There is a daughter I mother A daughter I love But she is not mine & I am not hers, Forever. There is a mother she loves A mother who loves her, Forever. For love is like water. No human border can keep it out. Yes, love is like water It moves above in clouds, […]
Sex matters. Not simply how we have sex, but how and what we think about sex. Figuring all of this out is seldom simple because the extremes views—represented by contemporary hook-up culture and purity movement—dominate the conversation even as they mislead us. The former advocates that we divorce the emotional/relational component from sex and use […]
Solve When I was nine, I wanted to be a detective. With my official children’s guide, I researched invisible ink, tracks and Clues. I was confident that as soon as I actually encountered a mystery I would solve it. As a nine-year-old, I was deeply disappointed that there weren’t children being kidnapped so I could […]
Dear Portia, I grew up in the heart of evangelical purity culture. When I was 13, my parents took me out to dinner and gave me a promise ring. Throughout high school and college, I heard boys would ask me to compromise my sexual standards. I was ready to tell them no, but no one ever […]
For a three-month stretch when I was seven or eight, I tried to learn how to pray. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d pull a children’s prayer book down from the shelf and move it to the crack of light that shone in from the hallway. I opened it up to the Lord’s Prayer and read […]
Without community, there is no liberation . . . but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” ~ Audre Lorde I. I grew up in a nondenominational church with charismatic leanings and “clear doctrine on everything from Genesis to Maps & References.” The Sunday […]
It starts with an itch, the slightest feeling of discomfort. You sit at the back of the church and ignore the questions hovering in your mind. You sing the words of the hymn extra loudly, looking at the faces around you who all seem to be rapt in wonder. You think about the word, ‘rapt’, […]