THE NATIONAL MARRIAGE PROJECT has released its latest report, “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” showing once again that family stability has declined significantly in the middle and lower classes, while rising modestly among the highly successful.  According to the study’s summary:

The children of highly educated parents are now more likely than in the recent past to be living with their mother and father, while children with moderately educated parents are far less likely to be living with their mother and father.

Specifically, the percentage of 14-year-old girls with highly educated mothers living with both their parents rose from 80 to 81 percent from the 1970s to the 2000s, but the percentage of 14-year-old girls with moderately educated mothers living with both parents fell from 74 to 58 percent. And the percentage of 14-year-old girls with the least-educated mothers living with both parents fell from 65 to 52 percent.

Overall, then, the family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children. (more…)

  LITERARY scholars are using the massive digital archives assembled by Google Books to analyse cultural trends. This article in The New York  Times quotes breathless, overblown predictions of how their findings will alter the study of literature and philosophy, as if technology can magically transform our understanding of intellectual history and ideas. Still, it's interesting to see how cultural trends can be quantified through changes in book titles. Professors at George Mason University, for instance, have documented the rise of skepticism in the 19th century.  From 1840 to 1910, the number of all books with 'Christianity' or 'God' in their titles declined from almost two percent to below .4 percent. Also, the word "universal" became much less common.

JESSE POWELL writes:

A new ritual in Japan is drawing a lot of attention: the “divorce ceremony.” As described in The Telegraph, divorcing couples go through a ceremony to which they invite their family and friends but instead of celebrating the beginning of their new lives together they celebrate their freedom and escape from a broken marriage. “From drinking toasts to never seeing each other again, through to symbolic rides in separate rickshaws to reflect the start of a new journey, the ceremonies consist of a string of symbolic acts to mark the definitive end of a marriage.” The article goes on to say: “Yet with divorce still something of a taboo in Japanese society, the ceremonies have caught on as a way to publicly formalise the separation in a way that is socially acceptable to friends and family.” A 32 year-old-businessman invited to one of these ceremonies had this to say: “I think the ‘divorce ceremony’ phenomenon in Japan is healthy – a sign that the country can embrace change as a national ‘family,’ rather than a cold-hearted ‘system’ of sclerotic preconceived taboos.” 

For some historical perspective on divorce in Japan from the Japan Statistics Bureau; in 1960 the divorce rate was 8 percent; in 1970 it was 9.3 percent; in 1980 it was 18.3 percent; in 1990 it was 21.8 percent; in 2000 it was 33.1 percent; and in 2007 it was 35.4 percent. (more…)

  LAST JUNE, Luigi Padovese, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of the Turkish port city of Iskenderun, was murdered in his home by a 26-year-old Muslim who stabbed him eight times in the heart and then severed his head while shouting "Allah is the greatest." He was one of many priests murdered in Turkey since 2008. Here are words of appropriate outrage from Europe.  Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, in a speech addressed to the Turkish ambassador last week, decries the Islamification of the West and the "romance of tolerance and human rights." "Your devotion to freedom of religion is pure hypocrisy," Stadler says to members of parliament who accuse him of being overdramatic.  His words could justifiably be addressed to the Catholic Church as well. This is a stunning speech.

HERE IS an excerpt from a speech by Austrian anti-Islamization activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who spoke this weekend at a conference of the Alliance of the European Freedom and National Parties in Ashkelon, Israel:

No civilization is eternal. Because Western Civilization has been in the ascendant for the last few centuries, there is a tendency to think that what we have built is the final state at which mankind has arrived–that we have reached, as Francis Fukuyama put it, “The End of History.”

This is hubris of the highest order, especially given all the indicators of the dangers currently faced by our civilization, both from without and from within. The signs may not always be obvious, but they are there, and they are growing in number.

The death of a civilization does not come only when sand dunes drift in over the rubble of a once-proud city. The end is not necessarily marked by an invasion of barbarian hordes, or the burning and looting of our homes and businesses.

A civilization can also die from within, when it forgets the core values that once made it great, when it stops believing in its own fundamental tenets. (more…)

IN THE previous entry on recent remarks by Pope Benedict XVI in a book of interviews with German journalist Peter Seewald, readers took strong issue with my criticisms of the Pope. I am grateful for these thoughtful comments and do not dismiss them at all. (more…)

I WAS talking to a 23-year-old man today at a social gathering. He is someone who is very smart and good-looking, but suffers from the typical adolescent tendency to veer between self-glorification and self-disgust. He needs a job, desperately at this point, and I asked him how it was going. He said it was not going well. Even though he knows nothing about my own opinions here, he then expressed a Thinking Housewife truism.

“Why would anyone hire me when they can hire a pretty girl?” he said.  “I mean, I would hire a pretty girl over me too. Everyone wants to work with a pretty girl.”

