Culture
Now they’re re-defining “parent”
The US Census Bureau has redefined the word “parent”, according to a New York Times story on a spike in the percentage of black children being raised in two-“parent” families.
The point of the story is to tout this gain, which may be entirely due to a re-definition of terms and not any actual change in society. Other possible drivers of the “trend” include more immigrants with traditional family structures who are part of the group known as the “black population” and an emerging black middle class. Yet, without giving us a breakdown, the bureau drops this bomb in the middle of their report, which to my mind invalidates the conclusions.
The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.
According to the bureau’s estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent.
There’s no denying that grandparents, aunts and uncles, foster parents, or just good-hearted folks who raise other people’s children are better for these children than not having anything, the re-definition of the word and concept of “parent” broadens its meaning to insensibility and risks watering it down, not unlike what has been done to the word and concept of “marriage” by civil partnerships, same-sex “marriage” and no-fault divorce.
It is undeniable that children are better off when raised by both parents living together in a loving household. And, yes, it is better for children not to be raised by abusive or neglectful parents. I would agree with author Orson Scott Card on this point:
There are marriages that desperately need to be dissolved for the safety of the children, for instance, and divorced parents who do a very good job of keeping both parents closely involved in the children’s lives.
But you have to be in gross denial not to know that children would almost always rather have grown up with Dad and Mom in their proper places at home. Most kids would rather that, instead of divorcing, their parents would acquire the strength or maturity to stop doing the things that make the other parent want to leave.
Let’s also not forget the statistic that children whose biological mother is divorced or never-married are “six to 30 times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse” and some studies show that children whose mother co-habits with a man whose not their father are 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse and up to 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse than children living with their married parents.
So why re-define parenthood? For one thing, it’s the bureaucratic impulse. When faced with a difficult problem not easily solved in one budget year or one administration’s term, you redefine “victory” in order to show that you’re doing a good job. But there’s also another impulse, connected to the marriage issue, which is the effort to re-engineer society, to break down the old structures with their traditional morality and strictures to usher in a new age that conforms to new desires and trends. Plus, it does away with all the inconvenient guilt over “broken” homes. Pretty soon you won’t be allowed to talk about the nuclear or traditional family. Already we’re made to feel guilty for excluding single-parent families and families where the grandparents are raising their grandkids in the absence of the parents.
The family is the most fundamental building block of society, not the state, not even the Church. Everything else is built on that foundation and we’re now tinkering with that foundation. If we’re not careful the whole tower of civilization will come tumbling down on our heads.
Photo credit: Flickr user Ela2007. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Great Depression, 2008-style
There are so many things wrong with this New York Times story that tells us the sob story that mothers are having to sacrifice buying designer jeans so their kids can have more stuff this Christmas. Yes, my dad tells me tales of his mom forgoing designer fashions during the Depression; it was such a hard time for everyone.
The article starts with this anecdote of a woman who is buying her daughter a mess of Christmas presents, but will have to forgo the designer jeans she wants to buy herself. (Click through to see the photo of the Christmas gifts for her daughter.) Then it tells us that the economy is so bad that “for millions of mothers across the nation, this holiday season is turning into a time of sacrifice.” No, they’re not worrying about whether they can put food on the table, heat the house, or even keep a roof over their kids’ heads.
Weathering the first severe economic downturn of their adult lives, these women are discovering that a practice they once indulged without thinking about it, shopping a bit for themselves at the holidays, has to give way to their children’s wish lists.
We’re so steeped in our consumerist lifestyles, so obsessed with buying stuff we don’t need and can’t afford that being unable to buy stuff for ourselves at Christmas is considered a major sacrifice.
“I want her to be able to look back,” Ms. Hunt declared, “and say, ‘Even though they were tough times, my mom was still able to give me stuff.’”
Right, because what really endures for kids is the memory of the stuff your mom is able to buy you.
Note, too, that there’s no mention of a dad for Ms. Hunt’s kid. But the Times doesn’t forget them, being quick to point out that it’s moms who are enduring this horrible burden of being unable to buy stuff themselves the most. Yes, because dads don’t sacrifice. Nope, in our culture, it’s only moms who really sacrifice. Dads just go to work and then go out drinking with their buddies and go play golf and then plop themselves in front of the TV. They don’t sacrifice anything.
In what world is being unable to buy something for yourself during your Christmas shopping any kind of sacrifice? I guess in the world of the yuppies that the Times considers its audience.
