1. Soul Mates (posted August 28) I love you, xkcd! This post asks "What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?" and comes at it with logic and data on world population- to show how totally ridiculous that notion is. Yes!
However, I still have to deal with Christian version of this myth- "God will set you up with that one perfect person!" which is much tougher to address... See also my post on how the Christian version of this myth is a much stronger beast.
2. How child sponsorship through World Vision works (posted September 4) This is a very very informative post, by a blogger who visited Sri Lanka with a team from World Vision. The child sponsorship program sounds great- it helps the community as a whole, not just one child at a time.
3. The Incomplete Politics of Poverty (posted August 31) According to the bible, there are 3 causes of poverty. This makes a lot of sense.
4. This video: Jesus Wants the Rose.
5. The amazing speeches of women in the conventions makes the silence of women in the Church that much more deafening. (posted September 5) Yes. This.
6. Defriended Over a Wedding, a Straight Man Gains Perspective (posted September 3)
7. Dear Pro-Lifers: STOP ERASING WOMEN (posted September 6) "Because that's the problem, isn't it? If zygotes didn't live inside women's bodies, this wouldn't be an issue."
8. Seeing Faces, Not Statistics (posted September 6) "And what would it have hurt for me to hear it? Why, in all of those abstinence-only speeches, where they scared you on the failure of condoms and condemned Planned Parenthood, why did they not explain that some people need them?"
9. The myth of how the hijab protects women against sexual assault (posted September 6)
10. Please Don't Tell Me I'm Beautiful (posted September 7) "I can tell you from over 35 years of first-hand experience, from when my face first got smashed with a baseball bat and my teeth were ruined, that it's a mind-f*ck to be told 'you're beautiful' when nearly every single consequential, real-world factor tells you otherwise." I totally agree with this article, and I wrote something similar a while ago: We CANNOT say "everyone is beautiful".