The centuries-old tradition of half-day schooling in Germany is breaking down as more women go to work. The trend will likely accelerate as a tipping point is reached. More women are likely to feel forced to work by changes in prices and wages and by a shift in cultural norms. Unless there is conscious social policy to resist the loss of the male breadwinner, this shift cannot be prevented in the modern world.

This cultural revolution in one country relatively resistant to advanced feminism is presented by the New York Times as it is presented everywhere. The change is necessary for the larger economic good. But the departure of women from the home leads to economic losses and social decay in the long run. Birth rates fall, education and manners decline, marriage rates decrease, and divorce increases. The workforce of the future grows weaker. Any economically vital society cannot be sustained at high levels over the long term by absentee parenting and childlessness. Already, one third of German women in their mid-40s do not have children.

You’ve heard of marriages between Christians and Jews, but what about between those who believe in recycling yogurt containers and those who do not. That’s an interfaith affair too.

The New York Times explores marriages and romantic relationships across denominational lines in the environmental movement. It’s not pretty:

Linda Buzzell, a family and marriage therapist for 30 years who lives in Santa Barbara and is a co-editor of “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind,” cautions that the repercussions of environmental differences can be especially severe for couples.

“The danger arises when one partner undergoes an environmental ‘waking up’ process way before the other, leaving a new values gap between them,” Ms. Buzzell said.

Read More »

A former president and major journalist claim that religion is oppressive to women and unless women are allowed to break into the remaining all-male clergy, the major organized religions will continue not just to oppress women religiously, but to indirectly cause the full-scale oppression of women in all areas of life. Any act of foul play by a man against a woman – and the implication is that there are many such acts of foul play – reflects this injustice. 

Now let’s examine the facts. Ever since the apostles abandoned their fishing nets by the Galilee, millions of men have followed in their footsteps, taking vows of relative poverty and often celibacy, consigning themselves to austerity and reproductive oblivion, and performing spiritual and material services, at all hours of the day, for their followers, at least half of whom have been women.

A small percentage of these men acquired power and tasted luxury. Popes and bishops fathered children and drank from vessels of gold, with the full imperial regalia provided by an established church. Anglican ministers lived in genteel and undemanding circumstances, able to pursue fossil collecting and literary studies. Televangelists became rich celebrities and famous theologians altered the intellectual landscape. But, by any measure, these men represent a minute fraction of the whole. The life of the average Christian cleric is not taken up by most Christian men for good reason. It is too hard. 

Now how is it possible to conclude that men have, out of animus, excluded women from this life, forcing them instead to taste the relative freedom of being mothers or daughters who were cared for by their fathers? It is only possible if one ignores the truth. Like so much of the prevailing opinion regarding male power, it is a myth. The exact opposite is true. Men have been the play things of anti-male prejudice, the widespread expectation that they must assume tasks women do not want or cannot perform and that they must give way to cultural prerogatives whatever they may be. Not only must they assume these tasks, they must perform them well, sometimes spectacularly well. Read More »

Mass rape, bride burnings, the brutal disfigurement of young girls in Afghanistan and wife beatings – who is responsible for these things? Not criminals, but Christian clergy who have never hurt a fly. It is religion that “creates the context” for any crime anywhere in the world perpetrated against a woman. Anytime a woman is slapped in the face or paid less than a man, the evil of faith is to blame, unless of course it is a New Age faith.

Such is the claim of the preposterous, babbling King Lear of modern politics, Jimmy Carter, and his New York Times fool, Nicholas Kristof, who wanders with the former president on the windswept heath of advanced political dementia. Religion is one of the “basic causes of the violation of women’s rights,” Carter said not long ago, and last week Kristof echoed this refrain in a column. Read More »

Fitzgerald writes:

This article by Jennifer Roback Morse posits several excellent points about the deeper implications of endorsing same-sex unions. Most women have no intention of becoming lesbians regardless of creed or culture. But I can definitely see the young women our feminized culture is churning out going for the concept of a two-parent household under the cover of a same-sex union to further game the system. Read More »

Hannon writes:

Your portraits of marriages are always singular and moving. They seem to cast a special light on the fact that two different people, two souls, inhabit a marriage. This is a special notion that deserves more reflection. The idea that they all end– husband, wife and bond– often seems haunting to me, in a strange nostalgic way. (But then you do not write about prosaic couples!). Read More »

At a dialogue with the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager Peter Gelb that was partly broadcast on public radio today, directors of controversial new productions spoke of the small-mindedness of audiences that have the audacity to boo.  Bartlett Sher, director of the new Les Contes d’Hoffmann, called booing “a self-interested expression of ownership.” Gee, that’s weird. I thought booing was a self-interested expression of contempt. Read More »

Craftsmanship is more than skill. It is a disposition, a state of mind, and a stance toward the world. The crafted object is idea and spirit made manifest. Robinson Crusoe was the craftsman par excellence. No one has more vividly described the inner world of the craftsman than Daniel DeFoe in his classic tale of the shipwrecked man on his island. Crusoe cured his solitude. He cured it with manual effort and small acts of creation. The most radically isolated of men, he lived in peace. 

