Category: Family
When Permanent Contraception Can Be Licit
Alex and Sarah are Christians who have been married for five years. They have 2 children and would like to have more. However, they feel called to adopt as the route to parenting more children. Their only hesitation is that...
Flawed Myths
Lyz Lenz. Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020. 240pp, $26. At church, I was taught that if a woman denied sex to her husband, he would find sex elsewhere. At church,...
The Discipleship of Work
When we moved to our farm several years ago with a toddler and newborn in tow, we mainly had it in mind to experience a bit of the country life: to plant a large garden and perhaps raise a few...
Threnody for a Good Man
Mat Feltner died at a hospital in Lincoln this week. Obviously it wasn’t Feltner himself — he lives nowhere outside of the mind of Wendell Berry, the pages of his novels, and the imaginations of the many thousands of us...
Teaching Children to See
This past winter, my six-year-old began each day looking out the window. I would hear him roll out of bed, feet hit the floor, his footsteps moving toward one of the windows in his room. I knew what he was...
The Contradiction of Healing Prayer
“The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” I think about this verse often. I am not sure who counts as a righteous person, and I’m not sure how to qualify “working.” The sentence before...
The Masculinity Crisis is an Economic Crisis
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has led to much reflection on the state of the modern evangelical soul. One thing that stood out from the podcast is that Driscoll and many like him have capitalized on the perception...
“Unpaid Gestation” and the Abolition of the Family
Every day, 385,000 newborn babies enter the world. A fledgling group of theorists and writers is interested in reimagining how we think about these births and the children they produce. Using the provocative tagline “Abolish the Family,” this group of...
A Theology of Infertility
After years of secondary infertility, my wife and I discovered she was pregnant on Father’s Day of 2016. It was a stunning moment for us, a seemingly miraculous answer to prayers that we had mostly given up on. But three...
Eyes to See: On Disability, Spiritual Sight, and the Holy Spirit
When I was pregnant with my son David Samuel, born in the heat of last July, I wondered if I could make a sort of bargain with God. I knew David would be disabled, and I prayed either that God...