As a psychologist and seminary professor, I frequently entertain questions about the timeline for forgiveness and reconciliation in situations of domestic or familial sexual abuse. Most frequently, church leaders want to know when it is appropriate to encourage a victim of abuse to allow an offender back into the home or life. These questions sometimes originate for quite different reasons. Some ask due to fear that once abuser and victim are separated, reconciliation is made much more...

Many centuries ago (20 to be exact), female babies were considered a liability. Demographics in the first century in certain parts of the world were stunningly imbalanced male to female. Female infanticide was not uncommon. Baby girls, often considered the equivalent of deformed, were killed by exposure. In essence, it was permitted by law to leave them outside the city on the dung heap to die. That is about as clear a judgment of “worthless” on a human life as can...

Some stories stick. Like the one I heard from Jean, a missionary to the underground church in a nasty part of the world. At a conference on spiritual formation, she told me that a national pastor, imprisoned and beaten daily for the crime of preaching the gospel, had requested his American friends to not pressure the government to release him. “Perhaps God wants me here for good purposes I can’t yet see. Please, take no legal action. Only pray that God’s...

Many of my therapist colleagues complain that it is difficult to know about and/or understand new drug releases before their clients. The Internet gives patients access to good and erroneous information about pharmaceuticals often before their FDA approvals. Patients then expect their therapists to render informed opinions about these drugs. To this end, we will periodically review new entries in the marketplace so that our opinions will appear "informed." ...

Doctoring the body does not begin with the treatment of illness, but with the preventative maintenance of health. Knowing how to keep the body healthy requires that we understand what the body needs. What diet? What nutrients?  So it is with doctoring the soul. What does the soul need? What nutrients?  We nourish the hunger of the soul by living coram Deo sola scriptura: face-to-face with God by Scripture alone. Deo is Latin for God; coram is Latin for in the presence of,...

Recent voting for the permanent Iraqi constitution was remarkable for the image of so many veiled Iraqi women coming out to vote in the face of fierce threats of death. However, the current draft constitution cannot miss the attempts by the majority Shiite parties to impose an Islamic religio-legal system on Iraq. Their goal is to make Islamic law the only source of legislation, insisting that no law in Iraq contradict Islam (and note that, throughout this article, I distinguish...

Kris Henning, Angela Jones and Robert Holdford studied attributions made by both male and female domestic violence offenders. They compared 1,267 men and 159 women convicted of domestic violence (in a heterosexual relationship) on a variety of measures of attributions of blame, denial and minimization, and social desirability. Most of the sample identified themselves as African-American (84.4%), with a mean age of 32.8 (SD = 9.4). Most were dating (mean length of relationship = 6.1...

We now know that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were the largest natural disasters in American history. And we know that with 24 named storms and hurricanes reaching into the Greek alphabet this year, we have beaten the record for the most tropical storms in a season set way back in the 1930s.  But with the storms gone into the record books, the misery they have left behind is just beginning. And the needs are, quite frankly, overwhelming, as well as the hard work needed to overcome...

Ask most men and they would say ‘yes.' Ask a woman and she would probably hit you. Maybe for men—their world seems stress free and perfect (smile), but for most women the demands, pressures and pain seem to mount daily and feel overwhelming. ‘Overstressed,' ‘overworked,' ‘underappreciated,' ‘underpaid,' and ‘burnt-out' are life descriptors I hear often from today's Christian women. When you look deep inside her heart, it is easy to see why. So...

Few issues in women are more hidden than sexual addiction. Depression, anxiety, even childhood sexual abuse and eating disorders receive more attention. Neither the clinical field nor the recovery community has directed much attention to this secret struggle in women. A Google search reveals only a handful of professional articles and far fewer books about women’s experience with sexual addiction. The vast majority of material on the topic is about men and written by...