Previously on...

And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers are always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework—an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the dependence, the lack of self-reliance of the boys and girls who are entering college today.

My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about Sally Rogers. Funny Sally, with her blonde hair bobbed and curled, a black bow affixed on the left side, flowered dresses that cinch at the waist and billow over the hips. She’s the type of woman who wears a single strand of pearls that settles just above the collarbone when she goes out for the evening.

My birthday is in late February and hers is in early March and “Where You Been, Fassbinder?” is the most depressing example of what it’s like to be a single woman, dateless, on your birthday.

Her strongest critics within the church are conservatives who should be most sympathetic to the project’s strictures: those who claim to follow the Bible literally themselves. “It’s revealing that when I say, ‘I’m going to actually do it,’ they react,” she said ruefully. “It goes to show at some level there’s a fear of exposing what it means to follow the Bible literally.” Evans is speaking to the church, but she’s not preaching to the choir. And by doing that, she’s helping her readers follow another Biblical instruction, this one from Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.