There's Beauty in the Bellow

It's not a new debate, but one that I keep an on-going dialogue with: can Christians practice/participate in yoga? I recently listened to John Piper's "Ask Pastor John" segment from last year on this topic. His response is a measured "No." Some of the comments retorted that yoga is "just exercise" in the U.S., if not the West. The thought on yoga ranges from dangerous idolatrous practice to cheery secularization, to adapting it to Christian meditation. Whatever it is, it is not inert. If we are going to plunder the Egyptians, we must take and repurpose carefully. I have the most problem with the last approach, of attempting to baptize yogic discipline with superimposed Christian prayer and Bible reading. Christian mediation is not like Buddhist or Hindu meditation. It has a different purpose: the focused contemplation on Yahweh and His glory. And it has a different method, which we have pretty well mapped out for us: devoted reading of the Scri...

Aimee Byrd noted (somewhere on her blog in the archives) that the Complementarian movement needs to address men using its tenets to hide domestic abuse. I came of age when the Biblical Patriarchy movement was in vogue. We did not hold with many of its dictums (especially the one about girls staying home all the freakin' time and avoiding college) but it still affected us. My dad was just fine with me and my mom wearing pants, but I often felt self-conscious about it. (Really, a stupid thing to obsess over.) I often felt that my hair was not long enough nor our family big enough. (The patriarchy movement seemed to believe that fertility was next to godliness.) When I learned about Complementarianism, it felt like fresh air. Patriarchy stressed hierarchy to the point of totally overlooking "in the image of God He created them, male and female." Reading Genesis it appears that my womanhood has something to tell us about what God is like. I felt strangely relieved when the...

We've just marked Easter -- or rather, we've just entered Easter season which culminates in Ascension Day on May 10th. Apologetics on the necessity of Christ's gruesome death and the certainty and reasonableness of His Resurrection are a regular this time of year. And so I would like to remark on the elegance and vigor of Christian apologetics. Randy Newman spoke about evangelism and apologetics to our church a little while ago and my husband speedily bought his book, "Questioning Evangelism." Newman makes the case for a more Socratic approach to evangelism rather than the traditional Grab Them by the Collar and Give Them Hell, Buy Now! sales pitch. I'm very adverse to the latter. For one thing, it's generally too wrote. For another, it would require a personality change and I think those are harder to come by than sex changes, even in this age of redefinition. One hears over and over of atheists growing up in religious households where asking Why? ...