Can women podcast with men? Aimee Byrd was forced to consider this question when she joined her two male co-hosts on the Mortification of Spin podcast. Listeners warned that she “was an affair waiting to happen, a possible career ender, perhaps Satan’s strategy to bring down another pastor and church” (7). This kind of thinking […]
Tuesday, 06 November, 2018 by Anna Smith
Today, when a woman becomes a mother, she finds herself mired in endless, passionate parenting debates: what kind of labor and delivery does she want? Breastfeeding or formula? Co-sleeping or cry-it-out? Celeste Ng’s new novel, Little Fires Everywhere, dives far beneath these debates to touch the questions that ultimately fuel those anxieties. What truly makes […]
Tuesday, 21 August, 2018 by Anna Smith
If you hate church fellowship hour, evangelizing strangers, and youth group lock-ins, you might be a terrible Christian. Or maybe you’re just an introvert. Adam S. McHugh, a pastor and introvert, has written Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture to help churches figure out the difference. Many books have been […]
Monday, 01 January, 2018 by Anna Smith
I am one of those tragic figures who is both a perfectionist and a procrastinator. I am such a perfectionist that the very idea of failure terrifies me to the core of my being. I am so afraid of doing things wrong that I am afraid to start, because I will probably not do it […]
Sunday, 28 February, 2016 by Anna Smith
The sight of heretics running rampant has always distressed the orthodox. Historically they’ve taken some extreme measures to restore their equanimity: wars of religion, the Spanish Inquisition, burnings at stakes, things like that. In America, so the story goes, with the advent of modernity, democracy, and the First Amendment, it was determined that religion was […]
Wednesday, 02 January, 2013 by Anna Smith