A Rundown on Rachel Held Evans’ Culture War Piece and a Few Responses

Last week after North Carolina passed Amendment 1, Rachel Held Evans wrote about how younger Christians are tired of culture wars:

Read Full Post »

“It’s 2012″ and Sexuality

In discussing a porn director on trial for selling DVDs showing women doing something extremely dehumanizing, Michael Stabile writes: Obviously Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10 was never intended to be art, and that’s the real problem with the art argument: it covers up what’s truly valuable about these films, which is that they allow us to [...]

Read Full Post »

Protecting the Chastity of an Aspiring Pervert – Evangelicals and Modesty

This was one of the posts that came out of a fairly lengthy look at body, the gender, and sexuality here at Notes….

Read Full Post »

A consistent ethic of stewardship for all of life

At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight. –Ross Douthat Only [...]

Read Full Post »

A contextualized view of sexuality – my contribution to the Earthen Vessels Symposium

My friend Matt Anderson had his first book come out earlier this year. (It’s a good one.) As part of the book’s promotion, he organized a blog tour/symposium in which different writers would offer an essay response to one chapter from the book. My assignment was to discuss the book’s first chapter on sexuality. One [...]

Read Full Post »

Repost – Nothing Behind the Curtain

Last year around this time I wrote an essay about marriage after participating in one of my best friend’s weddings. Seeing as Joie and I are getting married this Saturday, it seemed like a good time to repost it. Post below:

Read Full Post »

The Blasphemy Isn’t Mine – N.D. Wilson on the Incarnation

From his marvelous Notes from the Tilt-a-whirl (one of the few books on my “every human being alive needs to read this” list) Plato, no covering your eyes, no throwing up in indignation, no offended boycotts of the crucifix set in urine. The Lord of all reality is coming to your hemisphere. And He, the [...]

Read Full Post »

What “The Waiting Game” tells us about singles in the church

If you grew up in evangelicalism, it’s a virtual certainty that a thought something like the following haunted you in your middle school years: “I really hope that I get to have sex before the rapture.” Or, if you grew up in a blessedly rapture-free church, you probably thought “I really hope that I get [...]

Read Full Post »

Nine Years Ago Today…

the Hound of Heaven chased me down and drug me into his Kingdom. On September 22, 2001 Jesus brought me to my knees and the Gospel became beautiful to me. It’s a day I remember every year. On the 58th anniversary of his conversion, one of my heroes, the great English evangelical preacher and abolitionist [...]

Read Full Post »

Rape Culture and the Question of Evangelical Culpability

Last week I wrote a rather severe post attacking a certain type of conservative evangelical for their chauvinistic and deeply destructive approach to the issue of modesty. The point wasn’t that modesty itself is innately bad, but that the way these conservatives were speaking of it was. Several people commented on the post, a couple [...]

Read Full Post »