Breaking News: Sam Nunn Endorses Obama

Former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn has endorsed Barack Obama, and will serve on his foreign policy advisory committee. Nunn is the exemplary "blue dog" Democrat and elder statesmen. The Georgia wing of the Gruntled family reports that Dems there want Nunn to be Vice-President.

The Gravitas Wagon is gathering steam ...

Counting Your Blessings Makes You Happier

Mrs. G. sent this one to me under the lovely heading, "Peer-reviewed gruntle!"

A study by R.A. Emmons and M.E. McCullough in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are happier when they articulate each day what they are grateful for. In an experiment, both psychology students (reasonably healthy) and neuromuscular disease patients (with something serious to be unhappy about) were asked to write down each day a list of things they were grateful for. After two or three weeks, both groups were happier.

Breaking News: The Boss Endorses Obama

Bruce Springsteen, my musical lodestar since I was a teenager, has endorsed Barack Obama.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Amen.

Divorce Costs Taxpayers $112 Billion Per Year

And that is just in this country. And this is just a minimum estimate of the direct costs.

This is the conclusion of a new report from the Institute for American Values, The Taxpayer Cost of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing. It was released today to coincide with the important civil religion holiday of Tax Day.

I will work through the details of this report in other posts this week.

A Great Teacher's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is dying of cancer. He gave the best "last lecture" I have ever read. As a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, he has done some amazing things in the computer world. What gripped me the most, as a teacher, were the extraordinary things he did to push students to push themselves to learn, and to honor and appreciate them when they did. More, he has a noble vision of the university clearing the way for students and teachers to work together to push themselves to learn. The whole speech moved me to tears as it has others.

The teaching stories are the best. I will give you a couple of the other tales and wisdom, told with gratitude, that give a flavor of his tone.

When I was here studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier, which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. [laughter] And I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said, we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans. [laugher] After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, this is my son, he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.

Work hard. I got tenure a year early. Junior faculty members used to say to me, wow, you got tenure early. What’s your secret? I said, it’s pretty simple. Call my any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.

Show gratitude. When I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week. And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that? I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?

A book of the lecture has been made to benefit the pancreatic cancer research foundation. The full transcript of the lecture is here.

Debbie's Hammer

The weirdest thing you will see today:

Debbie Reynolds, in full '60s cool, singing "If I Had a Hammer."



This was made by Debbie Reynolds' own production company for the Scopitone video jukeboxes, a '60s craze that didn't survive the decade. I can't find an exact year.

Update: In response to a query, Scopitone expert Bob Orlowsky wrote:

I don't have an exact date, but it was made sometime between the end of 1964 and the first half of 1965. It's great, isn't it?

Indeed.

The Church Doesn't Help Divorcing Kids

Elizabeth Marquardt told the Centre College audience yesterday one sad finding from her study of children of divorce: among those who were active in a church at the time that their parents were divorcing, only a quarter reported that anyone from the church talked to them or tried to help them deal with the divorce.

Divorced kids report that rarely do people try to talk to them or hear about their loss and pain when their parents divorce. This is sad when most people in general do it, but tragic in the church.

Some church people at the lecture went away with a conviction to do better.

The New Divorce Stigma

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, has been lecturing at Centre College this week. This morning in my family class she offered an idea that I had not heard before.

In the old days, children of divorce were stigmatized. This sentiment is pretty much gone -- she says she never experienced it personally, and the students likewise do not tell me of any stigma they express or experience. The standard view is that it is not the child's fault. This is very sensible.

However, it is becoming widely known among people who study and talk about marriage that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. This is so despite the fact that divorced kids usually hate divorce, and vow not to inflict it on their own children.

Hence the new divorce stigma: children of divorce are sometimes treated as damaged goods on the marriage market.

It is important to say that most divorced kids who marry do stay together. Divorced kids are more likely to divorce, but are not destined to. And any individual can be the exception to the trend, even much stronger trends than this one.

The answer to the new divorce stigma is not to deny the risk. It is true: divorced kids are more likely to divorce. Rather, the answer is to turn that passion to make marriage work into the foundation of constant communication about the marriage.

Fight divorce with good marriage.

Sex-Starved Wives

Michelle Weiner Davis is interviewed in Time on her new book of this title. The empirical core of the study is a survey of 1000 married women, 60% of whom reported that they wanted sex at least as much, if not more, than their husbands. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married. This is not as helpful a statistic as it should be. In fact, I would guess that a survey of husbands would report the same result - 60% of men would report that they wanted sex at least as much or more than their wives. What we need is the spread -- more, the same, less. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married.

Nonetheless, Davis' main point is that men are not always filled with sexual desire. Their desire for their wives is affected by how they feel about their marriage, how they feel in general, and, sometimes, for physical reasons. And women often want sex for reassurance about the relationship, so they may well want it more than their husbands precisely when their emotional bond is most strained.

Sex on the Brain Makes Men Take Bigger Risks

A nifty study by Brian Knutsen and Camelia Kuhnen found that men bet higher when shown images of sexy women.

I don't know whether this means they were trying to get more resources to improve their odds of winning the desirable woman, or whether, on the contrary, the very thought of immediate sex made them throw prudence to the winds.

Honey-Colored Nation

I heard two great phrases this week that mark the generational change America is undergoing as the Race Question turns into the thousand ways of living our national ethnicity.

Jon Henke, of the libertarian QandO Blog, reprinted his post of 2006: "Martin Luther King: The Last Founding Father."

And in some other blog, which I can not now find, someone described today's America, Obama's America, Gen-X America: we are a "honey-colored nation."

Poobah

This one is all from Mrs. G.

Did you see Chris Matthews ask Barack Obama what’s going to happen after the primaries are over? And Obama saying then “the poobahs will have to decide?” I hooted.

Of course, since it’s a word I learned in family conversation, I hadn’t ever looked it up, and Trilby and Endub wanted more information. Thus:

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Buckhounds, Lord High Auditor, Groom of the Back Stairs, and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

The expression "The Grand PooBah" was first introduced on the television show "The Flintstones." Fred Flintstone and his friend Barney Rubble were members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge No. 26. A high ranking elected position within this organization is Grand Poobah or Grand Imperial Poobah.

The character Howard Cunningham on the TV series "Happy Days" was a Grand Poobah of Leopard Lodge No. 462 in Milwaukee.

In the "Darkwing Duck" episode "The Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck", the title character's nefarious uncle attempts to blackmail his planet into making him "Grand Poo-bah of the World" with a giant laser.

Mokey, a primary character in the Jim Henson TV series "Fraggle Rock," wishes to join "The Secret Society of Poobahs" in an episode of the same title.

Any time you’re linking superdelegates to Gilbert and Sullivan, Fred Flintstone, Howard Cunningham, Darkwing Duck’s nefarious uncle, and Mokey the Muppet, you may not have thrown a punch, but you’ve thrown one hell of a pie.

Homeland Generation

The generations discussion by Richard Delano of Lifecourse.com that I reported on yesterday was mostly about the Millennial generation, born 1982 to 2002. He did let on, though, that they were trying on a nickname for the generation born after that: the Homeland Generation. Conceived after 9/11 and born in 2003 or later, their experience is likely to be different from that of the Millennials before them. And if the Lifecourse four-generation pattern holds, the Homeland generation should be like the Silent generation.

Millennials' Favorite Jobs

I just attended a very interesting lecture on the Millennial generation, today's young people, given by Rick Delano of Lifecourse. This is the firm founded by Bill Howe and Neil Strauss, whose work on generations I have written about before.

The Millennial generation, born 1982 - 2002, are an upbeat, standards-seeking, group-oriented, parent-following generation. They are so unlike the Gen Xers at the same age. One of Delano's interesting findings: the Millennials, now voting in their first few elections, are twice as likely to vote as the Xers were at the same age.

One finding really struck me. When the 2006 high school seniors -- the eldest Gruntled child's class -- were asked which employers they would most like to end up with, their choices were, in order:

1. Walt Disney
2. Google
3. U.S. Department of State
4. Federal Bureau of Investigation
5. Central Intelligence Agency.

(Aging Boomers, remember to retrieve your jaws from the floor.)

Good Compendium of Marriage Odds-Making

Time has a decent short article. FYI.

Eat Less Junk Internet

Another insight from the Posse Plus Retreat.

Students spend hours browsing the internet. Facebook, YouTube, TV shows, jokes, and occasionally a bit of news. They have extended their late night hours from midnight to 2. This is bad enough. They are more tired than students have always been, and avoid morning classes even when they need the subject.

