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Over the last couple of weeks, Josh Harris has announced that he is splitting up with his wife and that he has left Christianity. Generally, I don't like to write about people, but prefer to write about ideas. However, there are some things about Josh Harris and purity culture that are instructive. Josh Harris grew up in a "homeschooling royalty" family. His dad was a popular homeschooling speaker, and Josh and his brothers were encouraged in pursuing their intellectual interests outside of academia. At age 21, Josh wrote I Kissed Dating Good-Bye. Over the next few years, he also wrote Boy Meets Girl and Not Even a Hint. These are books that discourage dating, encourage courtship, and lay th

It's Friday! Let's see what is out there on the internet! 1. You want to read the Mueller report, but you can't get through 400+ pages of legal-ese? Don't worry! The LawFare Blog has dramatized, yes, dramatized, the Mueller report into a podcast. You can find the intro here. So far, they've released two episodes and they are much more comprehensible than the actual report. Trust me. 2. This is entertaining, but also a bit concerning. The Trump administration's A/V team did not catch that a fake Presidential Seal was projected up behind him during a speech this week. Yikes! 3. With abortion access becoming more scarce, more women are looking to get medical abortion by mail. One website ranks

I am currently on a steroid taper for my chronic migraine since it seems to have taken a turn for the worse over the last month. It seems, though, that I react to different steroids rather differently. Prednisone predictably makes me anxious, hungry and insomniac. I've been on Decadron this time (and my last steroid course) and find that I'm not as hungry, and the sleep and anxiety issues are intermittent. I slept a lot yesterday, probably recovering from Friday's migraine and trip to the ER. But, tonight, I can't seem to relax enough to sleep. Other non-related thoughts. Our exchange student who is coming in a month or so needs to update her immunizations and we are told that she should try

I feel like Loki at the end of that video clip. Although no one is claiming that I said I was a god! I called my doctor on Thursday about my persistent headache issues. He put me on a high dose steroid taper - yay! Then I had the migraine from hell on Friday and I ended up in the Emergency Department where I was able to get relief without narcotics - yay! But, I still didn't feel much better yesterday (Saturday). The pain was better (not gone, of course), but I was depressed and tired and generally feeling icky. That would be because we had one hell of a storm headed our way. When all was said and done, we were out of power, the temperature had dropped at least 20F, and my mother-in-law was

Yes, it's Saturday, but I wrote this post on Friday and it got lost in the interwebs and I'm having to rewrite it. But, if I do something like this again, it will still be Friday Finds, so I'm keeping the name! It was quite the Friday for me. I woke up at 4:20am with a whopper migraine despite having started decadron the day before. Strange, huh? But there was a bad storm coming. Anyway, I took a variety of meds with no relief so Patrick took me to the Emergency Department where I was given a cocktail of meds that did NOT include narcotics, but brought my headache back down to a very low level. Yes! Life was good again! Now onto Friday Finds! 1. One evening last week, I had the crazy idea to

Patrick and I like watching competition shows like American Ninja Warrior, Top Chef, and Project Runway (OK, that one's more me than Patrick). Something you hear a lot on these shows is, "I want to show (the world, my kids, . . . ) that you can do anything if you just try hard enough." Guess what? That's just not true! And we need to admit it. Hard work gets us far down the road, but we can't all reach the same destination. I'm a family doctor, but Patrick could probably not have made it through medical school. I have a very good memory and excellent pattern recognition skills. He, on the other hand, is really good and math and can problem solve like nobody's business, so he majored in engin

Are those of us who are calling for changes at the southern border calling for open borders? It seems like every time Trump tweets about Democrats, he's saying that they want "open borders". Is that really true? I can't speak for everyone (and I'm not even a registered Democrat), but disagreeing with the President does not mean that someone wants open borders. It is absolutely possible to believe that this country can have border security without holding asylum seekers in detention centers, separated from family without basic hygiene needs being met. It's possible to want an increased number of refugees coming to this country without wanting to open our borders to every possible refugee. And

I came across a couple of abortion articles to share with you this week. First of all is this New York Times story about how women getting abortions are more likely to be poor. Women getting abortions today are far more likely to be poor than those who had the procedure done 20 years ago. Half of all women who got an abortion in 2014 lived in poverty, double the share from 1994, when only about a quarter of the women who had abortions were low-income, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights and conducts a national survey of abortion patients every six years. The abortion rate has declined by nearly 40 percent since the mid-1990s. But the United S

Managing chronic migraine is always a challenge. Between the pain and chronic fatigue, it's just hard to get things done. And, since I love productivity so much, I value getting stuff done! Things have been worse over the last few months, so a few weeks ago, my headache specialist gave me occipital nerve blocks and a steroid taper. That helped temporarily, but things are back to being problematic. My baseline headaches are worse than they were a year ago and my migraines are more frequent than they used to be. I don't mind being physically inactive. I'm happy to read or knit, although my body minds it and reminds me about it when I try to get back to my exercise regimen. But, I know that ina

Time is running an excellent article by David French about why evangelicals continue to support Trump. He asserts that it's all about fear. And he's right. French first points out that evangelicals are taught from the cradle not to be afraid because God is with us. Our Bible stories from Sunday School are shot through with that theme. And, of course, he reminds us of 2 Timothy 1:7. But in 2016, something snapped. I saw Christian men and women whom I’ve known and respected for years respond with raw fear at the very idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency. They believed she was going to place the church in mortal danger. The Christian writer Eric Metaxas wrote that if Hillary won, America’s chan

Within the last couple of days, I have come across two different pieces of writing containing opposing pieces of information. And it's important. First, a letter from Dr. Dobson, best known from his days at the helm of Focus on the Family. There's a lot to the letter that could and should be discussed and I refer you to Libby Anne who has done a good job with it. What I want to focus on is this section: Before I conclude, I must tell you about the agents who have to deal with this chaos. They are compassionate men and women, sworn to uphold federal law and protect our borders. They obviously care about the detainees, and I respect them highly. They work tirelessly feeding people three times