Today is the Day of Silence “to highlight the effects of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment” in schools. Parents and teachers, you may hear questions from your youth about this; I regret I did not post this earlier.
An End to Bullying
First, I want to register my full support for putting LGBT bullying to a final and complete end. I’m told by a source I trust that as many as one-third of LGBT teenagers consider suicide. That’s horrifying. It’s likely that peer mistreatment …
Last time in this series we talked about one great way to help our children remain connected to life in Christ as they leave home: give them a multi-generational experience of that life as they’re growing up. Now for some discussion on why young people leave the faith.
Top-quality research indicates there is one great (?) way above all to discourage students from becoming Christ-followers as young adults. As part of the National Study on Youth and Religion, led by Christian Smith and Melanie …
One of my daughter’s best friends is an Olympic hopeful gymnast. I went to one of her meets earlier this year, and sat with her parents for part of it. After her balance beam performance I asked her dad what it was like watching his daughter on that apparatus. He said something like, “I can’t stand to watch. And I can’t stand not to watch.”
His daughter won the competition that day, first place all-around. Needless to say, the dad was very proud.
I have …
I just wrote about parents’ responsibilities to teach our children the truths of the faith, including the reasons we believe. That’s a challenge, for sure. But I don’t think we can deny how eternally important it is for our children.
I’d like to open up this thread for discussion on how we can learn how to teach, and teach our children to learn. The floor is open.
Children love to ask questions. Teenagers' questions can be disturbing: “Is this church thing for real?” “Why do I have to obey your rules?” “I'm not sure I believe in God anymore.”
Even more disturbing might be the questions they keep to themselves.
Jesus encouraged questions. They were a major part of his ministry. They're good for us. It's good to be equipped with answers, too! But we need to respect the questioning process, and let it happen.
So we might …
My daughter was bullied all through grade school and even into her high school years. One of those incidents required significant medical attention. Her Christian faith was one reason she was made a target.
Christianity itself is often a target of bullying in the form of ridicule. Dan Savage did it in his speech to high school journalists last year. Here’s the thing, though: bullying is usually a show of strength to hide some weakness. Anti-Christianity bullying is no exception.
Today’s blog post on …
Here’s a discussion you can have around the dinner table, if your kids are old enough: What is marriage? Our culture is getting it wrong more often than not.
You might ask it this way, as I have done on this blog recently:
Why does marriage exist in the eyes of the law? What is it about marriage that merits that attention? That’s what you really, really need to think through.
It’s not so boys and girls can “make it” with each other …
As I have said elsewhere, I’ve been haunted lately by the vision of a family around the dinner table (even that’s an ideal thought, but let’s pass that by), where the middle- or high-school child says, “Dad, Mom, why do we believe … when my friends or my teacher say … instead?” I could fill in the blanks there with a hundred topics, most of which most Christian dads and moms have trouble answering.
I don’t need to tell you that you’re the first line …
Podcast:
Going to college was the best thing that ever happened to my spiritual life: it was there that I began my relationship with Christ, learned how to follow him, learned how great he was, and understood that I could serve him the rest of my life. It’s not that way for every student, though: many are unprepared for the social and intellectual pressures they experience on a secular university campus.
I gave this talk (length: 51:42, edited down from the original talk duration) in …
"The New Atheists claim to be the party of reason.... The problem is, they're not very good at it." — Discover the provocative ebook True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.