In 1986, Hal Higley found a letter addressed to his wife in the mail. When he asked Kathi, she said it was from a friend in Louisiana, but their strained marriage had left him suspicious. Later, as they put their three kids in the car to go to dinner, Hal slipped inside to search for the letter and found it hidden in a drawer. When he read it, he said, his “whole world fell apart.” The letter was from another man.

Four years after they married in 1954, Charlotte and Dick Griffiths moved to the jungle of Indonesia to translate the Bible into the Hatam language. Living among the isolated tribe intensified normal marriage stresses but also brought them closer to each other and to God. Dick, now 90, has mild dementia, but Charlotte remembers both hard times and good times.

Two years into his first pastorate, Mark Looman sat down to lunch with his wife Dorothy and their two girls. From Mark’s perspective, everything was normal, but over the last eight years, Dorothy’s frustration had been silently building. At that lunch, it became too much: She told Mark she did not love him anymore and walked out the door. “I wasn’t sure if I’d even see her again,” Mark says.

If you had a system that yielded poor results every time you used it, how long would it take for you to chuck that system? 

The traditional Maasai windowless mud-and-dung hut, with its poor ventilation, has for who knows how long been the cause of respiratory infections and eye irritations in adults and children of the tribe. So why have these Kenyans 50 miles south of Nairobi continued generation after generation to design their shelters like that? I don’t know. Tradition? No one thought of a better idea?

Who owns your body? It’s a hot topic today, with actress Alyssa Milano calling for a “sex strike” till legislators agree that women own their own bodies.

If you’re a Christian, you know the answer: God owns your body. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). If you’re not a Christian, you are trying hard to unknow that. Romans says you do know it though: One cannot “suppress” (1:18) what one does not already know deep down.

Patrick Henry College professor Stephen Baskerville is the author of Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution. His most recent book, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power, brings a sword to some current debates. Here are edited excerpts of our interview.

I’ve discovered that the secret to enjoying life is thankfulness (“be thankful”—Colossians 3:15). It really works. There’s always something to be thankful for, and finding it transforms your whole perspective. Isn’t it just like God to make His command to be thankful simultaneously His means of deliverance?

This year I particularly want to focus on one kind of thanksgiving—being thankful for men. I choose this because it is open season on men as much as on turkeys, which I feel sorry about. So here is my list of reasons to be thankful for men: