On Sunday afternoon I will ring a bell, be let in through the security gate, sign in, put on the required name tag and be escorted to the gym for my allotted hour. The generic name tag simply says “Clergy” but as the residents at the felony DUI incarceration and treatment center file in,...

  Where no gods are, spectres rule. Novalis One time I took a group of people in the drug rehab program to the local zoo. Most of our group had been to prison – some for years. Most were felons. Most of the women had been prostitutes as well as addicts. Most of them had been homeless, had lengthy...

I believe that only married people should have sex. You probably do, too. Evangelicals breastfeed their young on the notion that exchanging bodily fluids other than saliva (and sometimes that’s off limits) shouldn’t happen outside the bounds of matrimony. Now, tell me where it says that in the...

There are three things a Christian woman in her twenties can be guaranteed to experience: weddings, bridal showers, and baby showers. It doesn’t matter if you’re single, married, a rich corporate lawyer, or a poor freelance writer – your friends are going to get married and reproduce,...

The other day I was watching TV at a friend’s house when a Dove deodorant commercial came on.  By the end of the ad, I was convinced that my armpits were so ugly they were not fit to be seen in public – at least not until I’d used Dove’s deodorant for at least five days.  But after I’d...

The state of Virginia executed a heinous criminal on September 23, convicted of murder for hire. The governor denied even entertaining the thought of clemency, which means, folks, we  have an execution. Usually this is not outside of the normative nature of Virginia’s penal system. My home state is...

You'd be shocked how hard it was to find an image for this article. I’ve just read in the Sunday paper about this “new” phenomenon of the female mid-life crisis. Apparently, up until quite recently, middle-aged women didn’t actually have crises. Try telling that to past generations of...

My day started at the women’s maximum security state prison.  In the area that I live there is a men’s and women’s maximum security prison.  I just so happened to have moved in across the street from the men’s maximum security prison, as you may have read, and sure enough a few weeks later...

In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud became famous for asking the question, “What does a woman want?”  He concluded the problem with women was they were hysterical, and what they wanted most was to be manually stimulated to orgasm.  It was an innovative solution to women’s quandaries,...

I have this theory about God. Unlike the theories of evolution, mine lacks any scientific proof whatsoever. I tell you that because if you’re the type of person who needs hard facts or empirical evidence, or simply a text message, well, honey, I got none of that. What I do have is a gut feeling. Before...