Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Of Graduate School and Life

Oh my gosh, it's been almost three years since I posted anything. I promise I'm still alive haha. Life's just been really busy. I started a Ph.D program at an awesome university and so I've been investing my writing time in academic pursuits and learning languages. I spend most of the academic year buried under a mountain of books, teaching, or traveling for research. Also, I'm seriously dating a great guy so that's been very distracting in a good way. :) Honestly, since the reign of Vision Forum came to an end, I haven't felt much impulse to write. But if Doug Phillips, Peter Bradrick, and their team of sadistic, narcissistic, nerfherders resurfaces, believe me, I will take them down again.

Then again, when I get free time to peruse blogs and consider the young Christian culture surrounding me, there is much to consider. There's been a lot of fallout from the "Purity Culture" in the last few years and books like, I Kissed Dating Goodbye have rightly been drawing a lot of fury from those affected by them. This a good thing! But it's also heartbreaking to read the stories of others who suffered a lot more than I did from these teachings. I've been blessed to have really awesome parents who didn't mind my challenging the books I was reading as a sixteen year old and now I'm blessed to be dating an awesome Christian man who was not affected by the purity culture.

Still, I see a lot of narcissism and legalism in today's Christian culture and I see that the fundamentalist ideas that I've spent years writing against have seeped into the evangelical church--at the same time the fundamentalist structure toppled. So I'm going to be writing about that... maybe not  often, grad school being what it is, but I think someone needs to speak up.

Ingrid