It’s true. It’s also true that a young pretty girl will most likely never be the sole or main support of a family. She does not need a job in the same way. (more…)

KILROY M., who lives in Australia, writes: 

IN THIS entry, the reader Chris disputes another commenter’s claim that feminism is on the wane. Chris writes:

I would very much like to share your optimism. But I know of no effort by conservatives in Congress, or in the churches to repeal Title IX. There is no one within the Republican Party who is speaking up with regards to the dearth of men teaching in our schools. No one within the recent Tea Party phenomena expressed any interest in eliminating the blatantly unconstitutional sections of the Violence Against Women Act. No state legislature I know of is planning to reform “no-fault divorce.” (more…)

AT The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau reflects on determinism and morality. He examines three Late Antique works, Satyricon, The Golden Ass, and St. Augustine’s Confessions, in light of one of the key tenets of modern liberalism — the notion that we are compelled to sin by external forces.

(more…)

WHY DOES a male prostitute use a condom? Does he do so out of genuine concern for his client, as Pope Benedict XVI suggested when he recently spoke of condom use by male prostitutes as a “first step in the direction of a moralization?” I am not an insider to the sex business, but does one have to be an insider to see the simple realities here. It seems logical that the prostitute uses condoms, or requires his clients to use condoms, 1) because he will not get clients otherwise and 2) to protect himself. There is most likely no genuine selfless “concern for the other,” as Vatican spokesman  Fr. Federico Lombardi stated when he backed up the Pope’s comments. (more…)

JEFFREY WHITING writes:

Thank you for writing against egalitarianism and feminism in Christian churches when so few are willing to make any serious criticisms of it. 

And, thank you for providing a forum sympathetic to the difficulties of men in the modern world today. Your writing is a refreshing alternative to the wicked rhetoric that is common on so-called “men’s rights” sites. However, I must admit, my stamina and willingness to continue actively resisting these influences has sunk very low. I will never become an egalitarian or feminist, but I’m transitioning from resisting them to simply trying to avoid being destroyed by them.  (more…)

AMERICA’S schools routinely use mothers as unpaid slaves. That would be okay if the tasks they demanded were necessary or interesting. But they ask for things that are typically make-work: bake sales and craft projects and fund-raisers everyone could easily do without. I remember once working hard on some ridiculous fund-raiser at my older son’s school, only to be told the money would be spent on a hideous steel jungle gym that was ripped out two years later. 

This trivial servitude, which can be found at churches as well, turns many women away from their families and homes. They get paid jobs to escape this depressing round of cupcake ventures. (more…)

  BRITAIN'S Equality Act of 2010 encourages companies to choose women and racial minorities over equally qualified white male job candidates. As reported in The Daily Mail, Labour ministers announced yesterday that the new law would "apply voluntary positive action in recruitment and promotion processes when faced with candidates of equal merit, to address under-representation in the workforce.’ This goes a step further than most anti-discrimination laws, at least the stated intention of most anti-discrimination laws, which is to remove any supposed bias against women. The Equality Act sets a new standard of active discrimination in favor of women.  The British government is also considering the draconian possibility of requiring the most powerful corporations to ensure that their boards are at least 40 percent female. Currently, about 12 percent of board directors are women.

IF YOU are searching for a Christmas gift for a child between the ages of five and 12, the 1987 film adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s prose poem A Child’s Christmas in Wales, available on DVD, is an excellent choice. This production stars the Welsh actor Denholm Elliott, who narrates with the words of the original poem about one man’s memories of his Christmases in a town in Wales. It features snow, firemen dousing flames, “useless” gifts, candy cigarettes and fat uncles dozing in chairs after Christmas dinner. It is funny and poignant, capturing the perspective of both youth and old age. Thomas is especially lyrical on the subject of snow: (more…)

ALAN writes:

I have observed the following notable species at public libraries in St. Louis and would like to know whether any of your readers have made similar observations in libraries elsewhere: 

The Cell-Phone Chatterers. Invariably cool people who sit at the computer next to yours and continue conversation on their cell phones that they began outside on the parking lot – and will not cease unless instructed to do so by library staff.  (more…)

A TEENY-CON is a conservative who exults in popular culture even at its lowest, or especially at its lowest. Here is a good example. Mike Potemra, writing at National Review Online, has glowing words of praise for Lady Gaga, whom he has “enjoyed immensely.” He’s concerned, however, that his tastes might strike his audience as pedestrian (not immoral or anything old-fashioned like that, just pedestrian). Potemra writes:

While I take a great deal of delight in my tastes in music [he doesn’t delight in music but in his tastes in music], I know that they are untutored; and I am plenty insecure enough to be grateful for the validation of experts whenever I come across it.  (more…)

FITZGERALD writes: