In 1984, I got a “C” in my ninth grade typing class. It probably should have been a “D,” but the teacher saw that I was trying hard. I had no choice. I wanted to be a writer and my handwriting was (is) atrocious. Turned out that I sucked at typing, too, but it was better than my penmanship....

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...

Vitriolic political discourse did not incite Jared Lee Loughner to shoot twelve people in Tucson, Arizona. I’ve tried to understand how someone could reach such fallacious conclusions beyond wanting to increase ratings and reader traffic. I’ve tried to get beyond the fact that I’m a psychologist...

Stephen Hawking recently told us that God didn’t create the universe; gravity did. Hawking said that the existence of life necessitates conditions under which life can evolve (we’ll sidestep the tautology of this argument for now). We shouldn’t be so surprised that we’re here and we’re not...

Ten or fifteen years ago, “courtship” became a buzzword in Evangelical culture. Books like Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye* and Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity popularized the notion of replacing dating with antediluvian courtship rituals. It started a lot of conversations and sold...

I like television shows where messed up people do good things in bad ways. Lately, however, I’ve been more interested in the cultural fascination with stories featuring Machiavellian protagonists. See, I’m not the only one who likes Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Godfather, The Sopranos, and several other...

The fundamental attribution error is psychological jargon for attributing one cause to something with many causes . The phrase is typically used in reference to human behavior, but I think it can be applied to social and cultural phenomena. For example, when I’m stuck in traffic and start shouting...

When I was thirteen, I liked the idea that my soul was distinct from my body.  I was fifty pounds overweight with acne that bordered on leprosy. More than a few people thought I needed braces. I hated my body. I shouldn’t have, but embodiment is a tough nut to crack when you’re crazy about girls...

I had a bi-level spinal fusion in April 2009, but my back still hurts. My surgeon keeps moving the goalposts every time I tell him this. “It will take three months for you to notice a difference,” he said at first. Three months later, he tells me six months. At six months he said, “Well, for some...

Here’s why there was an horrific earthquake in Haiti: It sits on an unstable fault line between two tectonic plates, just like the one a few miles away from where I sit in Southern California. The awful, simple truth is that the beautiful island of Hispaniola rests on a piece of the planet that’s...