Your chance to ask interview questions

Next Monday and Tuesday at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, I’ll be interviewing in front of students two well-known female authors and conference speakers, Elyse Fitzpatrick and Carolyn McCulley. I’ve read four of their books and prepared some questions, but I’m open to your suggestions about questions I should ask, and I’d like to hear about your experience with subjects on which I’ll question them.

For example, Fitzpatrick’s website proclaims “No fluff. No bricks. Just Good News.” She says women’s conferences often offer fluff (cotton candy stories) and bricks (thousands of rules). Have you found that to be the case?

Fitzpatrick has written two books about eating disorders: Love to Eat, Hate to Eat: Breaking the Bondage of Destructive Eating Habits and Uncommon Vessels: A Program for Developing Godly Eating Habits. WORLD reporter Sophia Lee has written about eating disorders, including her own, and I think she’d agree that part of the problem involves getting the gospel wrong. What have you seen about how eating disorders develop, and how they can be successfully fought?

(By the way, Fitzpatrick predicted that press coverage of the eating disorders Princess Diana and Jane Fonda had two decades ago would lead to more of them. “Talking about it, ‘educating’ the public, ironically will probably cause more young women to experiment with it, Fitzpatrick wrote. “Since it seems popular to be bulimic now, we will see more and more of it in our counseling rooms. We need firm, clear, biblical answers that speak to the heart.” That makes sense to me; we’ve seen similar things in suicide coverage.)

Fitzpatrick has written a lot about parenting, including this: “Something odd happens when we start training the miniature unbelievers in our own home. We forget everything we know about the deadliness of relying on our own goodness and we teach them that Christianity is all about their behavior and whether, on any given day, God is pleased or displeased with them.” Parents, is that your experience?

She writes in Give Them Grace, “It’s the premise of this book that the primary reason the majority of kids from Christian homes stray from the faith is that they never really heard it or had it to begin with.” I’ll ask Fitzpatrick whether she’s saying that if our children stray, it’s because we did a bad job teaching them the gospel. What do you think?

“Most of us are painfully aware that we’re not perfect parents,” Fitzpatrick writes. “We’re also deeply grieved that we don’t have perfect kids. But the remedy to our mutual imperfections isn’t more law, even if it seems to produce tidy or polite children. Christian children (and their parents) don’t need to learn to be ‘nice.’ They need death and resurrection and a Savior.” I’ve enjoyed teaching many polite children, but are they particularly at risk of misunderstanding the gospel?

Her summary, in the introduction to Give Them Grace: “Let’s face it: most of our children believe that God is happy if they’re ‘good for goodness’ sake.’ We’ve transformed the holy, terrifying, magnificent, and loving God of the Bible into Santa and his elves.” True?

Carolyn McCulley also became a Bible-believing Christian as a young adult, at age 30. (Fitzpatrick says God changed her when she was 20.) I’ll ask both women how that happened, and I’ll explore with McCulley how the Bible shook up all her prior feminist assumptions. (McCulley says her education as a journalism major left her with “a caricature of masculine sexuality as a model of freedom for both sexes. Aggression at work and on dinner dates was the legacy of my education.”)

I’ll ask McCulley about her experiences in South America, where on an Easter Sunday: “I heard the greatest message of redemption and forgiveness that would ever reach human ears. There, sitting among people who had once despised each other for the color of their skin, I learned that hope for change was found in the life and death of Jesus Christ.”

Fitzpatrick has been married for 40 years and McCulley is single. McCulley writes about that, and I’ll ask her how singleness figures into her thinking. (Maybe the tag line on McCulley’s website gives a hint: “Living by grace. Fueled by caffeine.”) Everyone knows the broader culture has conflicted views about marriage and motherhood. How, in your experience, I’ll ask her, does that show up in the church?

McCulley writes a lot about work in her new book, The Measure of Success: “Women should work and work hard every day. As Christ-following women, the Bible calls us to work for the glory of God. But the location of where we work is neither the definition nor the measure of our success.” She asks if you’ve noticed that “far more verses in the Proverbs 31 portrait are about productivity and financial management than relationships”?

McCulley began her media career producing for a famous political talk show, The McLaughlin Group. She was a commercial film producer and a media and marketing handler for Fortune 500 companies. Then, during the Great Recession early in 2009, she started her own film company. I’ll ask about those experiences, and how she deals with tensions between films she wants to make and the need to make payroll and keep the lights on. McCulley’s principles for job success include: Pay your dues, address conflict, put your confidence in God. What are yours?

She lists in Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? the questions she asked herself as marriage never came: “What good purpose could God have in keeping me single? Was there something wrong with me? Or with the men around me? Am I stunted in my femininity because I’m not a wife or mother? … How are we to prioritize demanding careers, a home with a constant parade of roommates, shifting relationships as others marry, and so on? Should I continue to hold out hope, or did I kiss marriage goodbye without even realizing it? So many questions—and all those questions led directly to the most important one: Am I trusting God with this hope deferred?”