Too Hot to Handle: Christians and Mental Health

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Immanuel Can: Let me tell you a story, a true story. It’s about a Christian man. Unfortunately for this poor fellow, he was also a diagnosed schizophrenic. He was taking medication supplied by the government, and so long as he was on his meds he was functioning normally. But then his program was discontinued and his medication cut off. Without it he became delusional, and in that delusion he came to believe that his son could only be saved by being killed.

Operating in that mindset, he attacked and nearly killed his own child.

Too Hot to Handle: Christians and Mental Health

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Metaphorical Mites

You remember the widow, right?

I know, I know, there are more than a few widows in the Bible. I mean the one at the temple in Jerusalem in the gospels. The Lord remarked on the gift she deposited in the temple treasury. He specifically drew the attention of his disciples to it when he said that she put in “more than all those who are contributing.”

If you only read Luke you might be forgiven for thinking this incident occurred at random, but Mark makes it clear that the Lord “sat down … and watched the people putting money into the offering box.” That may seem an odd way to occupy your time, but I think he was waiting for a certain poor widow to come along.

So her two mites matter, and maybe not only for the reasons you might think.

Metaphorical Mites

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Recommend-a-blog (2)

It’s only been a year and change, so I guess it’s about time I did another one of these.

Eddy Plett is a brave man. Talking candidly about mental illness (particularly one’s own struggles) is not universally greeted with enthusiasm in certain conservative evangelical circles.

Especially when you do it on the Internet.