We need them as a godly covering over us to protect us from other men, from the world, and especially from the enemy. I just had to laugh and shake my head when I got to that threat, especially when it was followed by a page-long commercial. You must be intentional, or the world, your flesh, and the devil will have you for lunch. So stay with this! This way of life John and I have laid out here has utterly transformed the lives of thousands of women … But you must choose it. But, before the sales pitch, Stasi gives us a reason to buy all of their stuff: I wanted to believe that evangelicalism had moved past the obvious nonsense that Helen wrote about in the 60s… but apparently we haven’t at all.Īnyway, on to the chapter: a lot of it is “buy more of our stuff!” They have CDs and conferences and retreats and study guides and journals and Wild at Heart to push, after all.

So when I dug into Captivating and really just found the same exact beliefs as what Helen Andelin promoted, only with a more palatable verbiage coating, it made me angry. When I was wrapping up my review series on Fascinating Womanhood, I went looking for the most popular books I could find that covered similar ground, and at the time I believed that what I’d find would be. In the end, I absorbed many of the same messages, but the way I was given them was much more toxic, and I believe that level of toxicity makes it easier for me to reject some of those ideas.

I didn’t have the same sort of experiences that many of you have had this wasn’t a book I was given by a well-meaning Sunday school teacher, I never had to sit through a “Bible study” dedicated to it. One of my favorite things about writing this sort of extended-review-critique-thing is that I get to interact with all of you– especially since I grew up in an environment where books like Captivating were far too liberal for me to read. So, this is it: the very last post on John and Stasi Eldredge’s Captivating.

Captivating stasi eldredge