By: Rev Jacob Bolton on March 12, 2020
Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin gives us a fascinating read this week in Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard questions for the World’s Largest Religion. I actually read this over Christmas break and had outlined my blog post, making a marked, yet lively reference to Ryan Dunn of MTV fame. However, the recent COVID 19 news, and how the…
By: John Muhanji on March 10, 2020
Growing and Living in Africa is an interesting life experience, coupled with different cultural dynamics from one place to another. African cultures have put a lot of emphasis on a boy child. Many parents would opt to educate the boy child than the girl child because they believe the boy would inherit and continue the…
By: Shermika Harvey on March 9, 2020
One of my first encounters with the world of transgenderism was through the 1999 Oscar-winning performance of Hilary Swank portraying Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. It was a heart wrenching true story of the 21-year old Nebraskan trans man brutally raped and murdered in 1993 by several male acquaintances after his transgender identity was…
By: Wallace Kamau on March 8, 2020
As to How we got where we are on the current Transgender ideology and political debate, history may shed some light. While Wikipedia may not be a very credible scholarly source to quote, I have opted to gather some historical data on the transgender legislation that helps in informing how this issue has evolved. The…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on March 8, 2020
A number of years ago, I worked as a Director of Fund Development, Operations and Ministry at the Kalamazoo Gospel Mission. I was not the Executive Director, but I oversaw many of the functions of the Mission. I also became very close to many of the homeless individuals who lived there, and my heart wrapped…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on March 6, 2020
In 1987 an advertising campaign was launched by the Partnership for a Drug Free America organization. A man, holding up an egg, says, “Here’s your brain.” He then cracks the egg in a hot frying pan and states, “And here’s your brain on drugs, any questions?” The emphasis was the long-term effects of recreational drug…
By: Mary Mims on March 6, 2020
Working as a Children and Youth minister for the last ten years has been a rewarding experience. I have gotten to know the children of our congregation in unique and meaningful ways. I have listened to the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of our children as elementary students through high school, and now some in college.…
By: Karen Rouggly on March 6, 2020
It’s helpful to start this blog with some identifiers. I am a cisgender, white, middle-aged, female. I identify as heterosexual and I am married to a cisgender, white, middle-aged man. We have two little boys who are aware of their whiteness, but not yet aware of the privilege it affords them. These two little boys…
By: Digby Wilkinson on March 6, 2020
The whole issue of human sexuality has been a difficult one for my age group to comprehend fully. I straddle an era in which homosexuality and transgender, in all its forms, were hidden behind closed doors, whispered about or only seen publicly in the world of entertainment. In the 1980s New Zealand faced the task…
By: Jenn Burnett on March 6, 2020
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”[1] The rapid increase in people identifying as transgender has left the church scrambling for answers and groping for a faithful response. The integration of SOGI[2] curriculum in public schools has made some uncomfortable and upset, while…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on March 5, 2020
Altered Carbon is my new favorite sci-fi Netflix show. The main character is a freedom fighter who is trying to find his long lost love across both time and space while utilizing his prodigious martial arts skills against both bounty hunters and dark governmental forces. It takes place over 300 years in the future where…
By: Andrea Lathrop on March 5, 2020
I will never forget reading the six-page letter to our senior leadership team from a mom of an 8-year-old boy that was identifying as a girl. She recounted with painstaking detail the years-long journey they had been on with their child and the crossroads they had reached. Having pushed gender conformity for years, they had…
By: Sean Dean on March 5, 2020
One of my favorite books is A Muslim and A Christian In Dialogue by Badru Kateregga and David Shenk. This book attempts an important thing, to have a serious and respectful dialogue between two men of deep devotion to their faith. True dialogue is hard. It requires a generosity of spirit, an ability to hear…
By: Rhonda Davis on March 5, 2020
Last year, I found myself in a conversation that was new to me. I was on the phone with a student inquiry who was born male and had always been attracted to females. However, he felt the lesbian lifestyle “told his story better,” so he fully transitioned (through medical and surgical procedures) to female. S(he)…
By: Harry Edwards on March 5, 2020
It has been several months now since my professor friend and I met for coffee at one of the coffee shops at Biola University. I often reflect on that sobering moment. We chatted about the latest goings on in culture as reflected in news outlets and social media, lamenting the fact that Evangelicalism today has…
By: Mario Hood on March 5, 2020
This week’s reading of Transgender Children and Young People falls in line with the last few weeks, as it is just as thick and thought-provoking as Pinker’s work. While Pinker does with stats and philosophical stances, Brunskell-Evans and Moore seek to provide another viewpoint to the conversation/debate about Transgenderism. Dr. Bird, in his review of…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on March 4, 2020
October 11 is National Coming Out Day. I had no idea this observance even existed as a freshman in college but was introduced to it early in the morning on my way to English class. It was a bright crisp morning and one of the Pride groups (not their name back then, but I don’t…
By: Shermika Harvey on March 2, 2020
Here’s to another week with Steven Pinker. Nonetheless, this is an election to a more academic approach to desperately search the pages of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature in hopes to discover common ground. With pure amazement on this rare occasion, commonality was found. Let us dive deeper into this concept,…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on March 1, 2020
Maher Mali’s review of Pinker’s The Blank Slate takes place 15 years after its publication in 2002. Mali contends that Pinker indicates inborn traits are highly probable rather than pre-determined. Pinker attempts to lay waste to the popular ideas of The Blank Slate (The mind has no instinctive traits), The Noble Savage (it is surrounding…
By: John Muhanji on March 1, 2020
When we are growing up, we heard many stories from our parents, teachers, grandparents, and many other storytellers. But the most story ever spoken as a true one was the one that a child of five months old, abducted by a baboon, and ran with her to the deep forest. The parents searched the child,…
