by | Sep 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Her new memoir brings her voice into the story of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” It also brings in an entirely different gospel.
I read Boy Meets Girl decades ago as an adolescent alongside thousands of other church kids in America. It was the much-anticipated follow-up to Joshua Harris’s now-infamous book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. As a very young adult, Harris had told us all how to date (or rather, how to court) in a pure way, so that we could all make it to our wedding night as virgins.
Boy Meets Girl was going to tell us how this had all worked out for Josh on a personal level. It also introduced us to Shannon, who I pictured as Josh’s leading lady. Turns out, however, she was more like his backstage help. As Shannon Harris makes clear in her recent book The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife, she longed to fulfill her dream of being a singer and actor, but was instead tasked with passing out cake to the cast.
I naively read Boy Meets Girl as a love story. I thought of Joshua and Shannon Harris as an example for all of us kids out there trying to date the “right” way. The book felt like a kind of promise that, if I followed the same rules, I, too, might find my future spouse and live happily ever after.
Decades later, holding Harris’s memoir , I can practically feel the weight of her untold stories in my hands. In it, she finally inserts her own voice into the narrative, giving us an entirely different perspective on the marriage, their ministry, and how being the pastor’s wife of a famous evangelical leader left her “starving” with “nothing left to give.”
Handling ‘heavy bricks’
What turned Harris from being a new, excited Christian into feeling like she had been handed “heavy bricks” by the local church? Those who knew Harris before …
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by | Sep 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
We live in a world haunted by sin and suffering. But it’s also one that points us to a glory beyond imagining.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
I rarely frequent the app formerly known as Twitter for long enough to be angered by anything, but I was last week.
A friend of mine posted a prayer request for her son, hospitalized for schizophrenia, with which he’s been grappling a long time. Most of the responses were what one would expect—expressions of love and concern.
One, though, was from a Christian man telling my friend that she could solve this problem quite easily: by taking away “secular” TV and music and video games. That response would be repulsive enough, but then I went and looked at some of this person’s other posts.
One of them, from sometime past, warned people about thinking about matters such as the Holocaust. He cited a famous Christian musician who went to Auschwitz and lost his faith in Christ. It’s better to think instead, this man recommended, about things that are lovely and pure.
Even Job’s friends had better counsel. Yes, many people have lost their faith—or never come to it—because they could not reconcile a good God with the atrocities and suffering they see in the world. Think of Dostoevsky’s chilling arguments from the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, for instance. The sort of willed ignorance to grave evil is hardly, though, a Christian response to such questions.
If this posture were just the ramblings of some random person online, I wouldn’t have given it much thought. But the sentiment expressed on that account—albeit crudely and rudely expressed—is one that many people unwittingly take: If I just remain very still and don’t think about what’s lurking out there, it will go away.
A few …
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by | Sep 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Christian family says their status has been revoked without warning.
A Christian family who fled Germany to be able to homeschool their seven children say they now face deportation, 15 years after arriving in the United States and fighting for asylum.
The Romeikes celebrated what their supporters called “an incredible victory that can only be credited to our Almighty God” in 2014, when they were allowed to remain in the US after years of court appeals. Their lawyer said the decision meant the family could “stay without worries in the future.”
Yet earlier this month, Tennessee residents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike said they learned their deferred action status had been revoked during a check-in with immigration officials. They said their family was directed to obtain German passports and to prepare to self-deport by October 11, with no prior warning or explanation for the change.
The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), an evangelical group that backed the Romeikes when they came to the US, has launched a campaign asking the government to reinstate their deferred action status.
Their four oldest children are now adults, and two have married Americans. The Romeikes continue to homeschool their three youngest, including two daughters born in the US.
“Deportation to Germany will fracture these families, while exposing the Romeikes to renewed persecution in Germany, where homeschooling is still illegal in almost every case,” said HSLDA.
In Bissingen, located outside of Stuttgart, Germany, the Romeikes decided to educate their children at home because they opposed public school curricula (including “sex education, evolution, and fairy tales”) on religious grounds.
Homeschooling is not legal in the country, though enforcement on the ban can vary by …
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by | Sep 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Azerbaijani offensive shatters 33-year effort at nation-building, depopulating majority of enclave from fear of genocide. Despite depression, Bible Society leader says, “God will not abandon us.”
Suddenly, more than 80 percent of people in Nagorno-Karabakh have fled.
Last week the unrecognized Armenian republic, called “Artsakh” by its 120,000 residents, suffered an invasion by Azerbaijan, which is recognized internationally as sovereign over the enclave nestled in the Caucasus Mountains.
At least 32 people were killed in the assault that violated a Russian-backed ceasefire, with at least 68 more killed six days later in a suspicious fuel depot explosion.
But more than the death count, fear of genocide is driving people to flee—more than 100,000 as of Saturday evening, according to Armenian officials and the UN [updated Sept. 29]. Though the enclave is home to around 400 holy sites now at risk of erasure, one official stated that 99.9 percent of Artsakh’s Armenians will cross the border to Armenia, the world’s first Christian nation.
The same crossing had been blocked by Azerbaijan since December 2022.
Near-starvation conditions ensued, with humanitarian aid allowed entry one day prior to the Azerbaijani offensive. The Artsakh government issued a decree to dissolve itself as of January 1, ceding control of a territory it declared independent after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Armenians controlled Nagorno-Karabakh since 1994, after a three-year war resulted in the deaths of 30,000 people, displacing an additional 100,000 in mutual exchange between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Peace talks faltered since then, as they continued to fail after 2020, when a 44-day war resulted in Azerbaijan reclaiming much of the enclave. A further 7,000 were killed before the Russian ceasefire.
Azerbaijan has promised that Armenians in the territory will be integrated as full citizens with equal rights, joining …
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by | Sep 28, 2023 | Uncategorized
Marx’s view of history powerfully shaped how we think about time and power, but it’s not the Bible’s view.
It’s been a heck of a month for conspiracy theories. My social media feeds have been inundated by warnings about impending COVID lockdowns and mandates, wild claims about 9/11, supposed revelations of alien corpses, and, after Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D) debuted a new mustache, a fresh round of speculation that he uses a body double to conceal ongoing health struggles.
Each outlandish story contributes to a broader ethos of conspiracism: a cynical and fearful mindset which frames everything around the assumption that the world is beset by a grand, secret evil and only a few know what’s “really” going on.
Neither conspiracist thinking nor belief in discrete conspiracy theories are anything new. But the social acceptability of such belief does seem to have grown in recent years. Some credit is due to the internet, of course, but I think there’s a much more fundamental source: human search for meaning within our place in history.
We’re living in a time when religion is in decline, social bonds are weakening, and the humanities are devalued. This leaves us with a dwindling canon of stories—shared histories, parables, myths, and folktales—that bind us together and inform a common moral vision. To cope, we’re retreating into ever-narrower interest groups, becoming more suspicious of one another, and searching for stories to make sense of evil, uncertainty, and suffering.
Conspiracism offers just such a story. Regardless of concrete evidence, conspiracy theories can cut through our sense of unease and ambiguity with a grandiose, black-and-white narrative. They flatter true believers that they’re in on a secret and can change the world.
In …
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