We are besieged  by do-it-yourselfers wanting to spruce up their homes. Mr. and Mrs. Clayton and John and Patrick – the two other part-timers – and I are besieged by customers. ~E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Terrible Writing Grey   Yes, I actually paid for and mostly read Fifty Shades of Grey. Feel free to judge me. Heck, I judge me. But I admit, when any book gets that much traction, it piques my interest and I will read it. Or at least try to read it. The writing in this is just plain terrible and I eventually had to say good-bye to Ana and Christian. If I had to read about one more cocked head or lips pressed into a hard line or inner goddess, I was going to start beating someone, and not in a sexy way. So why on earth is this book completely dominating the … [Read more...]

I used to be a complementarian. I believed that a wife was called to submit to her husband. I believed it enough that when I got married and wrote my own vows, I included "obey" in them. Granted, this was a lot more about the words than any kind of actual submitting. I'm not sure we ever really sorted out what "biblical headship" or "biblical submission" looked like. Mostly we just treated each other with love and respect and if we ran into an area where we disagreed, we'd figure out who felt more strongly about it and let that be our guide. But the label we would have used would have definitely been complementarian. But there was always one place where mutuality reigned, and that was the bedroom. When we read 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, everything in that passage screamed mutual … [Read more...]