“An Open Letter
to Anne Rice,” by Karen Spears Zacharias, should be of interest to anyone who has followed
Anne Rice’s public declaration that she has left Christianity. I wrote a quick
response earlier this week: “Can You Follow Christ Without Being a Christian.” 

I’ve also been
grateful for an interesting discussion in response to my post, “Some of My
Questions About Gay Marriage,”  written in response to Ross Douthat’s blogpost “The Marriage Ideal” and Andrew Sullivan’s response, “The Unique Quality of Lifelong Heterosexual
Monogamy.”  I
also commend to you Ellen Painter Dollar’s thoughtful response: “I’m Probably
Going to Regret This But…” 

Finally on a
totally separate topic, I commend Kenda Creasy Dean’s article, “Faith, nice and
easy,” about American
teenagers in the church. Here’s a quotation from it to whet your appetite:

American young people have learned a
well-intentioned but ultimately banal version of Christianity that’s been
offered to them in American churches. Most youth seem to accept this bland view
of faith as all there is–as something nice to have, like a bank account,
something you have in case you need to draw from it in the future. What Christian
adults have not told them is that this account of Christianity is bankrupt. We
have not invested in their accounts: we “teach” young people
baseball, but we “expose” them to faith. We provide coaching and
opportunities for youth to develop and improve their pitches and their SAT
scores, but we blithely assume that religious identity will happen by osmosis
and will emerge “when youth are ready” (a confidence we generally
lack when it comes to, say, algebra). The result? Teenagers who don’t have the
soul strength necessary to recognize, wrestle with and resist the symbiotes in
our midst–probably because we lack this strength ourselves.