And if our economy is dependent on people buying stuff for themselves they don’t need and can’t afford, then maybe it’s time for a little shakeup and a re-ordering of priorities.
Just a little thought to share with you all on this Black Weekend (formerly known as Thanksgiving weekend or the First Sunday of Advent).
Photo credit: Flickr user litherland. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The world’s oldest temple and the limits of knowledge
Archeology continues to turn the best theories of scientists on their heads. In Turkey, they’ve uncovered a temple that’s millennia older than the next oldest known temple. They estimate it to be at least 12,000 years old, dating from the earliest moments of civilization, at time most scientists believed humanity consisted solely of roving hunter-gatherer nomads.
Schmidt and his colleagues estimate that at least 500 people were required to hew the 10- to 50-ton stone pillars from local quarries, move them from as far as a quarter-mile away, and erect them. How did Stone Age people achieve the level of organization necessary to do this?
The new theory is that an elite priestly caste must have formed much earlier than previous estimates. What’s funny is that the scientists continue to base their theories on assumptions, such as for example that monotheism follows after polytheism and animism in human civilization.
There’s a kind of post-Enlightenment chronological snobbery, a sort of gnosticism, not in the classical sense, but in a more general sense of a worship of our own intellect. Modern intellectual man believes he can unlock all the secrets of the universe through his own means. Yet we’re constantly seeing the folly of such belief.
So many theories once taught as virtual fact when I was a kid have now been cast aside in favor of some new formulation, often characterized as bedrock solid and the last word. In 30 years they too will be on the ash heap of history. So it goes.
Photo credit: Haldun Aydingün in the journal Archaeology.
Voting by the color of your skin
I was in line at the TSA security checkpoint at Chicago’s O’Hare airport yesterday and had just reached the kiosk where the TSA agent checks your boarding pass and ID. The agent happened to be black. The woman behind me, a white woman in her 60s, asks him excitedly out of the blue: “Are you ready to vote for Obama?”
I know we’re in Chicago, Barack Obama’s hometown, but I think it would be a little much to assume everyone is voting for him. There must be some Republicans in the city. So why would this woman assume that a perfect stranger is voting for Obama?
Could it be that she saw the color of the man’s skin and made an assumption about his preference? This is just plain old racism, as if a black person could not possibly have considered policy stances or character or any other factor and found he preferred John McCain.
Whatever happened to Martin Luther King’s dream that someday we would judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin?
And yet maybe this woman’s assumption was not so far-fetched. I received an audio file in my email from a friend the other day of a clip from the Howard Stern show, of all things. Someone had gone up to Harlem in New York to interview folks in the street, pulling aside black people in particular and asking them who they were voting for. All of them said Obama. So then the interviewer listed off a bunch of McCain policy positions, characterizing them as Obama’s, and asked if this was why they were voting Obama.
“So which of Obama’s policies do you support more: his pro-life beliefs or wanting to stay in Iraq until the job is done.” The most common answer was “both”. The interviewer even asked, “Do you like Obama’s pick of Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate? What do you think of her?” They all thought it was a great idea, they thought she was wonderful.
Maybe the woman in Chicago wasn’t so far off in her assumption. Maybe it’s the people who are voting for Obama because of the color of his skin who have betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission.
If only we had wine bars to save our churches
I just don’t think they get it. The Church of England is hemorrhaging members and money, even to the point of finding it difficult to maintain its historic cathedrals. So what is their plan for reversing this trend? Are they formulating a bold new evangelization? Seeking to bring the basic truths of the Gospel to a new generation? Reaching out to the masses of new immigrants who might be receptive to the faith of their new homeland? Not at all.
Instead one cathedral has hired an experienced retail marketer who plans to open wine bars and hand out “loyalty cards.”
The first “director of hospitality and welcome” at an English cathedral has unveiled far-reaching plans to make its operations more business-like. Mark Hope-Urwin, a former executive with the John Lewis department stores chain, has been recruited by Birmingham Cathedral to oversee a radical change to its image and branding. His plans, revealed today, include a chain of city-centre wine bars and “loyalty cards” for regular worshippers to obtain discounts at the cathedral’s shops.
I don’t think they could find a more telling cliché for the perceived elitism of English-speaking Anglicanism today than a wine bar, which is the sort of place you find the snooty upper-middle class dual-income, no-kids yuppies, not salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar and white-collar families.
