Privacy Policy

First Things First: Your Privacy

I don’t like my email address being sold or passed around. Therefore, I will not provide your email address to any advertiser, period. Your address will not be provided to anyone unless I have your permission or are required to do so by law.

I further protect your privacy and email security in general by requiring that new subscribers “confirm” or “verify” their subscription request. This prevents people from harassing others by subscribing them to something they may not want. When you subscribe, I send a message asking you to confirm your subscription. You must click the link in this message before your subscription will be activated. Of course, you may always cancel (or “unsubscribe”) at any time: there is a link at the bottom of every issue to make it easy.

In addition, I will never sell customer postal addresses, either. So if you support me in any manner, the information you provide is also kept confidential. I don’t appreciate my information being sold, so I won’t do it.

Terms of Service: Grace by the Cup is offered without charge for your personal use. In return for your free subscription, you agree to abide by the terms of the copyright notice included in each issue, and you agree that you are responsible for maintaining your own subscription, including changing your own address or stopping your subscription when you choose. Unsubscribe links are included in every issue.

Comments and Letters to the Editor: All comments, whether sent by email or posted on this site, become my property and may be published. Comments will be published at my sole discretion. Once published, any editing of comments shall be at my sole discretion, including removing comments for any reason. Comments on the site will be removed in the case of spam, off-topic posts, “flaming,” invasion of others’ privacy or other legal reasons, or if they do not materially contribute to the discussion at hand. I ask that you include your first name and location, and these may be added by us if you fail to do so. Publication in this blog may include your first name and location, but will not include your email address, and may (or may not) be edited for length or clarity.

Underage Subscribers: Grace by the Cup is designed for adults and well-educated, older teens. Kids under 13 will not likely understand the content, and I do not knowingly accept subscriptions for pre-teens. Any pre-teens discovered on our distribution will be deleted. Any particularly brainy kids that want to read Grace by the Cup should ask a parent to subscribe, and then ask to read their parent’s copy. Some copy may be worth reading with your loved ones.

Cookies: The site — and the advertisers who make this free service possible — may use cookies or “web beacons” to get statistics on who sees what ads, whether you click on the ads, etc.

I may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of specific interest to you.

Google may be one of these third-party vendors, and they use cookies to serve ads here. Google uses a special DART cookie that enables it to serve ads to you based upon your visit to this site and others that you visit.

If you don’t want to have this DART cookie on your computer, you can opt out. I feel you’ll be making a mistake by doing that, as you’ll then see ads for random goods or services that won’t be of much use to you.

eCommerce Policies 

Financial Support: 

Should you decide to support Grace by the Cup financially, rest assured that this site uses industry-standard SSL security on our entire site, not just online contribute forms. Contributions are currently accepted via PayPal only. (See more info here.) Contributions will show on your  Paypal history as “GRACECUP” or “GRACEBYTHECUP”.

Refund Policy: I do not offer refunds if you simply change your mind, or get mad when you don’t like something I say.

Note Regarding Online Credit Card Security: I do not accept credit cards at this time. When that changes, this will be updated.

Affiliate Relationships

You should assume that any links on this site, or in my emails, is to a site that has an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to the providers of goods and services mentioned, and the owner of this site may be compensated when you purchase from such a provider. You should always perform due diligence before buying goods or services from anyone — via the Internet or offline.