Hännah Ettinger blogs, tweets, is the founding publisher of The Swan Children Magazine, and dishes feminist critique of YA novels over at The YA Wallpaper.
When I was young, my family attended a pretty “normal” evangelical non-denominational church for a couple years. While we were there, the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins was sweeping through American evangelical Christianity, leaving eager young Christians to froth and foam in debates about the end times and personal eschatology. I read a series of kids books by a similar author, Frank Peretti, among other titles, and all of these stories were essentially heavy-handed allegories about spiritual warfare, the end of days, rapture/tribulation, and whether or not you had been faithful to Jesus enough to make the cut when he came back. Read more
I really don’t like Dave Ramsey, but I’ve never had much to point to in order to back up my general discomfort with the man, besides his brash conservative persona and his bad theology. But thanks to Matthew Paul Turner’s article that ran on The Daily Beast yesterday, I’m able to connect some of the dots a little better. Ramsey runs a (Christian) financial advice business that’s worth something like $55,000,000. His basic premise makes some sense, if you’re a middle class white guy with a steady-salaried job and health benefits. Stay out of debt, pay off your debt, trick yourself into spending less by using cash, pay off your small loans first so you feel like you’ve accomplished things, etc. But the instant you step out of that bracket, it stops making sense and (to use one of his catchphrases) becomes “just stoopid.” Read more