JESSE POWELL writes: 

The American Community Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau, has added some questions about marital events to its annual survey. The 2009 American Community Survey results have been released and a report-titled “Marital Events of Americans: 2009” has been issued. These findings confirm the widely-publicized reports of the National Marriage Project, which have shown a widening social gap, with divorce and illegitimacy rates much higher among the uneducated.

Before offering these newest findings of the American Community Survey, I would like to comment on the focus of the National Marriage Project, which has enormous influence in the national conversation over family decline. 

The Marriage Project consistently promotes the idea that if only everybody took up the values of the well-educated, or somehow learned the secrets of marriage success that the college educated know, everything would be fine and dandy. There are two problems with this orientation. 

First of all, the well-off are just that, the well-off. If everybody was educated then those at or near the top would simply be average. The fact that the more successful are more successful is true but not interesting. The fact that there is a distribution of level of success in people’s family life is again true but not surprising. (more…)

  A FAN writes: My housewife (of 50 years now) and I love paddling a canoe. That painting by Winslow Homer of a tandem canoe underway in serious water is something that has special meaning to us. Few things compare with the cooperation, teamwork, and occasional skill required to negotiate treacherous waters in those unique watercraft. Wilderness canoeing is a beautiful way to "recreate," to see God's handiwork up close, and to "iron out the wrinkles in your soul." The experience is a lot like life's journey. It helps you learn to trust and to depend on each other.  Another sport that somewhat compares to it would be tournament doubles tennis with your spouse as partner. Things can get serious there also! It will show you where your weaknesses are. You need to be well married to do either successfuly and if you have married "the wrong one?" Either of these two pastimes will probably be a good indicator.

A READER FROM ARIZONA writes:

Regarding your post on Satanic imagery on children’s clothing, Mexican culture has us beat by a long way on this “symbolism” beginning with the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, which may have existed in Indigenous cultures. There are skulls and skeletons everywhere and it is not confined to that particular celebration. The obsession with skeletons permeates the culture. Across the line and in Mexican shops this side of the border the things are pervasive. Clothing, folk art and every type of object are covered with them. (more…)

  TO READERS who have enjoyed the previous posts on the ideas of architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, I recommend this excerpt from his book, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction. He writes: In wanting to explain a cultural mystery — why the world renounced emotionally-nourishing buildings, and instead embraced buildings that literally make us ill — one comes up against severe obstacles. It is not that methods for producing humane buildings are unknown, nor that there is a lack of architects to build them; society has made a conscious decision to build what it does. Furthermore, enormous energy is spent in convincing people that our contemporary built surroundings are good, even though almost everyone feels otherwise. There is a basic disconnect between what we feel, and what we are told we ought to feel — or forced to accept. Answers to these questions lead us from architectural theory into social beliefs and systems. [cont.]

DIANA writes:

I’d like to draw attention to the journalistic license taken in this New York Times article about a sperm donor who has fathered more than 150 children. The whole thing is sickening. The principle is sickening. But also, the mealymouthed journalistic weasel-words. I quote:

“Cynthia Daily and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive a baby seven years ago, and they hoped that one day their son….”

The child is NOT “their” son. He is the product of a sperm and an egg. He is the son of the sperm donor and the mother. (more…)

 DANIEL H. writes:

Recently I was in Houston for business. I was told that I absolutely must visit the Rothko Chapel while there. “One of the great American artworks of the 20th Century,” I was informed. (That should have been my first clue not to go!) (more…)

  COOKING is a form of argument. "Look," the cook says, "at the splendor of the earth." We eat things of surpassing beauty. This fact is strange and wonderful. It is almost too strange to comprehend. A Darwinist would say we evolved to find things beautiful that are good for us to eat. That is, at best, a partial explanation. A painting of a bowl of peaches, such as this one by the 17th century botanical artist Giovanna Garzoni, doesn't make me hungry. It recalls this bond with the earth. We commune with the rain and sun. We taste the dew. We consume the sublime and make it part of ourselves. The homage we pay to the peach is unnecessary to survival.

IN THIS excellent 2009 piece, “The Cult of Ugliness in America,” Fr. Anthony J. Brankin correctly locates the real source of the hideousness of modern architecture and American life in general. The problem is spiritual. He writes:

[T]he cult of ugliness is so pervasive, so all around us, in every nook and cranny of our lives, that we stand the risk at every moment of missing it, of no longer being able to see it or even be repelled by it.

He laments the extreme ugliness, not just of strip malls and contemporary clothes, but of church architecture. He writes:

Look at some of our newest churches and cathedrals. Many of them are stunning and awesome — no, not for their homage to tradition and the Catholic sense of beauty. They are stunning and awesome in their utter inhumanity, their complete lack of scale, their thorough and total sterility, and their horrifying proportions. There is not an angle that could please nor an arch that could comfort. Not a piece of molding that could hold us in its shadow. Not even a little statue before which we could light a slender taper. Like the gaping mouth of the pagan, child-sacrificing furnaces of Moloch, some of our new churches will consume their people in holocausts of visual horror.  

