Winter and Spring: Seasons of the Christian Life
March is the time for climbing out of winter. After snow, ice, freezing rain, and endless clouds, a sunny day at fifty degrees feels positively balmy. The forsythia is blooming. The daffodils have “curtsied up and down.”[1] It has been a long walk through the wilderness, and Easter is on the horizon. In the best years, the inner self begins to bloom again as well. Modern psychological man assumes he merely projects his own hopefulness...
Teaching Bible Stories without Moralizing
One morning I read the Parable of the Mustard Seed to my four-year-old. He knows something about seeds and plants already, since he has watched the sunflower seeds he planted grow mammoth and yellow all summer. But, to ensure he has some context, I explain that a mustard seed is also very small—smaller even than a sunflower seed—yet grows into a large plant. I read the story. He sits in silence. Then his eyes widen in wonder as he...
Stewarding Fertility
Recently my husband and I, no longer able to stifle our curiosity, sat down to watch the Amazon Prime documentary, Shiny Happy People. While I will not weigh in here on the actual merits of the documentary, it highlights, through its depiction of the Dugger family, a movement found in some conservative Christian circles referred to as “Quiverfull.” The term is taken from Psalm 127:3–5, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord:...
Forming Hearts through Stories: A Review of Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigen Guroian
In an earlier essay, I lauded the benefits of teaching catechisms to young children. Although I still stand by that piece, I have become convinced that stories—rather than sheer didactic teaching—are central to the shaping of our inner lives, characters, and understanding of God. I suspect that memorizing a catechism without the benefit of a story-formed heart will most likely produce a meager harvest. By God’s design, stories are at...
Motherhood: The Ideal and the Diabolical
Mother’s Day evokes strong emotions, both good and bad. This is partly because, since the Fall, each of our mothers fits roughly into either the ideal type of motherhood or the anti-ideal—the diabolical type—of motherhood. In our annual cultural celebration of Mother’s Day, we tend to elevate the bare position of motherhood itself—as if it is a good in itself—or even just the fact of womanhood (which, perhaps, was not originally a...
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