The very attitude of the brains behind this idea is telling.
“We are in a competitive environment. People have all kinds of distractions in their busy lives and at the moment too many just see the cathedral as a big brick monolith. That has to change if we are to bring people in.”
If you approach the mission of the Gospel as just one among many distracting entertainments on the menu, then you’ve already lost the fight. If I’m looking for a “distraction” or entertainment, then church is low on the list.
Being a committed Christian of the sort who will remain loyal to the local parish is a lifestyle, not a hobby. Christianity doesn’t live in a box to be brought for an hour on Sunday, but is something that changes the very essence of your being and brings a change to your entire life through an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ.
But you go ahead with your wine bar. Oh, and how many points do I have to earn on my loyalty card before I get one of those snazzy collared purple shirts?
Photo credit: Yajico. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
Liberals wrestle with conscience over conservative artists
With the advent of blogs and Twitter and other avenues for personal expression online, it has become ever easier for public figures (and private ones as well) to make known their personal opinions on all manner of subjects unrelated to their cause for fame. What’s interesting is that when some fans find their favorite author/actor/artist/what-have-you espousing ideas they find repugnant they have an existential crisis.
Now, to be sure, this is nothing new for most conservative and/or traditionally religious people. The ranks of the cultural elites are filled with those who espouse all kinds of liberal notions that are the opposite of our own cherished beliefs, even going so far as to express disgust for that to which we hold fast. We’ve become accustomed to that actor in our favorite show/movie or this author of our favorite book giving us pause. And with these celebrities venturing onto the Internet where they can make their opinions even more transparent, this becomes a more common occurrence.
What’s interesting is that liberal fans are now dealing with this problem. I’ve seen this crop up most recently with regard to Orson Scott Card, the author of the sci-fi classic “Ender’s Game” and a devout Mormon who espouses social conservative political views. Card has been a newspaper columnist and commentator for some time, but recently he’s been very vocal about the travesty of courts redefining marriage as well as giving free rein to abortion.
Confession of a non-hugger
During daily Mass today, the priest in his homily said that since we’re all one big happy family, we should hug one another during the Sign of Peace. For my part I said to my buddy sitting next to me, “Don’t even think about it.”
Yes, I hear all the time how stiff and frozen we New England, European-heritage Catholics are, especially compared to our Hispanic brethren. Hey, I thought we were all about cultural diversity. Well, in my culture we don’t get all huggy with strangers and mere acquaintances. At least, I don’t.
I have several reasons for my stance. For one thing, this was a Mass at my workplace in the new Archdiocesan Pastoral Center. Even though this is a religious celebration, I think it would be inappropriate for me to start hugging my co-workers. Second, while the people to my left and right were men—in which case a biff to the shoulder is as close to a hug as they’ll get from me—in front and behind me were women, including three much younger, unmarried women.
Maybe I’m old fashioned or just over-sensitive, but out of respect for my wife, as a policy with rare exceptions, I don’t hug women outside my family, especially younger unmarried women. (One exception was last Friday when one of my long-time temps left us. She wanted to give me a hug in thanks and goodbye and I agreed since it was her last day and it seemed to be the thing to do at the moment.) It seems to me that a hug is just too intimate to be shared with just anyone, only one step removed from a kiss. You may say I’m being silly, but I say that it’s a partially a byproduct of an oversexualized culture and partially my own desire to make hugging more than just a fleeting fancy.
Maybe I’m old fashioned or just over-sensitive, but out of respect for my wife ... I don’t hug women outside my family.
Several years ago I volunteered in my parish’s youth ministry program and the youth minister, an old friend, insisted that the adult volunteers should be giving all the kids hugs whenever we see them because they don’t normally feel the love from the Church. (Suffice to say that this was pre-2002.) I flatly refused because that just seemed like he was asking for problems. Sure enough, the program’s decline started about the time one of the volunteers was revealed as showing too much interest in one of the kids. Nothing illegal, immoral, or even unethical, just … inappropriate.
Now, if you’re one of those affectionate people who likes to hug everyone you meet, that’s fine for you. But keep in mind that there are those of us out there who don’t feel the same way, so please don’t get offended. It’s just not my culture and cultural differences aren’t bad. They’re just different.