The worst part of a steady diet of junk internet is that it fills your brain with trivia and drives out more important stuff. It is not simply the time that we -- students and non-students -- spend on this stuff, but the lost opportunity for better content. An hour on news and political blogs, or art sites, science speculation, religious devotions, even just social rants and grievances, is a richer diet than a steady stream of the mental equivalent of Cheesy Poofs.

I like humorous videos as much as the next person, and check I Can Haz Cheezburger? daily. Nonetheless, junk internet should be taken in moderation, just like every other kind of junk food.

Social Responsibility is the Work of Collective Actors

This weekend we had the retreat of the Posse Scholars and their guests. The theme was "social responsibility." The group was a wonderful collection of energetic young people who want to do good. The general thrust of our discussions was to find practical ways to be socially responsible right now.

As I was reflecting on this conversation, I was struck by an idea that I had not fully articulated before: social responsibility is carried out by collective actors. Individuals change the world by creating collective actors and working together. Students offered several examples of individuals who have made a difference in the world. In each case, though, a few moments' reflection made clear that they did not act alone.

Wanting to change the world yourself is a good start. But actually doing it requires that you also develop the skill of working with others. Collective actors can be responsible for re-ordering the world responsibly.

Clinton's "Black Knight" Strategy

Mrs. G. has been saying this for weeks, but Andrew Sullivan actually posted it.

The Deep Government Says Guantanamo Prisons Are a Stain on the United States

Colin L. Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright agree.

That, in itself, is amazing.

What they agree on is that the political prison camps at Guantanamo Bay are damaging our reputation in the world and are probably illegal. The Secretaries of State for Democratic and Republican administrations agree that what the current administration is doing is wrong.

Christopher and Albright, and also Baker, Powell, and Kissinger (!) together make as clear a common voice from the center of the political system as one could ask for.

Rigidity, Not Patriarchy, Makes Family Roles Rigid

An article with the eye-catching title "Feminism Keeps My Marriage Together," by Christie Church, makes the claim that patriarchy was damaging her marriage because of the rigid roles it imposed on them. Feminism, she argues, let Church and her husband get free of the rigid expectations of their wife and husband roles imposed on them by society.

A patriarchal family does normally have rigid roles for wife, husband, and other family members. But so does a matriarchal family. Even an egalitarian family can have rigid roles -- in fact, a commitment to a 50/50 split of all family work forces even more rigidity than does patriarchy.

It is not the patriarchy that makes the rigidity, though; rigidity makes rigidity.

The Beavers scale of family functioning is a five-point scale running from chaos, through tyranny, rule-bound families, and the somewhat colorlessly named adequate and optimal families at the top of the scale. The problem in the bottom half of the scale is achieving enough order to have a secure life. In the bottom half of the scale, rigidity is a step up. This is why the middle -- not the bottom -- of the scale is the "rule-bound" family. Rule-bound is, as the name suggests, characterized by rigid roles. Most rule-bound families will lean toward patriarchy, but there are other rule-systems that they can enforce rigidly on one another.

The achievement of the rule-bound family is order. The price they pay is that it is hard for family members to be intimate with one another, without upsetting the rules. This, I think, is the problem that Christie Church is really wrestling with, more than patriarchy.

What makes the higher functioning families adequate and optimal is that they can maintain sufficient order while dealing appropriately with the individual qualities of each person in the family, not just their roles.

Church and her husband seem to be moving beyond rule-boundedness to a more flexible, adequate functional system. For them, that meant dividing labor in ways that were a little less traditional. For other couples, that might mean quite different arrangements -- strict equality, or complete reverse of tradition. I expect that for most couples, flexibly dividing family labor based on the interests, skills, and resources of each half of the couple would, in fact, result in a mostly traditional sexual division of labor most of the time. But however labor might be divided in an appropriately personal family, the point is that it is being rigid about roles that creates rigid roles in a family, not patriarchy or any other social system.

Wine With Dinner for Teens?

Following yesterday's post about drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds, I was drawn to a column in the New York Times by wine writer Eric Asimov. He is a wine professional, and grew up with teens having a little wine with meals as part of his family's normal practice. Now that his kids are coming to the age when they would normally be introduced to wine, he and his wife were torn by the school's message that kids should have zero alcohol.

Asimov read the research and talked to the experts. His conclusion:

in a household where wine is regularly served with meals, and where there is not an alcohol issue, violence or a communication problem, young people might experience some degree of protection against future alcohol abuse by being offered small tastes of wine.... the research seems to indicate that it can help by teaching children that wine is a ceremonial beverage that we drink for its taste and for how it goes with food, and that the point of drinking is not drunkenness.

This seems to me an entirely sensible conclusion. Moreover, in 30 states, including Kentucky, it is legal for parents to serve their own children alcohol. I myself am a teetotaler and don't have wine with meals, so have not had occasion to offer it to my children. But I think that it is appropriate for my older teens to try alcohol. I will argue the benefits of a teetotal life, but if they learned to be moderate drinkers -- one glass of wine or beer -- that would be OK.

Choose Responsibility at the Grass Roots

I support Choose Responsibility, a national movement to create drinking licenses for 18, 19, and 20 year olds. Tonight I got my first chance to promote the idea locally. Many communities participate in the biennial federal survey of teen drinking, which they then discuss in town meetings. Tonight Danville had its town hall meeting. This was mostly about high school drinking, which was pretty scary. 80% of high school senior reported drinking ever, and a quarter reported binge drinking recently. When I made the pitch for drinking licenses for high school graduates, this was a new idea to most present. One person said "Oh, no, then they will just drink more; that would be like giving them condoms, which makes them have more sex." But I think most were open to exploring the idea -- especially those who deal with college students.

Family Citizenship by Military Service

The Associated Press has a new story on more than 100 soldiers who are awarded citizenship posthumously. The story focuses on their families' ambivalence in dealing with this sad achievement. Truthout.org passed the story on as part of their criticism of the war.

Yet as I read the story, this is one area in which the Iraq war has actually made things better. The AP reports that there are tens of thousands of "green card soldiers" in the U.S. Armed Forces. They get U.S. citizenship in exchange for their service.

At the start of the war, these servicemen and women would only be awarded citizenship when their service ended. For the families of those who died, this was particularly bittersweet. In response to criticism, though, Pres. Bush changed the rule to allow citizenship to those who applied for it on enlistment. Since then 37,000 soldiers have been naturalized. Another 20,000 foreign nationals serve in the U.S. military who have either not applied for citizenship or not completed the paperwork.

Another important change is that the relatives of dead soldiers who are awarded citizenship posthumously have the same advantages in coming to the U.S. legally that the relatives of living citizens do. This ended the Catch-22 in which the relatives of naturalized soldiers could get on the fast track to citizenship only if the soldier survived the war.

The United States has always offered immigrants military service as the fast way to citizenship. This seems to me a good and just thing. And these improvements in the path of naturalized soldiers seems to me a silver lining of this bad war -- even for the families of the dead.

The Audacity of the Greatest Hope

A joyous Easter to you all.

"Just Do It" Do-Gooders

David Brooks has an excellent column about the new breed of social service activists who are in it for results, not for big rhetoric and lifestyle theater. He writes, "The highest status symbol in their circle is a Rand study showing that their program yields statistically significant results." These are my kind of servants of the public good.

I see this as the coming to fruition of Gen-X. Howe and Strauss, in 13th Gen, predicted when Gen-Xers were still college students that what they would bring to the commonweal was a devotion to getting a practical job done. Reacting against Baby Boomer rhetoric, they eschewed big causes in their wild youth. Now settling into years of social responsibility, they want their work to really yield results.

I was born in 1960. I am on the cusp between the Boom and Gen-X. I feel the pull of both styles. But my heart is with the Xers.

Pick a problem. Try a solution. Test the results. Git 'er done.

Unilateral Divorce Increases Violent Crime

A new study by two Spanish researchers at a German labor institute using American data found that unilateral divorce led to increases in violent crime of 8 to 12% in the 30 years following divorce reform.

Another Marriage Benefit: Low-Stress Sleep

A new study from Brigham Young University researchers found that happily married people have lower blood pressure than singles by about four points. Even more interesting, happily marrieds had lower blood pressure while sleeping. Unhappily marrieds, on the other hand, had higher blood pressure than singles.

