My assistant put me up to this. She does a first pass on most of the emails I receive and recently called to say, “There’s a book out there called Girl, Wash Your Face, and you’re getting multiple emails about it every day. You need to review it.” I looked it up on Amazon and…
This is an article I’ve prepared with no small amount of trepidation. In the past I’ve written frequently and confidently about the role of a husband within his marriage, and especially about how it is tersely and perfectly summarized in Ephesians 5:33: “Let each one of you love his wife as himself.” But the last…
Life is too difficult for us to do it on our own. We are too weak, too unwise, too full of sin. Thankfully, God does not intend for us to carry out the Christian life independently. Instead, he gives us the strength, the wisdom, and the godliness of other Christians so they can bear our…
The great desire of Christian parents is that our children will grow into godliness. While they are under our care, we pray that they will come to confess Jesus as Lord, treasure his Word, and be ever-more conformed to the image of that great Savior. And as we pray, we work hard to train them…
You may have heard the phrase before: Behind every great man there’s a great woman. Like most maxims, it is generally true, even if not universally true. But here’s the surprise: Sometimes that great woman is not behind the man, but before him. Sometimes that great woman is not his wife but his mother. In…
Boys thrive under the love and leadership of an attentive father. Boys need their dads to model godliness and masculinity, to display patterns of love and respect within marriage, to teach skills necessary to grow into mature manhood. Much has been written to encourage fathers to embrace these responsibilities, to be the example their sons…
Lin Bian, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, wanted to understand how and when gender stereotypes develop, and especially the old stereotype that boys are smarter than girls. The results of her study were stark. “Among the 5-year-olds, both boys and girls associated brilliance with their own gender. But among those aged 6 or…
This book begins with a wedding. It kind of has to, doesn’t it? After writing so many books as a single woman, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth (formerly Nancy Leigh DeMoss) has now written her first major work as a married woman. Not that it’s a book about marriage, of course. Not yet. Rather, it’s about adornment,…
Many years ago, I was part of a church that developed a particularly troubling women’s ministry. It had been founded with noble intentions and was meant to address the unique concerns of women. Before long, though, the leaders became enamored with a problematic author, and their theology began to diverge from that of the pastors.…
Let me first tell you how None Like Him begins, then make two brief observations. “If you had told me five years ago that I would one day write a book for Christian women that led off with a quote from Proverbs 31, I probably would have punched you in the face.” The first observation:…
I wonder if you have ever noticed that Christian books authored by women tend to be written for women, while Christian books authored by men tend to be written for both men and women. Books authored by women tend to have feminine covers, while books authored by men tend to have neutral, not masculine, covers.…
This book is going to be big. Huge, even. Its predecessor has sold well over 10 million copies and more than a decade after publication has no less than 6 editions on the list of Christian bestsellers. Today, at last, comes the long-awaited sequel, releasing to great fanfare—a million-copy first printing backed by a huge…
Autumn has descended at last. The heat of summer has slowly, stubbornly given way to the cool of autumn. The long summer days have surrendered to evenings that come too early, nights that linger lazily before yielding to dawn. Most days I find myself outside long before the sun has shown its face, running through…
Last week I spent a couple of days at Muskoka Bible Centre, a Christian camp north of Toronto where we love to spend time in the summer. While there I cracked open a new book by Michael Haykin and saw that, fittingly enough, he had dedicated it to the staff and guests of MBC. I…
You never know where your Bible study will take you. You never understand how perfectly God has woven his Word until you follow a single thread from author to author, culture to culture, millennium to millennium, and see how God’s revelation of himself and his purposes is so perfectly consistent. Recently I followed a thread…
It can be a dangerous thing to walk into a Christian bookstore. It can be a dangerous thing to listen to Christian radio or watch Christian television or attend that big conference. It can be dangerous because the Christian world is polluted by so much bad teaching. There are so many leaders who claim to…
Thinking back, I wonder if people thought I was a bit of a mama’s boy. I grew up in a stable home and loved and respected both of my parents. I regularly spent time with each of them. But I was always closer to my mother. If this was true when I was young, it…
Blogs were never meant to be one-way communication. Because of the increasing difficulty in maintaining a helpful commenting section, I have recently added a Letters to the Editor feature. Today I share some recent letters to the editor. This week’s Letters to the Editors were almost entirely focused on three articles. Comments on Homemaking In…
That article about homemaking struck a nerve. Last week I wrote about Aileen and her Counter-Cultural Vocation of Homemaking, and I did so to share my gratitude that she decided to put aside other dreams to focus on caring for the home and children (and of course, for me). In retrospect, there is one more…
Blogs were never meant to be one-way communication. Because of the increasing difficulty in maintaining a helpful commenting section, I have recently added a Letters to the Editor feature. Today I share some recent letters to the editor. This week’s Letters to the Editors (and last week’s, since I didn’t post any last week) were…