Photo credit: Kalandrakas on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
Our wedding reception music
A friend of my sister-in-law dropped me an email the other day. She’s getting married and wanted some advice. She knows that Melanie and I eschewed the traditional DJ for our reception and instead went with a series of playlists on my iPod hooked up to a speaker system.
Yes, horrifying and terribly gauche, I know, but we were trying to be economical and neither us liked the idea of a disc jockey imposing his personality on our reception. It went mostly well, after we decided not to use the expensive performance monitors I borrowed from a friend and just ran it through the hall’s stereo system. (Unfortunately the expensive speaker system made horrible feedback and we couldn’t figure out why.)
So my s-i-l’s friend said she didn’t think her fiancé’s taste in music was right for a reception and, based on what she’d heard, thought mine might be a better fit. I’m flattered, of course, and so I told her I’d share the playlist from our wedding reception. I should mention that these songs come from both me and Melanie. Can you guess which music comes from each of us?
There are three playlists: Before and during dinner; after dinner; and other. Dinner and mingling music has a distinctly different flavor from dancing music and I wanted the dinner music to start quiet and light and build up throughout the meal to something more festive in preparation for the energetic party music. Keep in mind, however, that our idea of party music is not just dance music. Neither of us have ever been much into clubbing and dancing, so our taste there could be considered … eclectic. The “other” playlist are songs that I wanted to have available to toss in here and there. Some are fun, some have special meaning.
The Lists, after the jump:
Oldest copy of the Bible now available on online
Ten years ago when I was telling people about the Internet and how the Vatican was setting up a web site, an image I often used to described the promise of this new medium was that of access to previously difficult-to-access information. I would point out that the Vatican’s libraries hold ancient manuscripts, including millennia-old copies of the Bible, that only very few accredited scholars would ever get to see and wait until the day those manuscripts are imaged and put online for anyone in the world to see at their own computers.
That day has come.
The British Library has announced that it will make the complete Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest, most complete Bible in the world dating from around 350 AD, available online for the first time and all in once piece for the first time in decades. The Codex Sinaiticus, so named because it was discovered in St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844, has been divided in pieces almost from the time of the discovery, with large sections being held in Britain; Leipzig, Germany; and St. Petersburg, Russia. As of Thursday, high-resolution images of 100 pages will be available at www.codex-sinaiticus.net and the rest will be added over the next year.
Think of what this will mean for scholarship of all kinds. Whereas research on rare or precious documents used to be limited to those with access and the ability to travel to far-flung places, now scholars and non-scholars will be able to get a better view of the document than even if they were physically present. (You’d never be allowed to actually touch such a precious treasure.)
Is there room in your family for one more this August?
I’ve received a request from the Fresh Air Fund to let you all know that they are looking for families in various parts of the country to host 200 children during part of August. Their program helps disadvantaged urban youths experience suburban and rural life for a brief time. They’re especially looking for families willing to open their homes to older kids, especially 9 to 12-year-old boys.
They have a variety of open dates depending on what part of the country you’re in. From August 15-22 they’re looking especially for families in or near Acton, Hopkinton, Lexington, Marlboro, and Wayland and from August 15-25, they need families who be on Cape Cod. There are many other parts of the country where they have need as well.
According to their site, The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877. If you can’t host, they’re also looking for donors to support their programs.
Book club to discuss Ron Hansen’s “Exile”
InsideCatholic.com is announcing a new Book Circle, which I think is something like an online book club. From their announcement:
What is “Catholic” fiction? Is it simply fiction written by a Catholic? Must it include Catholic characters and treat distinctly Catholic themes? Does it reflect a “Catholic sensibility,” being a product of the “sacramental imagination”? Ought the Catholic reader — or the general reader, for that matter — even bother with such questions?
These topics get chewed over a great deal in our circles, but all too often flit about in the realms of abstraction, unmoored by careful reference to any particular text. In that light, Matthew Lickona, Amy Welborn, Joseph O’Brien, and Bishop Daniel Flores decided to sit down with Exiles
, the latest novel from Ron Hansen, to explore some of these questions.
The discussion of the book will take place on the InsideCatholic web site July 14 to July 18, and apparently the idea stems from a recent discussion kicked off by Todd Aglialoro’s article, “Whatever happened to Catholic fiction?”
Exiles is the novelization of how the real-life Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins came to write his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hansen also wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
A call for suggestions of history books
Having just finished reading about the crusades, I realize my knowledge of European history, in general and in the medieval period in particular, has large gaps. I know British history best, primarily because of my reading various literature in English, but I’d love to spread my wings a bit.
