messages sent via body language. Time for plan B. “First of all,” I said, “that’s not how you ask. Second, am…
Read MoreA Stream Of Consciousness Rant About Pop Music
Katy Perry was singing on the radio when Nicholas popped out with, “Is this song called ‘Tiger Rahr’?” I chuckled inwardly at the way his brain changed “roar” into “rahr,” and then suddenly chuckled at myself, because all our kids yell “rahr” instead of “roar” as a result of being chased them around the house…
Read MoreWe aren’t losing people because of worship. We’re losing them because we’re hypocrites.
There’s a blog post making the rounds right now about the dismal record of churches, both mega- and traditional, to retain their youth into adulthood. The author and all the commenters have their pet theories about why this is–the age-old argument between “worship isn’t relevant” (i.e. it’s too traditional) and “the worship is too contemporary”…
Read MoreShould Men Shave….Everything?
As bloggers, sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. We get so caught up in the prettiness of our prose and the profundity of our thoughts, we start to think that the most important thing we do is get site traffic and lots of comments. Well, yesterday I wrote a very heartfelt post, and your response…
Read MoreParadox and Contradiction
Call it reversals, call it paradox–Christianity is full of them, and they are a sometimes insurmountable stumbling block for people contemplating religious belief. To destroy yourself in order to find yourself, to die in order to live, to consider yourself blessed when you are mourning, or poor in spirit, or persecuted…to people steeped in the idea…
Read MoreFirst World Problems
I was pulling into Macy’s yesterday afternoon when a story came on NPR about the food supply, or more accurately the lack thereof, in North Korea. When I think of North Korea, I think of world security, nuclear weapons and a hostile dictator–but I’ve never thought of starvation. Until now. “I saw one family, a…
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Kathleen M. Basi 