Adultery is Common, But Not Normal

After every big adultery scandal, such as Elliot Spitzer's, someone will run a story about how common adultery is in the animal world. In this week's entry, the New York Times' Natalie Angier opines that "In Most Species, Fidelity is a Fantasy." She combines the results of very varied studies about shrikes, voles, foxes, gibbons, and humans to conclude that "anywhere from 10 to 70 percent of the offspring will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male." No big deal, she implies.

But it is a big deal. And it makes a big difference which end of the spectrum we fall on. In fact human beings are close to the 10% end. The great majority of children are fathered by their mother's husbands.

I think the subtext of articles like "Faithfulness is a Fantasy" is to normalize adultery. This is not simply reporting the facts, but making them worse than they are now. The truth is that among human beings, fidelity is normal, adultery is rare.

Obama Names Wright's Error

Barak Obama has taken some heat for things his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. I think Obama's previous repudiations of Wright's crazy comments should have been more than enough to put the issue to rest.

Today in Philadelphia Sen. Obama gave a great speech on race. He reiterated his repudiation of Wright's crazy talk. Then he went beyond that repudiation, and named the underlying error that his pastor made. In this statement I hear the Joshua generation giving the right answer to a disappointed member of the Moses generation:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation.

Amen.

Deport Polygamist Illegal Aliens

There is a growing subculture of West African illegal immigrants in this country who sneak in, then buy wives from home to serve as rightless free domestic labor. They make a bunch of kids at once, on the public nickel, to be US citizens who will retroactively make the whole thing legal. And create a voting bloc for polygamy. No thanks. Nip it in the bud. European nations that have given up on monogamy are already reaping the whirlwind these days, with the women doing most of the suffering.

Biting the Bullet About Women in Church Leadership

I am working on a larger project to restore the Establishment in the Presbyterian Church. By Presbyterian Establishment I mean an informal but real group that can lead the church and heal its divisions with recognized authority. Some readers have worried that my comments about the role of women in such an Establishment might be contested to the point of closing some readers' minds to the rest of my argument. I want to try a draft of this section on you, my helpful readers, for your comments. This is just one snippet from a much larger document in which I lay out the rest of what I mean by a Presbyterian Establishment.

The case of women in the Presbyterian Establishment is both the easiest and the hardest to resolve. It is the easiest, because there are so many devoted women in the church, many of whom have significant leadership experience and potential. It is hardest because, at every higher level of power, there are fewer women who are willing to take the job than there are men.

As a sociologist who has taught and studied family life, sex, and gender, I have become convinced over the years that the differences between men and women in their approach to power is deep. To be sure, women have been excluded from the opportunity to achieve power and to be part of the establishment in the past. Changing sexist structures that excluded women is a great gain and something we should always be vigilant about. But I believe that assuring women equal opportunity to be part of the Presbyterian Establishment will not result in an equal outcome of women being half of that Establishment.

I have been convinced that women, as a group, are less likely than men to sacrifice their families for positions of power. Moreover, women tend to be less likely to want to rule over others than men are; likewise, women tend to be less likely to accept other women ruling over them than they are men. To be sure, there will always be some women who would make good leaders and who are willing to do the job, even at the cost of being separated from others. But I think it is simply a fact of our complementary sexes that women will never voluntarily take up a proportionate share of positions of power, in the church or any other organization.

So if your main goal is equal representation of men and women in all positions of power and authority in the church, then the Presbyterian Establishment project is probably not for you. The more effective the Establishment is, the less likely it is to simply reflect the raw demographic diversity of the church. I say, so be it. The church needs an Establishment that works with real effect and authority.

I Am as Cool as I Have Ever Been

I was listening to the interview on NPR with Dan Kennedy about his days working in the record business. He tells a rueful tale of being a middle-aged guy who thinks he is still as cool as he was at 17.

This got me thinking: was I ever cool? Certainly not at 17, nor college, graduate school, early married life, making a career. Nope, nerd all the way. So now - as a professor who looks so much like a professor that I am on college billboards, a dad whose children gave him a bumper sticker reading "I [heart] embarrassing my teenage children in front of their friends," a fat guy pushing 50 who holds hands with his wife in public -- now I am as cool as I have ever been.

Spitzer's Wife

I agree with Maggie Gallagher: the innocent wives of guilty adulterers should not be expected to stand by their men during the public confession of guilt. That should be his humiliation, not hers. If she chooses to keep him afterwards, that should be credited to her moral heroism. And if she stands by him when he denies the charges, that is honorable marital loyalty.

Adulterers should do the perp walk and press talk alone.

Spitzer

Susan Estrich, a smart politico who taught Elliot Spitzer in law school, concludes that this is why a man so smart could do something so stupid:

"There is only one obvious explanation for why a smart man would commit such a totally self-destructive act: He didn't think he would be caught."

This could be so. Still, my inclination is to think that it is something else. He is a sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes bullying crusader. I think such a man might do something so wrong, catchable, career-ending, and humiliating because he thinks, subconsciously, that he is a fraud.

Half of Teens Girls Are Sexually Active, and Half of Them Have a Sexually Transmitted Infection

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their major study of teen girls and sex. The headline of this post contains the main finding.

The news story, and many variants on it, goes on to attack abstinence-based sex ed curricula. This strikes me as a non sequitur, at best. The report does not indicate what sort of sex education these girls might have had. One might look at the raw finding and conclude that we need much more education in abstinence.

The secondary finding is that half of African-American girls have sexually transmitted infections. The rate for white and Hispanic teens is 20%. This is just a disaster. My expectation is that the sexual activity of girls directly correlates with whether their fathers are active in their homes, but that is not provided in the news articles. This would account for the enormous racial disparity in the STI rate, though.

Vasectomies for March Madness

Yes, this is a serious suggestion. The University of Oregon suggests that men get a vasectomy before the NCAA tournament begins, so they can sit around healing while they sit around watching basketball.

What a wonderful idea.

Catholics Come Home

A Catholic ministry (apostolate) run by American lay people, called Catholics Come Home, has produced some fine commercials now running on television. I particularly commend the one called "Epic." It does, indeed, present the epic sweep of the Catholic Church, both now and historically. They make some astounding claims -- astounding because they are true -- such as "we are the largest charitable organization on the planet"; "we invented the college system"; "we developed the scientific method"; and my favorite, "with the help of the Holy Spirit, we compiled the Bible."

Beat that, proddies.

Stuff White People Like

The blog "Stuff White People Like" is a self-parody of yuppie culture that is pretty funny. As is quickly apparent, it is not about all white people -- in fact, the current item on the blog, #84 Tee-Shirts, cites "Getting Lucky in Kentucky" as unacceptable because it is worn by the "wrong kind of white people." But that, itself, is part of the parody -- the kind of white people who are self-conscious about being white, and parody themselves because of it, are drawn from the yuppie end of Anglo culture.

And the #1 thing white people like? Coffee.

Why Are There So Many Useless Young Men? Easy Sex

Kay Hymowitz has an excellent article in the current City Journal, "Child-Man in the Promised Land," on the spread of educated, employed, socially retarded young men. These are the men that society has made a huge investment in, in hopes that they would become responsible husbands, fathers, and citizens. But they remain in gadget-strewn arrested development. Hymowitz notes that these guys, with the resources to make a social contribution, spend their time and money on proudly immature self-indulgence.

The punchline, though, is that all this self-pleasuring doesn't fill them with pleasure. It makes them numb and apathetic.

Hymowitz cites two successful "lad lit" authors, Nick Hornsby and Benjamin Kunkel, in naming the source of slacker apathy: the easy availability of sex.

I think Hymowitz buries the lead. She set out to chronicle this new social type, the happily immature Single Young Man. As a sociobiologist and a Calvinist, I do not need any convincing that most men, left to their own devices, would live for the sense pleasures of the moment.

I am more interested in what turns boys into men. The great lever that civilization has is the intense, passionate interest of most men in sex with women. I think Hymowitz, and other promoters of civilization, should put that in the lead of each marriage article. If men could only get sex in marriage, the vast majority of SYMs would straighten up within a year.

It is a free country. Men don't have to be responsible. Neither do women. But there is great wisdom in the near-universal social custom of women strictly limiting sex outside of marriage. And without some responsible men, society itself will fall apart. Women can't do everything by themselves.

The Richest Families Are Having More Kids

I have previously reported the good news that the marriage rate and the birth rate among the most educated women has risen recently. I attribute this to more study of good sociology. :-)

Now there is evidence that the richest families are bigger. Among the top 1.5% of families by income, the proportion of 40-something women with three or more kids has risen over the past decade from 29% to 41%.

This group is too small to affect the overall birthrate very much directly. Indirectly, though, trends among the rich do tend to affect patterns among the upper middles, at least. And the rich are the people who can best afford more kids. This is a hopeful small development.

57% of Pakistani Britons are Married to Their First Cousins

Birth defects follow. Altogether, 70% of Pakistani Britons are married to relatives.

The West is in a race between the dangerous social patterns that immigrants bring with them, and the assimilation to our social patterns. We are hampered by the fact that some of our social patterns are also dangerous. Pakistani Britons rightly fear that if their children do not marry safely within their own families, they may assimilate to the British pattern of illegitimacy, which is now becoming the norm among the native British population.

I am not for either wholesale assimilation or wholesale rejection of the host culture. And I am certainly not for restricting immigration just because the immigrants, if there are enough of them and have a strong enough culture, resist assimilation. I think each case of assimilation or not should be judged on its merits.

Mark Steyn, who publishes these scary facts, is worried that the relativism of elite culture in the West gives us no grounds to resist the bad practices that immigrants might bring. I think he is right about that. Things are worse in Europe and Canada than they are in the United States. But we also have a problem with spineless relativism. It is worth practicing vertebrate enhancement of our culture, in anticipation of similar problems.

Low-Sex Marriage is Only a Problem if it Is.

CNN has an article on the reliably titillating subject of the "sexless marriage," which their experts describe as having intercourse less than ten times a year. One of their experts, Marty Klein, a licensed marriage counselor and certified sex therapist in Palo Alto, California, says that one cause of the problem of sexless marriages is "America's obsession with marriage."

I think this is exactly backwards. I think one cause of the problem of unhappy marriages is America's obsession with sex. Sure, sex is a fun, and is one of the many channels through which married people build up their ties with one another. Human beings are built for strong sexual desire at times, especially men. And you can't beat sex as a way to make babies.

Still, there are many more important things in life than sex. Sex is a normal good of marriage, but its good is not best measured in quantity. The more educated people are, the less often they have sex. This doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. It more likely means that they have other good things to do.

If a couple doesn't have sex much, that could be a symptom of a problem in their marriage. But a low-sex marriage is not a problem in itself.

Divorce Cuts Close Ties With Fathers in Half

Penn State researchers Alan Booth, Valarie King, and David Johnson,and Mindy Scott of Child Trends, studied how close adolescents felt to their fathers before and after divorce. The great majority (70+ percent) felt close to their mothers early and late in adolescence, regardless of whether their parents divorced.

With their fathers, most -- 57% -- felt close when asked in early adolescence. In later adolescence nearly half (48%) of the kids with married parents still felt close to their fathers. For the divorced kids, though, those feeling close to their fathers dropped to a paltry 25%.

Who Tortures? The Loyal. Who Won't Torture? Those with a Higher Loyalty

This week Centre College was visited by Darius Rejali, one of the leading experts on torture in the world. In his public lecture, he said that torturers are not chosen for their intelligence, but for their loyalty. One consequence of this fact is that torturers often can't tell when their victims have told them the truth. Their cruelty is for nothing.

In private remarks to another group at the college, Prof. Rejali was talking about the whistleblower at the Abu Ghraib military prison scandal, as well as in some other cases of torture. The whistleblower is usually someone just like the torturers in rank, in class background, in authority at the torture site. What they differ on is their commitment to a higher standard that gives them the courage to say "this is wrong, even if my superior says it isn't." Among Americans, the whistleblower is usually an evangelical Christian.

I think all of us have the capacity of be torturers if we thought it was the only way to protect our loved ones. Scholars like Prof. Rejali can convince our heads that torture does not work to do that, and creates worse harm to society. To move our hearts and guts to say no and stop torture usually requires an additional conviction, from a more spiritual source.

Religious Churning is Good

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 4 (and last)

The headline on most articles about the Pew survey of the religious landscape have emphasized how much denominational switching Americans do. A quarter of American adults have made a biggish change from their childhood faith -- mostly Protestant-Catholic swaps, or vice-versa, but also switching across the Christian/non-Christian divide. When we include people who have switched from one Protestant denomination to another, the percent of religious switchers among American adults rises to 44%.

On the whole, I think religious switching is a good sign. This is what a free market looks like. Choice normally increases commitment. Converts are more intense members, as a rule. To pick a number out of the air, we might expect that nature plus nurture would make, say, 2/3rds of kids choose the same denomination as their parents. Even the groups with much higher retention rates now -- such as the 90% Hindu retention rate -- will likely drop closer to the two-thirds mark as subsequent generations get more Americanized.

Moreover, one of the critical requirements of a religious free market is the willingness to evangelize. Catholics and evangelicals can have significant switching out and still hold their market share because they evangelize. Jews and Episcopalians, to take just two of many examples, have significant losses but do not evangelize, and are slipping.

Religious change is a sign of a religiously vibrant society.

Catholic Lose Big, Hold Steady

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 3

The Roman Catholic Church has been the largest denomination in the United States for five generations. Catholics make up about a quarter of the population. Yet the Catholic Church shows huge losses over a lifetime in the new Pew survey. Asking adults what religion they are now, and what they claimed as a child, the RCs show a 24% loss. Yet they remain nearly a quarter of the population. How is that possible?

Part of the answer is conversion. While 7.5% of the population reports that they once were Catholics but now are not, another 2.9% of the population made the shift the other way, making up almost 40% of the loss.

The other part of the answer is immigration. Almost half of all immigrants are Catholic. Immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the Catholic membership in this country - double the percentage of Americans who are foreign-born.

The Pew survey does not tell us when the exiting Catholics departed. It seems likely to me that there was a spike of departures in the wake of the recent priestly pedophilia scandals. If so, then the rate of departures is likely to slow down soon.

Still, for a group with such massive losses, the Roman Catholic Church is surprisingly and steadily robust in the United States.

Deconstructing the Religiously Unaffiliated

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2

One of the big findings of the Pew survey is that the "religiously unaffiliated" are now 16% of the adult population - making them the fourth largest "religious family." However, Pew also added a nuance to their questions that most surveys miss. They had the usual categories of atheists and agnostics, and then a catch-all category of "nothing in particular." The nuance comes in the next step: they let people within the nothing in particular category further defined themselves as "secular unaffiliated" and "religious unaffiliated."

So how do the religiously unaffiliated break down? The 16% of the total falls out:
Atheist 1.6% (of the total adult population)
Agnostic 2.4
Secular unaffiliated 6.3

Thus, the truly not religious population of the U.S. at the moment is 10.3% of the total. Another 5.8% of the total are not affiliated with a religious institution, but nonetheless think of themselves as religious.

Moreover, the unaffiliated are a changeable group. While 16% are unaffiliated now, only 7% were raised that way. And they are young - 31% are under 30, vs. only 20% of the whole population. And they are less likely to be married - 46% vs 54% of the total. They are more likely to be men - 59 vs. 48. Interestingly, the education and income profiles of the unaffiliated are the same as the population as a whole.

What this suggests to me is that the core of the religiously unaffiliated are unmarried young men. If we check in with them later in the life course, a significant portion of them will have become affiliated.

The Big Lumps of American Denominations

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 1

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new survey on the landscape of American religion that will be the benchmark study of this subject for a decade. It is big enough, at 36,000+ respondents, and diverse enough to give a picture of denominational groups down to .3 of the population.

I want to start with the big lumps of denominational families that it reveals. Americans are

1/4th Catholic
1/4th Evangelical Protestant
1/4th Mainline + Black Protestant
1/4th Everything else

Of the Everything else, about half are "nothing in particular" - but half of them say that religion is important in their lives.

All the non-Christian religions add up to about 5% of the total U.S. population.

58% of American Kids Live with Their Married Parents

The latest good news from the Census Bureau finds that a solid majority of kids live with their married parents. Another couple percent live with their unmarried parents -- and a significant hunk of those parents will marry. Being raised by their own married parents is the best situation for kids. That doesn't mean that the other options are terrible, or that all married parents are great. But most kids get the best option. And since most parents want to stay married and raise their kids together, most parents get the best option, too.

The Thin Religious Coalition Against Gambling

Kentucky is considering casinos. A broad coalition of religious groups oppose them. The surprise is that the liberal churches, starting with the Kentucky Council of Churches, have been strong leaders in the anti-gambling coalition. Many mainline churches, my Presbyterian Church included, have firm teachings against gambling going back to the days when we strictly regulated our own conduct.

I believe, though, that the mainline churches are more worried about other people's gambling than our own. Sure, gambling can ruin people in all classes, but it is far more likely to ruin the lives of poor people -- just like all the other regulated vices. Sure, everyone who is tempted to an addiction is helped if the temptation is forbidden. But ruinous gambling hasn't been a big item in the moral agenda of most mainline members for a long time. You can get a bigger mandate to limit smoking from mainline Christians than to hit the streets to fight gambling. Even the limited kind of gambling, such as the lottery and bingo, that are permitted here, involve the Other Danville and the Other Kentucky. On those rare occasions when I have seen lines of people purchasing lottery tickets or playing commercial bingo, I didn't know anyone there. In a small town, it is hard to go into any social setting and know no one.

The Louisville Courier-Journal had a good piece on this debate today (in which yours truly is quoted). I think Peter Smith, the journalist covering the religious angle of this story, is right that this debate has created some "strange pew-fellows."

Witty Prank of the Year: Frozen Grand Central

On Stridency in Bipartisan Marriages

The New York Times has a light piece in their "Modern Marriage" feature, "I Married a Republican." The author, Ann Hood, is of the all-good-people-are-Democrats school, yet she falls for and marries a man who "votes for the best candidates" - who almost always happen to be Republicans. Her friends are appalled. She finds his friends to be very nice people, yet she ends up ranting at them whenever politics comes up.

The moral turning point in the story comes when she realized that "it was not his stridency that was causing this rift in our marriage, but mine."

The story has a happy ending from Hood's (and the Times') perspective. Her husband decides Obama is the best candidate. As an Obama supporter myself, I applaud that outcome. I enjoy her suggestion that there should be a bumper sticker: "Barak Obama: Uniting America, One Bipartisan Marriage at a Time."

What struck me as odd about the story, though, was that the author never describes her political choices, or his, or anyone's as based on reasons. The whole frame of the story is that blind loyalty on our side is good, blind loyalty on the other side is bad. Stridency comes in for some muted criticism, because it creates marital rifts. But she does not make a case for choosing the best candidate. She is not won over by her husband's apparent calm and reasoned judgment. Only that she won.

Now, I appreciate that Ann Hood is employing a common women's conversational ploy of presenting herself as strident and unreasonable -- she is starting in the one-down position in relation to the reader -- so that the reader can invite her up to an equal position. I imagine that many of the women that she tells this story to respond with their own tales of realizing they were being unreasonable. This restores equality. It is a species of "troubles talk." Nonetheless, it seems to me that she missed the point of her own story. It is not just stridency that creates the rift. If we don't think critically about our own positions, and give others credit for thinking critically about theirs, we cannot reasonably heal the rifts created by our stridency.

She Is Ready for the Question Four Months Before He Pops It

The British program The National Wedding Show commissioned a survey of married couples in that country. They found that, on average, a couple got engaged nearly three years after they met: two years, eleven months, and eight days, to be exact.

The survey also found that she wished that he had proposed sooner -- four months sooner, on average.

I have met many couples in which she was waiting, with decreasing patience, for the proposal that she knew was coming. In fact, he often delays the proposal just because she is expecting it. He wants to surprise her. And he doesn't want to feel like he is following orders.

Still, if four months of grief can be avoided, or even cut back to two, many couples might have a happier life.

What Anger is For

Steven Stosny was the keynote speaker at the Bluegrass Healthy Marriages conference. Stosny is a marriage therapist and researcher, and co-author of the wonderfully titled How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It (which must be aimed at men).

Stosny had a fascinating sociobiological tidbit in his talk. He said the portion of the brain that is given over to anger is more than twice as large as the portion concerned with self-preservation. His reading of this: we developed anger to get us to protect our loved ones. We need to protect our loved ones because humans are more dependent on other people than most species are, especially during our long childhood. It is to our long-term advantage to protect our loved ones, especially our genetic relatives. But protecting our loved ones to the extent of endangering our own self-preservation is a hard and biologically costly choice. Thus we need to devote big brain resources to overcome our short-term individual interest in order to realize our long-term social interest. And anger makes us mad enough to override our higher calculations of interest and just do what needs to be done to protect our own.

Two Military Dictatorships Crumble

This is a great moment for democracy: Pakistan had an election displacing the military dictator, and Cuba announced the retirement of its military dictator. The Pakistani election has been marred by many things, yet it promises to bring to power multi-party democracy in a Muslim state, which is extremely rare. Cuba's announcement that Fidel Castro is retiring is even further from bringing in multi-party democracy, since he is likely to replaced by his brother.

Still, if the military (theirs and ours) can keep their hands off, I think we will see functioning democracies in both countries within a few years. It would also help if we had normal trade with both countries -- if we had ended our foolish embargo of Cuba 40 years ago, I think we would have brought Cuba into the club of American democracies long ago.

I am hopeful. Building democracy builds centrism.

Fraternities Fighting Casual Sex Face Challenges, Too

Fraternity parties are notorious sites for casual "hook ups." Recently I got another view of this issue from an officer of one fraternity that is trying to change that story in their own house.

"being respectful of women [is] a key element among our brothers, and even brothers [will be] called out for any disrespectful actions (such as groping, or any action that may make a woman uncomfortable).

[In our house, at least,] I believe the general statement that “fraternity parties are places where people hook up” to be especially true with non-fraternity male members. I believe the dance floor of a fraternity party provides a certain degree of anonymity in which males can “make a move” on a female, and if the female is willing, she can be taken back to a dorm without anyone noticing. I am frustrated by such occurrences because men who take women home anonymously will not have the criticism from the entire chapter to motivate them to choose the right decision."

Fraternities have the power to partly regulate their members' actions -- for good or ill. If, as sometimes happens, fraternity means that brothers assist one another in taking advantage of women, as in "Animal House," then the group makes things worse. On the other hand, a "good guy" fraternity can help one another uphold a higher standard of treating women respectfully. In that case it is the independent men who take advantage of the fraternity's open parties to meet incautious women, without the fraternity having any leverage to regulate the men's behavior.

The fraternity is, in this case, a help to women and the moral order; it is the independence of independents that leaves women and the moral order without protection.

The Adopting Act Holds

The General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the "supreme court" of the Presbyterian Church (USA), released a major decision this week on the Pittsburgh case. This case is the first of several heading to the GAPJC to test the real meaning of the church's adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report in 2006, on which I have blogged quite a bit.

At issue in the Pittsburgh Presbytery case were two related points:
can a candidate for ordination in the church scruple behavior, as opposed to belief? and
can an ordaining body make a blanket determination of what the essential and necessary standards for ordination are?

In both cases the GAPJC said no.

Specifically, the court said that ministers and elders may declare that they disagree with the church's interpretation of scripture as requiring that all officers must “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or in chastity in singleness” (Book of Order, G-6.0106b) - but they must still act within that standard of behavior until and unless the whole church constitutionally changes that interpretation.

Second, the court said that the presbytery must take each case for ordination individually and not issue a blanket interpretation of church rules that go beyond what the constitution itself explicitly says. Each candidate's confession and scruples must be considered individually and as a whole.

In other words, the middle way that PUP promoted, and the Adopting Act of 1729 standard that it revived, were upheld by the court.

Yes We Can vs. Like Hope, But Different

The "Yes We Can" video that will.i.am made of Barack Obama's speech is just great.



The parody reply for(?) John McCain is hilarious.

Thank God for Evolution, Conclusion

I have been reading Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! in the hopes that it would help me put together the Biblical view of God as creator of heaven and earth with the evolutionary view of the long, slow development of the universe. I appreciate Dowd's commitment to seeing the development of the universe as a meaningful Great Story. In the end, though, he doesn't engage the science enough to help me clarify a biblical understanding of evolution. More frustrating to me, his reinterpretation of Christian language is so ambiguous that I can't tell if he could deliver the faith/science connection that he promises, even if he did have more detail on the science.

Dowd does have an interesting theory of the connection between brain development and sin, which I wrote about earlier. And he does have a useful timeline of cosmic evolution. Ultimately, though, he says he is not trying to coordinate religious views and scientific ones. He even seems to reject the project, though he does in fact do a bit of that himself. He is, as he says, a popularizer and evangelist for the view that evolution is itself a religious worldview. So if there is not as much science as I would like, that is more my problem than his.

Dowd's ambiguity and reinterpretation of Biblical language is more of a problem even within his own project. He distinguishes between the "night language" of religion and the "day language" of science. Here he gives a translation from one to the other:

Our purpose, individually, is to grow in Christ and to support one another in staying true to God's Word and God's will. Collectively, we are here to create Christ-centered institutions that glorify God and embody the values of the Kingdom.

He continues, "A day language way of saying the same thing might be:"

Our purpose, individually, is to grow in trust, authenticity, responsibility, and service to the Whole, and to support others in doing the same. Collectively, we are here to celebrate and steward what Life has been doing for billions of years and to devise systems of governance and economics that align the self-interest of individuals and groups with the wellbeing of the larger communities of which we are a part.

The latter might be a worthy ethical view, but I don't see how it is simply a translation of the former view. He articulates at some length his theory of Evolutionary Christianity, Evolutionary Islam, Evolutionary Judaism, Evolutionary Buddhism, etc., which re-interprets all faiths into one - the same one that he sees in evolution. Dowd even contends that all faiths will evolve into his version of cosmopolitan unitarianism when everyone faces up to "reality." Sociologically, it seems very unlikely to me that all the world's faiths will give up their tradition and what he calls "flat earth" Scriptures to embrace scientific unitarianism.

What has been hardest for me to pin down in reading this book is what Dowd means by God. On the one hand, he uses God talk all the time, starting with the title. On the other hand, he says:

God was active at every moment, at every critical juncture. God, as I have been using the term, is no less than a holy name for Supreme Wholeness, that Ultimate Creative Reality that brought everything, step-by-step, into existence.

On the other hand, he denies that God designed anything. Everything evolved by natural selection. In his final credo, Dowd asserts

I believe that God is creator and ruler of the Universe. And I know that this statement is metaphorical, not literal, in what it says about the nature of reality.

I can't tell what Dowd's God is - if he thinks God is real. If you take Dowd to mean exactly what he says, then God is a metaphor we use to describe whatever it is that happens to emerge from evolution. He believes that evolution is leading the universe toward greater complexity. Moreover, he thinks the fact that human beings understand the universe means that they evolved in order to be the universe's way of understanding itself. This is a pretty vision, but I don't see how he can derive that either from his science or his theology.

Valentine's Day Reflections on "Marry Him!"

We in the marriage-promoting world have been all atwitter about an article in The Atlantic recently, Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough." Gottlieb, a liberal feminist writer who had in the past written against settling, decided to have a child on her own before 40. Now, she wishes she had married when she was younger. She held out for Mr. Right, and now she is alone and regrets it.

I mostly applaud Ms. Gottlieb's sentiment. I think most young people have a distorted view of marriage. They think it is about someone who will make you happy. The core of marriage as a social institution, though, is to form a partnership that is good for your children. (And yes, of course, there are many fine and socially useful childless marriages. I am talking about marriage as a social institution, the marriages that most people have.) I think it is healthy for women to look to marry the fathers of their children before they think about finding their own soulmate.

What disturbs me a bit in all this talk of "settling" is that is leaves out how marriage transforms people -- especially men. Marriage reliably makes people more responsible. Very often, it also makes us better people -- more concerned about others, more interested in how the big world affects our own, even more loving.

Moreover, it is helpful and humbling to remember that our spouse settled in marrying us. We are all imperfect. Knowing that your mate settled in marrying you can be a strong motivator be the person she or he deserved to marry.

What I Learned at the Evolutionists' Testimony Service

Last night I went to a talk at the local Unitarian-Universalist Church. The talk was sponsored by the Kentucky Association of Science Educators and Skeptics, a debunking organization focusing on paranormal and creationist claims. One of their number, a geologist, had visited the Creation Museum. His talk was mostly a simple slide show of what he saw at the museum. His commentary was, of course, critical, and he was preaching to the choir in this setting to this audience.

I was dissatisfied, though, because the criticism didn't really engage the substance of what the museum offered. The sheer fact that they taught young earth creationism and rejected evolution was reason enough to bemoan their ignorance. In the Q and A session I sent up a written question, asking for a good specific example of what was wrong with young earth creationist geology. The speaker offered the example of Kentucky limestone. He said that limestone is made in clear coastal seabeds piling up sediment over a long time.

Here, I think, is where we can see the disconnection between the creationist and evolutionist arguments. The creationist can readily concede that one way limestone can be made is by sediments piling up in clear coastal seabeds over a long time. But they also contend that another way would be in a sudden calamitous flood. In the museum they show pictures of major geological changes made by the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in a matter of weeks.

What the creationists object to is the flat, unreflective assertion that the evolutionists' proposed theory is the only possible way to explain what we see in nature. Until the evolutionists offer a rebuttal to that critique, they have not answered the creationists' objection.

The event at the UU church was mostly a testimonial among believers. In addition to the geologist and the KASES organizer, two biology professors had been recruited for the panel. With their usual fair-mindedness, though, the UU panel also included a Presbyterian minister, head of the local interfaith alliance, as the token theist. He made what I thought was the most penetrating comment of the night. He thought that lying behind the passion on each side of the creation/evolution debate was a deep emotion: each side feared the other. One of the scientists objected to this characterization, contending that he didn't fear the creationists, just their ignorance. I can't help but think that this attitude -- that the other side disagrees with us only because they are ignorant, fearful, and dogmatic -- will not help.

Indeed, attending an evolutionist testimonial service shows the knowledge class -- which thinks of itself as the embodiment of reason, logic, and open-mindedness -- at its most fearful, dogmatic, and close-minded.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 5

A comment on yesterday's post brings out an important point. Virginia wrote,

As a liberal Christian, I think it is possible to accept the Biblical account of Creation as a metaphorical narrative and see God's hand in the truly amazing process of evolution. A few degrees warmer or cooler, a few cells that split in different directions, a percentage less of one kind of gas and a percentage more of another and this would be a completely different world.

I agree with Virginia that the universe does seem amazingly well designed for life. I think that insight is a very promising way to go in reconciling faith and evolution. Science cannot, of course, prove the "anthropic principle," or any theory that the universe is designed and created. But it can't disprove it, either. So you and I are left to judge on some other basis than empirical science why the universe works so marvelously.

In one way, that is what Michael Dowd is doing in Thanks God for Evolution! The amazing wonder of the Great Story of evolution is the whole motive of his ministry. Surprisingly, though, Dowd denies that any aspect of the universe is designed. It all just evolved. He is not arguing that evolution is evidence of the divine; rather, he says that evolution is divine. We are meant to take the book's title more literally than readers like Virginia and me might have thought.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 4

I am halfway through Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution! The expected parting between his view and Christianity has begun. Dowd preserves the core language of Christianity, including salvation. He says, though, that for the doctrine of salvation to make sense, "our theology of salvation must be freed from otherworldly and unnatural interpretations." Dowd contends that "we" and "people today" just can't believe in an otherworldly God -- though, in fact, that is exactly what most people do believe.

Dowd's reinterpretation of Christian salvation means having "Christ-like evolutionary integrity." I read this as mostly the traditional liberal Christian strategy of re-interpreting "faith in Christ" as "being a good guy like Jesus." I think C.S. Lewis answered this in Mere Christianity, when he pointed out that Jesus definitely believed God was otherworldly, and that he himself was (and is) the son of God in an otherworldly way. Either Jesus is God, or he is a mad-man.

One thing that is new in Dowd's language: believing that Christ really died, was resurrected, and ascended -- that is, believing what the Bible says -- is "unnatural." And I am not sure what evolutionary integrity is.

Huckabee Quiz

1. In November, as Mike Huckabee surged in the polls, a student at Liberty University asked him what was driving his startling success. Huckabee responded, "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."

2. "Sometimes," the former Arkansas governor told his supporters, "one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor."

3. "We've also seen that the widow's mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world."

4. "It's almost like when the prophet was looking for a king. He came down, looked through all of Jesse's sons, went through a whole bunch of them, and said, 'Is this all you got?'"

So, how many allusions did you get?

NPR listeners thought Huckabee was speaking a secret, mysterious dialect. They didn't know what he was talking about, and neither did most of the Christians they found on the Mall in Washington. Fortunately they found Vickie Frey, a member of an evangelical megachurch in Omaha. She supported the hope that there is some biblical literacy left in the church, and got them all right.

Bury the Hairy

Another gem from my sister and her kindergartener son.