It would be better to pray in catacombs than in these inhuman structures.

(more…)

RESPONDING TO the post, “The Men Who Created Feminism,” Lydia Sherman writes:

When I was still in my teens in the middle 1960’s, before the hippie movement in the U.S. or rather, before the moral rebellion, I moved with my family to a foreign country, where my father had a job for four years. That country would have been considered backwards by U.S. standards, because young people still lived at home until they married, women married young, and they had to have both families’ approval before marriage. The economy was family-based, with the father’s place of business held in a shop near the street, while the family lived upstairs. When the children started marrying, the parents would buy them a home. In turn, the young married couple would save up their money and help the next member of the family who married, buy a home. Credit cards were rarely used, although you could get credit in a store.  (more…)

IN A PREVIOUSLY posted interview by James Kalb, the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros makes interesting comments about the distinction between science and technology. Salingaros argues that we live in an unscientific age.

He writes: 

Our educated world remains ignorant about the distinction between science and technology, unfortunately. Science helps us understand the universe and ourselves. Technology applies scientific results to master processes that we can manipulate so as to better our lives.

To the degree that technology denies human nature, it is unscientific.

Salingaros’ point is made in connection with contemporary architecture and its dehumanizing qualities. Architects have denied the need for complexity in our visual environment. He writes: (more…)

ALL LIBERALS are messianic about education. David Brooks of The New York Times is no exception. His column today is about the need to restore the “vigorous virtues” in America. Instead of noting that the decline of virtue parallels the growth in Big Schooling, Brooks calls for more public spending on education. He even calls for “prenatal education,” which normally means health education for mothers but in this case I suspect Brooks means real prenatal education. Perhaps the differential between American and Japanese test scores could be eliminated by educating those in the womb. There is that eternal optimism. To a school fool, there’s nothing a school can’t do. Brooks writes: (more…)

GREG JINKERSON writes:

You may be interested to see some good discussion going on today at Chronicles under a column by Thomas Fleming. In one of his responses to readers, he gives some sharp analysis of the roots of feminism, and points out that it is primarily the white male figures of the 18th-century Enlightenment who are to blame for the revolution, rather than the usual suspects like Mary Wollstonecraft. He attributes male willingness to embrace the feminist ideal at that time to a proto-Playboy philosophy and easier access to women. I had never seen the connection made, either, between today’s feminism and Renaissance-era, anti-Christian humanism, but it makes a lot of sense. The relevant passage is found at Comment #13.

Let us never forget that white males created and promoted feminism, that feminism is a male ideology. The women feminists were inconsequential eccentrics-compare the negligible influence of Mary Wollstonecraft with that of her lover Godwin, for example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other harridans they cite so often were regarded as freaks by both sexes. (more…)

A PENNSYLVANIA  judge has ordered a traditionalist Anglican priest to vacate the premises of his church on Philadelphia’s Main Line. The decision comes years after the Rev. David Moyer was defrocked by the Episcopal Church because he agreed to become a bishop for the Traditional Anglican Communion. A priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd for 21 years, Moyer refused to leave the parish after he was ordered to do so.

Moyer objects to the ordination of women, homosexual clergy and homosexual “marriage,” all of which are accepted and approved of by the Episcopal Church. In recent years, he would not allow Bishop Charles E. Dennison, of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, to preach or conduct confirmations at his parish. The diocese, a withering institution with magnificent buildings, has only 55,000 members left. Moyer is now seeking to join the Catholic Church. His determination and refusal to kowtow to the totalistic demands of modern liberalism are heartening. Much of modern Christianity is not Christianity, but an entirely new faith. Moyer is leaving an anti-Christian institution behind.

One wonders what will become of Good Shepherd’s beautiful stone church building, a vestige of Philadelphia’s Episcopalian elite. Perhaps someday, after the limited attention span of liberals runs its course and the novelty of Rev. Jane or Rev. Heather wears off, it will be a restaurant or a fitness center. Perhaps a pizzeria. Wood-burning ovens would be nice.

(more…)

  AT American Thinker, Mary L. Davenport reports on the largest analysis done to date on the effects of abortion on mental health. The study shows that women have a 155 percent increased risk of suicide after an abortion. Synthesizing the results of 22 studies involving close to a million women, Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green University came up with findings that are remarkably at odds with the official stance of the American Psychological Association, which recognizes no link between depression or suicide and abortion. 

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS get immense mileage out of stating – and overstating – the obvious, and reducing the obvious to one single overwhelming theory of behavior. Catherine Hakim, of the London School of Economics, has discovered that physical appearance matters. Beautiful people are likely to earn more money.

Hakim has written a book about “erotic capital.”  Many interesting things can be said about the influence of innate atractiveness on one’s fortunes in life. But Hakim’s even-handedness is questionable. She states in the above interview: “Women are always undervalued, no matter what they do and no matter what they are.”

How could anyone contemplate the issue of physical attractiveness and come to the conclusion that women are undervalued? Hakim has apparently never visited an art museum.

(more…)