With the expansion of economic freedom and the resulting material prosperity, we’ve reached an unprecedented position of personal reflection and vocation-seeking. This is a welcome development, to be sure, but as I’ve written recently, it also has its risks. Unless we continue to seek God first and neighbor second, such reflection can quickly descend into self-absorbed and unproductive naval-gazing.

Thus far, I’ve limited my discussion to the ways in which privilege and prosperity can impact our views about work outside of the home, but we needn’t forget the side effects that modernity might foster in an area that often consumes the rest of our daily lives: the family.

Just as most of our ancestors had few choices about where they glorified God in business (toiling for the feudal landowner), they also had few choices when it came to raising families (who they married, how many children they had, etc.). Whether due to lack of contraception, more practical material/financial concerns, or any number of other factors, for most families, children were simply a given.

Today, much like in our approaches to job-seeking, child-bearing has come to involve a significant degree of choice, and the overriding choice of the day seems definitive. As Jonathan Last points out in his book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, birthrates in the Western world are in a free fall, with more and more adults opting for fewer and fewer kids, if any at all. Last offers plenty of nuances as to why this is happening, pointing to a “complex constellation of factors, operating independently, with both foreseeable and unintended consequences.” But on the whole, he concludes that “there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children.” Read more on Family and Vocation in a Culture of Choice…

Family, church, and school are the three basic people-forming institutions, notes Patrick Fagan, and they produce the best results—including economic and political ones—when they cooperate.

Even if all the market reforms of the Washington think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine were enacted, we’d still need to kiss the Great American Economy goodbye. Below the level of economic policy lies a society that is producing fewer people capable of hard work, especially married men with children. As the retreat from marriage continues apace, there are fewer and fewer of these men, resulting in a slowly, permanently decelerating economy.

Read more on The Wealth of Nations Depends on the Health of Families…

Christian’s Library Press and Acton Institute announce the release of the first English translation of The Christian Family by Herman Bavinck.

When this book was first published in Dutch, marriage and the family were already weathering enormous changes, and that trend has not abated. Yet by God’s power the unchanging essence of marriage and the family remains proof, as Bavinck notes, that God’s “purpose with the human race has not yet been achieved.”

Accessible, thoroughly biblical, and astonishingly relevant, The Christian Family offers a mature and concise handling of the origins of marriage and family life along with the effects of sin on these institutions, an appraisal of historic Christian approaches, and an attempt to apply that theology.

Aptly reminding Christians that “the moral health of society depends on the health of family life,” Bavinck issues an evergreen challenge to God’s people: “Christians may not permit their conduct to be determined by the spirit of the age, but must focus on the requirement of God’s commandment.”

John Bolt, professor of Systematic Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary says this about Bavinck’s The Christian Family:
Read more on First English Translation of Herman Bavinck’s ‘The Christian Family’…

I have been duped. I thought, along with my husband, that we were doing a good thing by raising our children in a household that valued traditional marriage and saw our children as gifts from God. I chose, for more than a decade, to work at home raising our children because I could not imagine a more important job during their formative years.

According to Laurie Shrage, I’m quite mistaken.

 Wives who perform unpaid caregiving and place their economic security in the hands of husbands, who may or may not be good breadwinners, often find their options for financial support severely constrained the longer they remain financially dependent. Decades of research on the feminization of poverty show that women who have children, whether married or not, are systematically disadvantaged when competing for good jobs. Marriage is neither a recipe for economic security nor responsible parenting.

Read more on I Am Woman: Hear Me Whine…

Former governor, pastor, and presidential candidate (and current radio host) Mike Huckabee has been a primary driving force in turning today, August 1, into an ad hoc appreciation day for the fast food company Chick-fil-A.

Huckabee’s activism in support of the “Eat Mor Chikin” establishments was occasioned by criticism leveled against the company’s support for traditional “family values,” including promotion of traditional marriage. Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy said, “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit.” That, apparently, was enough to galvanize many opponents of “the biblical definition of the family unit” and the rights of a company to be supportive of such. These opponents include, notably, a Chicago alderman and the mayor of Boston.