The boy and I were discussing transplanting bushes. We agreed you need to dig them up carefully so you get all the roots, even the small ones. Then, said he, the bush "holds its breath" until you put it in the new hole. After that, you "bury the hairy" and put the dirt back around the bush's roots so it can stop holding its breath.

I also liked the "bury the hairy" dance, which is a sort of hunched shoulder, arm swinging, gorilla-esque shovelling dance, while singing the dirge-like "Bury the Hairy" song.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 3

Michael Dowd has found an intriguing way to understand Original Sin and the Fall in evolutionary terms. Our brains have different regions that seem to correspond to a developmental sequence from the parts in the bottom that we share with the reptiles, through a section like that of lower mammals, to the large region like the higher mammals, and finally the lobes in the front that are distinctively human. As brain scientists have studied these different parts of the brain, they perform different functions. They also promote different, sometimes competing impulses. We have inherited a propensity to do things that gratify our simplest urges for pleasure and survival that conflict with our more complex understanding of what is good and right. This inheritance, Dowd argues, is how we can understand Original Sin.

Seeing our conflicting sinful urges in this way, as an emergent result of our psychological and physical evolution, does not make them less sinful. But it does, Dowd argues, help us defuse the emotions around them. Calmness is the face of strong desires can help us not give in to them.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 2

The most engaging part of Michael Dowd's vision in Thank God for Evolution! is that God is immanent in the entire cosmos, creating and evolving everything. As Dowd frames the great purpose of our lives, "Humanity's Great Work is to further divine creative emergence -- God's will -- in ways lifegiving for the whole." This is close to a doctrine that is more Catholic than Calvinist, but I like it still: that we are meant to be co-creators with God in the further making of this world.

Dowd names his position Creatheism, which deliberately plays on creation-theism and creative-atheism. He treats all names for God as metaphors, but as nonetheless pointing to something real. He allows that his position has strong affinities with panentheism and with process theology, but is trying to express it in a way more palatable to both Biblical theists and atheists. We is trying to express a view of God both immanent and transcendent, while recognizing that the reality of God goes beyond any terms or metaphors we could come up with.

Thank God for Evolution, Part 1

Recently I wrote about "evolutionary evangelists" Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow.

I am now working through Dowd's book, Thank God for Evolution! Dowd was a UCC minister. I think he still is. Dowd and Barlow now make their living traveling around the country arguing for a "marriage of science and religion" based on an appreciation of the cosmic grandeur of evolution.

At an early point, Dowd distinguishes between Evolutionary Christianity (and Evolutionary Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) and "flat earth faiths." Flat earth faiths may not literally believe in a flat earth now, but they revere scriptures, and interpretations of scriptures, that were written when flat earth beliefs were indeed the norm. Dowd names this as the problem he is trying to solve: "today's continuing use of flat-earth commentaries to interpret flat-earth scriptures is the most problematic of all."

Dowd is going to try to thread a middle way. He does not reject scriptures (any of them), but accepts them as good-faith efforts to understand the meaning of the cosmos. As his phrasing of what is "most problematic" makes clear, it is our interpretation of scriptures as literal theories of the cosmos that he is going to tweak, if not utterly transform.

What I like about Dowd and Barlow's project is their attitude of humility, wonder, and, most of all, gratitude for the cosmos -- and their commitment to understanding the evolution of the cosmos as a meaningful story.

Baptists vs. Structural Evils

Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, say liberals shouldn't scorn evangelicals because they now do good social action work. Which is true. But even that he says in a scornful "they've come so far" way.

In this column he specifically mentions Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback megachurch, which is quietly Southern Baptist. His and his wife's personal experience with poverty and misery in Africa has mobilized the "purpose driven" wing of evangelicalism to do heroic work there. Baptists do fabulous cup-of-cold-war work -- 7,500 Saddlebackers going personally to Africa to fight poverty is truly impressive.

And yet, they still can't see the structural picture. You fight AIDS by changing individual behavior. Score one for the Baptists. But you fight warlords, who sell drugs, rape, and kill, with armies. Baptists don't have an army (nor should they). That is what the government is for. And when low-church evangelicals are in charge of the government, they can't seem to get that.

Most Americans Want a Servant-Leader President

The Christian Post is reporting an interesting poll done by Zogby for the American Bible Society on what qualities voters want in a president. Most Americans want a God-believing, Bible-quoting president. Since that describes the overwhelming majority of Americans, this finding is not so surprising.

An interesting detail is that most people want a president who "sees the office as a privilege to serve others, with a responsibility to God." The New Testament standard of the president as a "servant-leader" resonated especially strongly with the youngest voters. Among those 18 to 29, fully 84% said that they wanted a president who saw him- or herself as a servant-leader of the people.

Guess the Fantasy

This one comes fully formed from my sister, writing about her five year old.


Danny, sotto voce, while flinging himself about: "Gryffindor: infinity! Yay! Yay!"

Super Bowl Church Parties

If that headline doesn't strike you as odd, you are deep in the civil religion. Many churches have Super Bowl parties, showing the game on the big screen that they normally use for hymn lyrics. These parties are designed especially to draw men and teens who usually avoid going into the church. Some churches use them as fundraisers.

Until this year. The NFL is enforcing the copyright deal it worked out with the government that forbids anyone to show its games on screens larger than 55". Sports bars are exempt. Churches are not.

I think this is actually a good thing for churches. It is very dangerous for churches to simply be absorbed into the civil religion. Churches need some tension with the world, or there is no point in going. Without that tension, churches are another part of the state/school/mall, with worse seats and terrible bread.

Churches need to be in tension with all the world's institutions. And that includes the NFL.

Evolutionary Evangelists Praise Creation Museum

Michael Dowd and his wife Connie Barlow are self-described "evolutionary evangelists." Dowd, a former evangelical creationist turned UCC minister, and Barlow, an author of several books on evolution, visited the Creation Museum -- and came away praising it for telling a meaningful story that has a place for us. The average natural history museum, they note, does not tell a story.

I believe that is the main point at issue. Evolution as a scientific theory can't offer a narrative of why existence -- our existence -- is meaningful. Evolution can show change over time, and even adaptations that helped survival in particular environments. But science can't say why that matters, or if all this change is going somewhere. 19th century moralists married evolution to the quite different theory of progress, with ethically suspect results. Scientific evolutionists today stay away from making ethical claims about evolution, one way or another.

But we still need a meaningful story to understand the world with. This is why most people, if forced to choose between a meaningful creation and a meaningless evolution, will stick with creation.

Dowd and Barlow say we don't have to choose. I agree.

Dowd and Barlow are extolling a middle way that reconciles Christianity with evolutionary views.

The Mormons' "John Paul II" Dies

Gordon Hinckley, the Priest, Prophet, and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, died yesterday at 97. He had been the top Mormon for 13 years. This is very long reign for a Mormon Prophet, since they usually succeed to the job after decades working up the hierarchy. Hinckley's likely successor, for example, is 80.

I see Hinckley as the Mormon John Paul II because, like the late, great Pope, he served a long time, traveled extensively rallying the faithful, and was aggressive but positive about his faith. Moreover, Hinckley oversaw the shift of the Mormon majority from the Utah and the USA to the global south -- a miniature version of the massive shift of Catholic strength from north to south since John Paul's election in 1978. 1978 was also a big year for the Mormons: that was when the top leaders had their "pentecost moment" and received a new revelation to open the priesthood (full church status for Mormon men) to black people. Hinckley took that revelation and ran with it. In his term as Prophet, almost two decades later, Hinckley oversaw a slew of new LDS temples in Africa and Latin America.

Mormon growth, like Christian growth in most denominations, is greatest south of the equator. Hinckley's successor will be an old white man from Utah, and probably the couple of successors after that. Someday, though, not to long from now, the Mormon Prophet will be a darker-skinned man from far away.

No Country for Old Men

... is a great movie. I think the Coen Brothers are great moviemakers. They have made very few bad ones. I can see echoes of their previous movies in this one, especially those set in the southwest.

There are serious religious themes here.

A hunter finds a bunch of dead guys and a lone survivor of a bad drug deal. The survivor asks for water. The hunter ignores him and goes after the money. If he had left it at that, he might have gotten away with the money. But conscience comes to him in the night, and he goes back with a jug of water - the very model of Christian service. When his wife asks him why he is going out in the middle of the night, he answers: "to do something stupid."

