In a New York Times op-ed on the current financial crisis, Nicholas D. Kristof wondered if, in addition to billion dollar bailouts, what banks really need is more women!

He went on to say that “At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, some of the most interesting discussions revolved around whether we would be in the same mess today if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. The consensus . . . is that the optimal bank would have been Lehman Brothers and Sisters” (italics added).

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People are fervently talking about the role of mothers and working moms and parenting. From my vantage point, people who have long espoused the right and the good of mothers also having careers are suddenly questioning whether that's actually a good thing.

Other people I have seen long champion mothers staying at home as full time moms are now suddenly saying it's no big deal.

In terms of flip-flopping, this is a doozy!Read more

Theology runs in my family. I think it’s in our DNA.  My two seminarian nephews attended an academic conference recently on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Simultaneously, over a thousand miles away on a California freeway, the same subject captured the imagination of my niece’s four-year-old son. (See, I told you it’s in our DNA.)

Riding along in the car with his mother, he heard something on the radio about Dead Sea Scrolls and began jabbering excitedly about what he referred to as “the Dead Sea squirrels.”  According to his version of the story, people who believed in God went into some caves and found some squirrels. They wrote Bible verses on pieces of paper and tied them to the tails of the squirrels. To his four-year-old mind, Dead Sea squirrels make great evangelists.

I didn’t encounter “scrolls” or “squirrels” as I wrote The Gospel of Ruth. But I faced the same potential for confusion in two important words—one I was eager to study and a second I tended to avoid. I never imagined how these words would intertwine or how their combination would shake up my whole vocabulary.Read more

Contrary to all the television ads, summer is the wrong time to visit Disney World in Orlando. In summer, the weather is miserably hot and humid. You can get soaked (or zapped by lightning) in one of Florida’s afternoon monsoons. The place is jammed with tourists, and you’re sure to spend a lot of time standing in lines.

But when Jack, our thirteen-year-old nephew and the youngest of Kelly’s four kids, came to see us, none of that seemed to matter. (Frank’s brother Kelly was one of three climbers who lost his life on Mount Hood last December).

Our mid-afternoon decision to take an ice cream break just happened to coincide with Disney’s daily Main Street parade. We sat with our ice cream cones at a café table off to the side from all the commotion, while Main Street erupted with a virtual Who’s Who of Disney characters scampering and dancing about, singing jubilantly: “Just believe and your dreams will come true!”

I felt a bit disoriented listening to the music, sitting there between my husband and my nephew who carry around with them an unseen ache and broken dreams that no amount of wishing on a star can fix.Read more

It has been a long time since I was in a math class.  But the other day, while listening to Garrison Keiller’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR, I was suddenly back in the classroom.  He was reading Jessica Goodfellow’s poem entitled, “The Invention of Fractions.” I stopped what I was doing to listen.  In his smooth baritone voice,

Keillor began,

   God created the whole numbers:

     the first born, the seventh seal . . .

I was about to get a thought provoking lesson on Higher Math. Read more

To some, the claim that beauty is key to our spiritual formation, will seem like romanticized blather. Others would whole-heartedly (an uncritically) accept such a notion, but not be able to do much with it beyond think it was a cool idea. Nonetheless, the claim is as old as the hills: sanctification, spiritual growth, spiritual (re)formation (or whatever else we might want to call the process of becoming truly human) requires participation in beauty.

One reason this concept can be hard to embrace is that our modern notion of maturation is so different than it was before the time of the Enlightenment. Often we reduce the means of becoming godly to a formula something like: truth + commitment = growth. When we continue to struggle with sin and immaturity, we assume that we need either 1) to get our theology and Christian worldview straight (“If you really understood ______ then …) or, more likely, 2) we just need to resolve (usually after some intense experience) to give 100%, sell out totally for Christ, get serious about things, etc. and actually follow through this time. Obviously, truth and commitment are necessary for growth. But are they sufficient?Read more

Of the many currents in the stream of Christian spirituality, two of them confuse me. The first is a “spirituality of beauty”, and the second is what—drawing on John Calvin-- I’ll call “whoop-ass” Christianity. First, let me characterize each vision of the faith, and then I’ll try to explain why the tension between the two is hard for me.
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