This is Wrong: Teaching in the Age of School Shootings
Saint John once wrote that perfect love casts out fear. I beg to differ.
Monthly Archives: June 2018
Questions, Painful Questions
The sheer novelty of the experience evoked a feeling of shock, as well as a slight blush. Perhaps there was something to this “feeling pretty” thing after all.
Dignity
We are incessantly inundated with tips, narratives, and guidelines for how to be sexy.
Hole Intimacy
We’re made to want things, to feel a deep burning ache, to pine. It’s innate to being human. We long for intimacy and connection, for a place and a people where we find peace.
Sundays Are for the Boys
With strength in numbers, Cadets was wildly successful at my church. And then there was our paltry GEMS organization.
Hello Again
The story tells us that when God sees Adam’s loneliness, he decides to create another creature, but not an equal.
Sex Education With Ninth Graders: For Dummies
You want to tell them what a boner is, so that if they ever come across one in an intimate environment, they know their boyfriend isn’t suddenly suffering from spontaneously protruding intestinal organs.
Squirrels, Pearls, and Makin’ Whoopie with Your Hat On
For example, the medieval church declared you could not have sex on Sundays (or Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays).
Sex Ed Thank You Notes
Dear First Kiss,
Thank you for the pause and rephrase that changed your “can I kiss…” to “can we kiss?”
Blessed Are the Sexual Predators
Let me offer this advice to future Church leaders: when adopting stances towards public figures, be consistent, or be honest.
Let Your Yes Be OH YES!
There are a few things I thought about (as well as a few things I wish I had thought about) by the time I first had sex. Maybe a conversation about the real definition can start there.
To Be Intimate
Or to put it another way: what happens when marriage comes to be defined by the promise of sex?
2001: A Sex Odyssey
Condoms were occasionally brought up with a scoff and a smirk. Believing that condoms were good for anything was credulity on par with believing the earth is flat.
Learning to Speak
Weekly we repeated the words. Gender is not the same as sex.
How the Church Talks
And you know what happens next? An adulterous Samaritan woman becomes history’s first recorded evangelist. Church, can we talk about that?
Purity
I think there is a divine vision at the root of “purity” that remains a potent challenge today: that apart from oneself, on the other end of every sexual encounter is another self equally as mysterious and indefinable as existence.
Terrified of the One-Eyed Snake
Peak Allison Janney right here, but with numerous parental triggers: “engorged,” “testicle retrieval,” “heinous bitch,” and of course, “Reginald’s quivering member.”
Just One
I know some churches are trying. “Singles group” is a thing. But really? That’s depressing on a good day, patronizing on a bad one.
God’s Orgasm
Why do we expect God to be sexually pure? As a woman, it’s fun to realize God and I have that in common.
If God is Love
Your body is not your enemy. And if you think it is, then treat it like an enemy: love it. Do good to it. Bless it. Pray for it.
The Sex Talk I Never Had
Could my parents have admitted they were too busy or uncomfortable to teach me? Yes.
Am I mad, bro? No.
A Christian Teenager’s Guide to Resisting Temptation
To the Church’s credit, I did not have premarital sex as a teenager. But there was also a lot of damage done.
A Letter to My Daughter (Should I Have One)
Wear your womanhood however you prefer. Wear it as a low-cut tank top and your short-shorts in the park, drinking lemonade.
Condom Nation
Those who drive sex education policies, it would seem, care more about ideology than accuracy—more about ideology, in fact, than effectiveness, teen moms, or lifelong diseases, either.
Sex: A Knowing
Daunted by the rightness of wrong, by the wrongness of right, by the thought that this is the nature of knowledge we inherit.
In a Day or Two
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for an afterlife like that—one where everything is shiny and my partner and I look like we’re thirty for the rest of our lives.
Look at the Women
You want to talk about how to teach young girls to love themselves? Or to believe that their bodies are temples, and not objects of shame?
Sex: A Reading List
Nagoski takes a thoroughly researched, science-based approach to dispel myths about female sexuality and to explain how the body and mind are inextricable in all things to do with relationships.
Virginity: An Education
Chapter 8: Religious Studies II
“There is no such thing as a condom for the heart. Once you have had sex, you are never quite the same.”
-“Pure Again,” Focus on the Family