Here is DeFoe on Crusoe’s work to make an umbrella:

“After this I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there. And I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox; besides, as I was oblig’d to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the Rain as for the Heats. I took a world of Pains at it and was a great while before I could make anything likely to hold; nay, after I thought I had hit the Way, I spoil’d two or three before I made one to my Mind; but at last I made one that answered indifferently well: The main difficulty I found was to make it to let down. Read More »

Upstate Conservative

In an excellent essay at Upstate Conservative, Thomas F. Bertonneau explains why ‘gnostic’ is an appropriate label for today’s liberal. As defined by Eric Voegelin, gnosticism stands for religious, and profoundly anti-spiritual, political radicalism. No other word encompasses this toxic combination of religious fervor and existential disappointment. Bertonneau writes:

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.

Read More »

Kristor writes at VFR:

It seems to me that when Darwinians express awe or reverence for nature, they are not so much dishonest as inconsistent. Honestly and straightforwardly carried through to their logical conclusions, their principles make a mockery of such feelings. Yet they cannot help having these feelings that they do have. They have these feelings because it is bliss to be alive, bliss to exist; it is bliss to know, and so to know is to love, to adore, and willy nilly to worship. Read More »

The blogger Justin at Truth Shall Set You Free  argues that Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid is a perfect introduction to female psychology for young boys. He writes:

… The Little Mermaid contains everything you need to know to understand women. It is exactly the movie you would want to show your sons, and make sure they fully understand its lessons. Which may seem odd at first, because it is usually identified as a girl movie, being, in fact, one of Disney’s big five Princess Movies.

Read More »

Reader Larry B. asks this question:

Who suffers more: a perfect being in an imperfect world, an imperfect being in a perfect world, or an imperfect being in an imperfect world? 

Read More »

N.W. writes:

I’ve often wondered how one can take joy in a thing which the one who made it took no joy in making. For instance, which of these two toys would a child prefer to be given: 

  Read More »

Before the 1972 Oakland A’s hit the field, it was rare to see baseball players with beards or moustaches. The A’s brought a whole new look, one that continues in various forms to this day.

Team owner Charlie Finley offered a $300 prize to the player who could grow the most interesting facial hair and held “Moustache Day” at the park, offering free admission to anyone with a moustache. (Hey, it was the seventies.)  Rollie Fingers, shown below, won the prize. The fact that the A’s went on to win three World Series didn’t hurt their look.

Read More »

Apropos of the recent discussions of beards and men, I was wondering why so few men in the 40s and 50s had facial hair. The reason was obvious, but I didn’t see it.

P.W. writes:

One of the main reasons that beards fell out of favor in the 20th Century was for military reasons, especially during the World War I years and beyond. 

This is because of the invention of poison/nerve gas. Men with beards and a lot of facial hair (mustaches, etc) are not able to obtain an adequate seal on their gas-mask, thus beards were abandoned first by the military so that their gas-masks would work correctly. Beards were discarded by the military for purely practical reasons and that trend then trickled out in to the general populace. 

Read More »

In a review at Frontpage Magazine of Precious, a new Lee Daniels film about a black welfare mother, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

At one time, black Americans had the edifying art of Negro spirituals, infused with religion, with which to escape the trappings of undignified lives. Now they have mediocre films and stories that moralize, but fail to inspire. If Daniels had let Mary sing “Motherless Child,” instead of performing her grotesque confessional, the magnificent spiritual would have transcended her grievance.

Read More »

A return to traditional family values may sound nice, but it makes no sense economically. The world has changed. We can no longer afford many children; women must devote themselves to work; and institutions must take over child-rearing.

This is the common objection to any proposals for restoring the traditional family. But it is a myth. In fact, the opposite is true. We cannot afford to go on as we are.

Read More »

A Coast Guard cutter in Guantánomo Bay rocked back and forth when the earthquake in Haiti struck even though the epicenter was 200 miles away. The scale of the disaster is unimaginable. My heart and prayers go out to all Haitians.