There is a fascinating article in Psychology Today this month. The piece is written by Hara Estroff Marano and it is entitled A Nation of Wimps. Marano notes that “parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers”. Here is an excerpt from her article.     Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. “Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.” Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation. “Life is planned out for us,” says
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Part of the joy of blogging is the feedback. I get lots of encouragement, thoughtful input, and (for the most part) graceful challenges. My rule is that disagreements presented in a civil tone deserve a thoughtful response. Angry, name calling challenges deserve a purposeful punch of the delete button. That relates to my other rule. I am paying the fees for my little piece of cyber real estate so when you come into my cyber home those are the rules. There are lots of blogs where you can SHOUT and be a jerk. That is not how we play blog here. Those are the ground rules as we set up another edition of the wildly popular “Ask a Bad Christian”  feature. This is the third installment of the blog that answers questions and challenges sent my way by faithful musers. The first question for Bad Christian comes from dear friend Randy in Oklahoma. He was challenging me about my views that politics should stay out of the
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I love people watching. Regular readers know that I openly acknowledge that my brain was not wired to factory specs. So I am letting down the curtain a bit to allow you to see a few minutes in my world. Here are my RMWPW (random musings while people watching) from a day at an outdoor food court yesterday. I do not understand women and shoes. Can someone (preferably female) explain to me why you, as a species, are willing to cram your feet into shoes so pointed you could give injections by kicking somebody in the posterior? I look at my foot and I look at those shoes. It does not compute. The human foot does not narrow to a needlepoint. The second question I have is why do women wear shoes they cannot walk in? I realize I am lacking advanced degrees but it seems to me that a shoe that does not allow you to walk is not a
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As I write this I am flying over Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. After spending three days in Minneapolis I have been reminded that the people of Minnesota are polite, reserved, and kind. So I was a bit surprised to pick up a New York Times story and read that a divisive controversy has been raging at the Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood, Minnesota. The controversy has caused the church to lose 20% of it’s membership. Since Woodland Hills is a body of 5,000 members that is a stunning loss of 1,000 folks. Must be pretty serious stuff, huh? Must be heresy or moral sin that is involved, right? But the controversy in Minnesota is about how the church should embrace patriotism and politics into the sanctuary. Dr.Gregory Boyd founded the Woodland Hills Church in 1992.  He wrote a book that I loved called “Letters to a Skeptic” so I knew his name before this story came to my attention. Before the last presidential election he preached a series called “The Cross
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I have struggled for years with the concept that God somehow intervenes in athletic events. I have seen the post game interviews where athletes thank God for helping them make the big play or for helping their team win. And I wonder if God really chooses to get involved with sporting event outcomes. Does He sovereignly evaluate the two teams and inventory the number of Christians on the home team versus the visiting team? Is it quantity or spiritual maturity that determines the eventual outcome? Would God bless a team with 20 nominal Christians or the one with 10 really committed believers? What if two equally committed players, one a wide receiver and one a cornerback, are going for a pass in the end zone for the game deciding play? Who gets the blessing of victory? The best prayer or the best player? Faith in sports is an ongoing debate and was the subject of a recent story in USA Today. Tom Krattenmaker wrote a thoughtful
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One of my favorite ancient characters is Diogenes of Sinope. Born in Turkey about 400 years before Christ, he was a student of Antisthenes (444-370 BC), who was himself a pupil of Socrates. His philosophy was “marked by an ostentatious contempt for ease, wealth, and the enjoyments of life.” Diogenes would have had a field day skewering the consumerism and materialism in modern day America. One of the things that I love about Diogenes is his moniker. The irascible philosopher was known as Diogenes the Cynic. What a great name! How cool would that be to have a title like that? It certainly is better than Diogenes of Sinope. I would gladly swap Dave of Garland for Dave the Self-Deprecating as my appellation any day. One story relates that while Diogenes was sunning himself, the powerful and feared Alexander the Great came up to him and offered to grant him any request. “Stand out of my light,” he replied. For a man who
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Recently my bride and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. I wish I could say it has been 30 years of wine and roses. Or,  for my legalistic friends, 30 years of Welch’s and practical cut flowers. But it has not always been easy. Neither one of us came into this little nuptial adventure with any idea of what we were doing. So I was a little disturbed to pick up a publication today that would have told me everything that women wished that men knew. How helpful that little bit of info would have been in 1976 instead of 2006. But I decided to proceed to see if I had figured anything out on my own. The survey was a joint effort of Woman’s Day Magazine and AOL. The title of the article is “What we wish men knew”. Here are some of the findings with my totally objective self-evaluation of my beginning marriage grade and current grade. When you tell
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