As a result, a relentless, but strangely rational killer tracks him, leaving a very bloody trail. And a soul-tired old sheriff, a Tommy Lee Jones character played by Tommy Lee Jones, understands what is going on, and tracks the killer. At one point he tells another cop that he thinks the killer is not a lunatic, but a ghost.

The killer vs. hunter plot is the gripping foreground tale. Ultimately, though, the sheriff is the protagonist, and the real story is how he wrestles with his own conscience and principles. I think the keystone scene comes late, when the sheriff is talking to an old lawman, crippled by a villain years before. Tommy Lee Jones says "I thought when I got older, God would somehow come into my life. But He didn't."

I will not say more about what follows. The ending is ambiguous. It is designed to leave open the question of how the main story ends. I believe the Coen Brothers deliberately left open the question of whether God did, does, or will come to the old sheriff -- and whether justice will be done.

I think so.

Students at the Creation Museum

I took my Sociology of American Religion class to the Creation Museum as the final, and fanciest, field trip of the term. The students ranged from incredulous evolutionists to of-course creationists. Most of the students were religious, and most believe that God created the world. They accept old-earth evolutionist views because that is what they have been taught. Even the creation-confident were mostly very skeptical of the museum's view that all of Creation is only 6000 years old.

What struck me the most about their reactions, though, was that most of them had never really thought about how creation and evolution relate to one another. They simply accept both as true, without trying to reconcile them. The stronger Christians were inclined to accept the museum's version of how creation worked, because it is the only elaborated theory they have ever heard. The more secular-minded students were inclined to reject the museum's argument, because they accepted the museum's contention that the only alternative to their view was the materialistic atheism of "human reason."

I think the polarization of this debate has been very bad for critical thinking. When you sit down and think about the possibilities, there are dozens of ways to reconcile creation and evolution, and thousands of middle pathways on any particular empirical mystery between the two extremes.

I think the weakest part of the Creation Museum argument is the idea that the universe must have been created in about 4004 B.C. Most people believe in creation. Most scientists will accept that there are alternative theories about how old the universe is, from very very old to unimaginably old. It is not hard to reconcile creation, even biblical creation, with an old or oldish universe. Without the Procrustean bed of Bishop Ussher's dating scheme, I think most creationists and evolutionists could come to a broad common ground.

Two Words: LOLCAT Bible

This is the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I will give you just a couple of selections.

Genesis 1: 1-3


1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1


Matthew 1: 18-21

18 Now, teh burth of teh Christ was liek dis: After Marry and Joseph waz all "We's gonna get marrieded, kthnx", but before dey could had hankiez pankiez Mary was all pr3ggerz from Teh Forse.19 Joseph was liek "I has virjn - NOOOO dey be stealin my virjn! Must hied hur".20 But when he was tihnkin, zomg, a WallCat frm Ceiling Cat was liek, "Oh hai! I'm in ur dreemz, givin u messij. Don't be scairdy cat. Take Mary as ur wife - is virjn. But teh Forse is strong in tihs wun, lol! HoverCat is on hur, givn hur feetus, srsly.21 "And she gonna made a son, and you gonna call him Jeezus, cuz he save kittehs frum bein bad kittehs. Kthxbai."

A Religion Joke to End the Term

We finished the Sociology of American Religion in our January term yesterday. Before I begin the grading binge, I thought I would share a joke that I composed for the occasion.

We studied a great range of religion, from Pentecostal gifts of the spirit to high-class liberal Episcopalian such as the retired bishop of Newark. Yes, we ran the gamut from speaking in tongues to antiquing and Spongs.

Gruntled Song of the Year

I know it is early to be making a selection, but there is one out there in enormous national release that will be tough to beat: "Things I Like to Do," by They Might Be Giants.

And why will tens of millions hear this song? Because it is used in a Dunkin' Donuts ad, as the donut peddlers go national as a working stiffs' espresso chain. And the song is perfect for that sensibility.

The ad is here.

A Middle Way, Even With Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden's son wants to mediate between his father and the West. He claims his father wants a truce. Omar bin Laden and his wife are planning a cross-Africa bicycle race to raise money and awareness for kids injured in the religious wars there. This is a good cause. And perhaps young bin Laden, who is 26, is right that a negotiated settlement with Al-Qaida is possible. It seems unlikely, but I honor anyone willing to make the attempt, however quixotic.

On the other hand, Omar does appear to be a bit of a flake. His partner in this desert bicycle race is new wife, an English woman twice his age who is now on her fifth husband. And it is more of a hoot than a sign of serious politics to see an Osama lookalike in dreadlocks a biker jacket.

There was one fascinating insight into bin Laden thinking in this article. Omar told the Associate Press reporter,

"My father is asking for a truce but I don't think there is any government (that) respects him. At the same time they do not respect him, why everywhere in the world, they want to fight him? There is a contradiction."

If Osama bin Laden thinks that forcing all governments (including his own) to fight him means that they must respect him, then I think we have a window into his tangled mind. And, oddly enough, this might make it truly possible that he would also take our willingness of negotiate as a sign of respect. If that is what it takes to get him to stop murdering people, it is worth a try.

Joshua Obama

Barack Obama is Joshua to Martin Luther King's Moses. He is not the only Joshua, and there is not only one promised land. The long exodus is not about the presidency, but about overcoming the great original sin of America: anti-black racism. However the presidential race turns out in 2008, I am glad to live in a time when there is a Joshua like Obama. Not the one I expected -- the product of a Kenya/Kansas hippy union, by way of Occidental, Columbia, Harvard and then Chicago community organizing, and then the U.S. Senate. But he is a good one.

Barack Obama gave a pretty good Joshua speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church for Martin Luther King Day; if every word of that sentence seems deeply meaningful to you, we share the same religion.

Jackson and Cromwell

As a democrat and Presbyterian, I have long tried to admire Oliver Cromwell. I once had an argument with his statue outside the Parliament building, going over his pros and cons. I think he did assist the cause of Reformation of the Church of England. On the other hand, his suppression of Parliament was a setback to the cause of republicanism in Britain for centuries, and his brutal treatment of Catholics is just unpardonable.

As a Democrat and Presbyterian, I have long tried to admire Andrew Jackson. I believe he is mostly a positive figure, and his refounding of the Democratic Party has been a hugely beneficial gift to the nation. On the other hand, his destruction of the Bank set back the national economy for generations, and his brutal treatment of the Indians is just unpardonable.

Still, Jackson's excesses were constrained by the presidency, which he respected and left voluntarily. Cromwell's excesses just grew and grew and were constrained by nothing but death.

So here is one cheer for Andrew Jackson. Cromwell will have to be content with his statue.

Paris Hilton, the New Princess Margaret

Two decades ago Maryln Schwartz published A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma. Like The Official Preppy Handbook, though not quite as informative, the Primer was a decent piece of pop sociology.

Princess Margaret is five years dead, and I imagine most Southern belles have never heard of her. So a slightly updated version of the original has been released: A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Paris Hilton Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma.

The reason Princess Margaret could not have been a KKG in the early 1960s was that she could be seen (often) walking and smoking at the same time. Belles of that era did smoke, but not while moving. That particular rule has been relaxed quite a bit, and belles are much less likely to smoke now in any case.

Of all of Paris Hilton's many transgressions against bellehood I am not sure which one was thought to keep her out of Kappa Kappa Gamma. The fact that she never finished high school, much less attended college, would surely have made it difficult.

Hindus Beat Buddhists in the Personal Networks of My College Students

In the world there are almost three times as many Hindus as Buddhists. But when I asked my class how many knew Hindus personally and how many knew Buddhists personally, Hindus beat Buddhists about 9 to 1. I think this means professionals who immigrated from India are much more likely to have kids in mid-USA college-track high schools than are Buddhist immigrants.

Does French Fertility Rest on an Overseas Foundation?

European fertility has declined to scary levels -- well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The average fertility in the European Union is 1.52. The one exception has been France, where the fertility level rose to 1.98 last year, surpassing Ireland as the most fertile country in Europe.

However, France, unlike other European countries, includes significant overseas territories in its official population. Among these are French Guiana, an official department (state) of France located on the north coast of South America. I have not been able to find separate fertility figures for French Guiana. I did find, though, that from 1990 to 2000, of all nations with above-replacement fertility rates, only Israel and Suriname had a fertility increase. Suriname is a neighbor and cultural cousin of French Guiana.

My guess is that the fertility rate in continental France is not actually rising. They face the same scenario of population decline that all the other EU nations do.