Consider this an open request for suggestions of good books for popular consumption, both general surveys of medieval Europe, but also good books that focus on particular places or periods, like the Muslim conquest of Spain and their expulsion, or the Bourbon rulers of the Two Sicilies, or the history of the Holy Roman Empire or the like.
I know Warren Carroll has produced a massive multi-volume set on the history of Christendom, but I’m hoping for something that will help me dip my toe into the subject before I immerse myself in something that large.
Photo credit: Copyright Lars Aronsonn, 2005. Licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike 1.0 license.
Thomas F. Madden’s New Concise History of the Crusades
This is not a whitewash of the Crusades, but a well-researched and explained look at the successes, failures, and motivations of the Crusades from the intensely devotional to the mundane, being sure to examine the crusaders and their foes in the context of the times and culture they lived, not holding them to the standards of today or of our culture.
The book was updated after 9/11 to place the Crusades within the geopolitical context of today. The last chapter examines how the Crusades have been perceived since the seventeenth century and very relevantly among the Muslim people of today. You might be surprised (but then again you might not) that what you’ve been told in the media about Muslims nursing grudges against the West for the crusades for the past seven centuries is a lot of bunk. In his penultimate chapter, Madden concludes:
It is not the crusades, then, that led to the attacks of September 11, but the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists. They stripped the medieval expeditions of every aspect of their age and dressed them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism. As such, they have become an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.
What could have been
The history of the Crusades fills me with sorrow because of the sorrow they wrought for all of Christendom. Along with many other failings during the Middle Ages—the political intrigues and ecclesiastical heterodoxy and more—the Crusades sapped the attention and resources of Europe as well as the prominence and esteem for the papacy and led to the Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called Enlightenment, which ended in the rejection of so much popular faith and devotion in the name of secularism.
Madden claims convincingly that Protestantism owes its existence to the threat of the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Turks:
The Protestants and the Turks had a mutually beneficial, although unintentional, relationship. The Turkish threat distracted the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor long enough for Luther to nurture his movement and secure his position. Because of his wars with the Turks and their allies, Charles V was unable to remove Protestants from his northern domains. As Kenneth Setton has noted, “without them [the Turks], Protestantism might conceivably have gone the way of Albigensianism.”
And yet if they had been successful in capturing the Holy Lands and beating back the armies that would have followed, including the Mongols and the various Turks and Tamerlane’s forces and what have you, would we be better off?
Xt3 – Official WYD Social Network
The Archdiocese of Sydney has launched its new World Youth Day social networking site called Xt3. Also, check out the cool 30-second spot on that page produced by Grassroots Films, creators of such fare as “The Human Experience”, “God in the Streets of New York”, and “Fishers of Men”.
As usual, it’s very cool. Those of you in the younger demographic will have to tell us old fogeys whether you like the site.
The sins of the mother visited upon the next generation
On a topic related to the immediately previous one, the daughter of feminist icon Alice Walker recounts that while her mother was off saving the women from oppression, she wasn’t being a very good mother.
Walker’s success as a campaigner was to her detriment as a mother. Like Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her home and her children as she directs her energy towards the poor of Africa, so America’s icon often went to feminist meetings and rallies and left Rebecca to fend for herself. Her daughter experimented with drugs and became pregnant at 14.
“My mother did a lot of leaving to go to her writing retreat, which was over 100 miles away — so she’d go there and leave me a little bit of money, leave me in the care of a neighbour,” recalls Rebecca, now 38.
[…]
Walker had also joined the early feminist movement — Gloria Steinem is Rebecca’s godmother — and it was her politics, more than anything, that shaped mother-daughter relations. The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.
[…]
When Rebecca became pregnant at 14, Walker wasn’t shocked: she calmly picked up the phone and arranged an abortion. “Her feminist thing was about empowering me to have an active sexuality and to be in control of my body, and that trumped any sense of boundaries,” Rebecca says.
What happens when you strip away one half of what it takes to create a just, loving, and nurturing society? You cripple its ability to raise up whole and hale children to populate the next generation. You essentially sow the seeds of its destruction.
Feminism was supposed to free women from oppression and lead them to self-fulfilled happiness. Rebecca Walker is proof positive that the women who followed the ideology most closely “freed” themselves at the expense of their daughters and generations of women to come, not to mention sons and husbands.
