Rachel Marie Stone's Blog, page 4
March 20, 2014
How I learned to stop worrying and just eat the darn cupcake
Food wasn’t a good gift from God to be received and eaten with pleasure and gratitude. It was something to fear, and fear it I did. The original sin, I believed, was a kind of gluttony: a deadly sin. It was better, according to Proverbs, to put a knife to my throat than to indulge […]
March 12, 2014
Why I hope there will be more cartoon characters like Hiccup
My sons are small and skinny. They are nothing like the heavily muscled superheroes they admire. That’s just one reason we love How to Train Your Dragon: because while we’re used to hearing about girls’ toys being relentlessly slimmed-down, sexed-up, and princess-ified, we tend to talk less about the vision of ‘masculinity’ presented for our […]
March 4, 2014
Can reading help us to become better people?
I have a confession: sometimes when I’ve finished a really good novel, I miss the characters badly. I worry about what’s going to happen to those whose fates are left mysterious; I grieve for those who have suffered or died, I rejoice over marriages and babies and feel and think all sorts of things about […]
February 27, 2014
About that bill in Arizona…and what other implications it might have had
I grew up in a Baptist church that didn’t condone the use of alcohol. But it was also located in an area where tourism was a key industry, which meant that a lot of young (and not-so-young) people were employed in restaurants. Restaurants that served alcohol. Different people in my religious circles had different opinions […]
February 26, 2014
Clothing sizes are arbitrary. Stop fretting over them.
The dress was too small, so I wouldn’t buy it. It came in a larger size, but I wasn’t about to wear that size—in my mind, it was “too big.” We’ve all been there, inordinately focused on the size number on the label. Women have fretted about their sizes—and how sizes differ from brand to […]
February 24, 2014
Why does animal suffering hurts so much?
I’ve encountered a lot of sad animal stories — in books, on the web, and in real life — recently, and I’ve mused over why I find them so distressing in a recent post for Religion News Service. A friend, commenting there, noted that one of the reasons animal suffering may break our hearts […]
February 21, 2014
Maybe there shouldn’t be a religious exemption to vaccinations.
I’ve written on vaccination before, and, no surprise, raised no small amount of ire each time. Recently, I’ve been wondering about the “religious exemption” that many parents abuse in order to excuse their kids from vaccines. Aside from the casual abuse of the idea of religious freedom (here expanded to “something I don’t believe in”), […]
February 20, 2014
Why Barbie Belongs on the Cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit
As the Eberhart family finishes packing the contents of their Manhattan apartment in the opening scenes of the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives, a man carrying a naked female mannequin passes by. “Daddy, I just saw a man carrying a naked lady!” reports the young daughter. “Well, that’s why we’re moving to Stepford,” her […]
February 13, 2014
The Valentine’s Gift That Costs Everything
I spent a fair bit of my teen years reading Focus on the Family’s Brio, a now-defunct magazine aimed at teen girls as an alternative to Seventeen, YM, and other glossy periodicals whose vision of female adolescence involved the consumption of a great deal of clothes and makeup and the pursuit of the perfect prom […]
Your reading group needs this. And you can even get it for free.
As Lorraine Caulton writes on the IVP website: Reading is a solitary act. For many of us it is a form of retreat—a welcomed silence and deserved rest from our demanding routines. We have our favorite spot in the house: the unmade bed, the couch long enough to doze on, or maybe the off-limits living […]
