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One Who Got Away: Libby Phelps Alvarez, Religious Brainwashing, and the Westboro Baptist Church
We’ve all seen the signs; we’ve all heard the rhetoric of hatred: “Thank God for dead soldiers,” “Soldiers die; God laughs.” The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas remains America’s best-known and least-understood cult. Founded by Pastor Fred Phelps, the rural church believes that the deaths of soldiers and Marines evidences God’s righteous judgment on […]
Rachel Held Evans and the Scandal of the Evangelical Heart
Sometimes I encounter a blog post so compelling, it stops me in my tracks. The other night I couldn’t sleep. Wind shrieked outside as a cold front clawed through Columbus. I padded downstairs over thick carpet and curled on the couch beneath my blue blanket. Cozy. I drank a cup of blueberry coffee and turned […]
The Golden Ooze
On a hot July day in an otherwise chilly Maine summer I drove to Pineland Farms in New Gloucester to buy ice cream. The country store also sold raw honeycomb in plastic tubs the size of a grapefruit. Raw honeycomb? Sweet gooey yumminess? I couldn’t resist. Sitting in my light green Taurus overlooking the rolling […]
Unforgiveness: How to Staple Your Own Hand
My friend Jeff once flew bush planes in Alaska. He gained great skill as a pilot and also learned how to service his own plane. The reasoning went something like this: If Jeff’s engine ever conked out while he was flying over the remotest parts of Alaska, he’d better be able to land the plane […]
Efficiency vs. Fruitfulness: Lessons from an Apple Tree
My joy-thief struck again. It happened during Christmas Break. My wife and I had just moved to Columbus, Ohio from Dallas. I graduated from Dallas Seminary in December and then we visited family in Maine. As temperatures dropped and snow flew I chopped down a Christmas tree, took naps, and generally did nothing which could […]
Love Bombing: Wax or No Wax?
“Love must be sincere.” – Romans 12:9 I can still remember watching American Marines drop grenades into a stream on a Pacific island during World War II. The black and white news footage showed shirtless, smiling Marines milling about on the bank, surrounded by palm trees and tropical plants. “These Marines have worked up quite […]
A Believer’s Assurance in Christ
I sometimes struggle with doubts about whether or not I am loved and saved. Are you shocked? I am, after all, a seminary student. Yet I doubt. “God may love others,” I occasionally say to myself, “but God doesn’t love me. I feel too sinful to be saved. I need to try much harder to […]
How to Identify Religious Brainwashing: The Dispensing of Existence (Part 8 of 8)
This is the final in an eight-part series on how to identify brainwashing in a destructive group or cult. It is based off of Dr. Robert Jay Lifton’s “Eight-Point Model of Thought Reform” and borrows from several other authorities on the topic of religious mind-control.* 1.) Part One: Milieu Control 2.) Part Two: Mystical Manipulation 3.) Part Three: […]
Who Writes Your Shattered Life?
“We will only love our story to the degree that we see the glory that seeps through our most significant shattering. To see that glory, we must enter into and read our tragedies with confidence that they will end better than we could ever imagine…. God writes our story not just for our own enlightenment […]
Spiritual Abuse: 10 Ways to Spot It
Sometimes less is more. Christian writer and blogger Mary DeMuth has a succinct post on ten signs of spiritual abuse. Having experienced spiritual abuse herself, Mary knows what she’s talking about. She notes the following: Spiritually abusive ministries have a distorted view of respect. Spiritually abusive ministries create a culture of fear and shame. Spiritually […]
Liberty for Captives 