In addition to Huckabee’s response, others have argued that there should not be a religious, or even political, test of sorts for determining our partners in free exchange. Jonathan Merritt, a Southern Baptist pastor and author, wrote a piece for The Atlantic, “In Defense of Eating a Chick-fil-A,” in which he writes, “in a society that desperately needs healthy public dialogue, we must resist creating a culture where consumers sort through all their purchases (fast food and otherwise) for an underlying politics not even expressed in the nature of the product itself.” Likewise Branson Parler, a professor at Kuyper College here in Grand Rapids, contends that “Christians need to disconnect the cultural goods and services provided by numerous institutions (including Chick-fil-A) from the gods of politicization and partisanship.”
Read more on Chick-fil-A and Free Exchange…

It should be obvious that developments within a social institution as fundamental as marriage will have an economic impact. Sorting out cause and effect in such cases is no easy matter, however; the temptation is to draw easy and simplistic connections. A suitably sophisticated analysis comes from Fr. John Flynn at Zenit. Flynn reports on a study by the National Marriage Project. Lots of interesting tidbits here, not all of them exclusively related to family issues. Among them: 75% of job losses during the current recession in the US have been concentrated among men without a college education; college-educated women are now more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than their less educated counterparts; extramarital affairs and alcohol/drug abuse are the only factors more strongly predictive of divorce than the feeling that one’s spouse is financially irresponsible.

Read more on Family Economics…

Mark your calendars! Jennifer Roback Morse is coming to Grand Rapids to speak at Aquinas College on Wednesday, November 19 at 7:00pm.

Dr. Morse will speak on the topic of her provocative new book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World.

Read more on Jennifer Roback Morse to speak in Grand Rapids…

Opening this weekend in many markets is an enjoyable movie with a meaningful message, Fireproof.

My wife and I had the opportunity to screen it a few weeks ago, and came away impressed. The story behind the story is itself interesting: A Georgia church decided several years ago to try to influence the culture in a positive way, and determined that making movies was the way to do it. They enlisted a handful of professionals, but in large part the effort was amateur. Their second attempt, Facing the Giants, enjoyed some success—great success, considering the film’s resources and provenance. (They made an earlier picture, too, Flywheel, which I have not seen.)

Read more on Marriage Movie…

This bit in this week’s Telegraph nails something I’ve been wrangling with for a while. Maybe you men out there can relate:

Many men believe the world is now dominated by women and that they have lost their role in society, fuelling feelings of depression and being undervalued. Research shows the extent to which men have had to change within one or two generations, adapting to new rules and different expectations. Asked what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, more than half thought society was turning them into “waxed and coiffed metrosexuals”, and 52 per cent say they had to live according to women’s rules. What they apparently want is what some American academics have dubbed a “menaissance” – a return to manliness, where figures such as Sir Winston Churchill were models of manhood.

It’s not a “feminization” thing really, and to push back here isn’t being chauvinistic. Most guys are cool with being softer around the edges especially when we connect it to loving our wives and daughters in ways that are meaningful to them.

But our culture has fallen into the trap of thinking husbands are supposed to love the way they do. We’re supposed to be our wife’s best girlfriend, with a winkie and chest hair added as a bonus. After all, we rationalize, it’s our wives who understand what love is all about, and men who don’t climb on board their way of thinking are dufuses or oafs and are certainly not interested in the relationship…

But that doesn’t really cut it, does it guys.

A girlfriend that sometimes leaves the toilet seat up? That’s not what you really want either, is it gals.

A brother in our church’s men’s group stuck a copy of Emerson Eggerichs Love & Respect in my hands a couple months ago. Was up most of the night reading it. Also listened to an audio interview by James “What Wives Wished Their Husbands Knew About Women” Dobson, who essentially smacked himself in the forehead for promoting the husbands-must-think-like-wives mantra for so long that he missed the obvious.

It’s the point that the Telegraph’s reporterette finally gets to at the bottom of her article cited above:

Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor and America’s best known political philosopher, who tackles the topic in his book Manliness, says the issue is ignored. “A man has to be embarrassed about being a man. I am trying to bring back the word manliness. It’s not respected,” he said.

Men, says Eggerichs, are built for honor and respect. It’s as much our “love language” as when our wives wish we’d listen to them talk about their day or – hubba hubba – do the dishes or laundry.

Read more on We Need a Menaissance…

From a CT interview in 1995 by Michael Cromartie:

Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done. The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.

From this it doesn’t follow that the state should make the law tougher, but rather that the culture needs to be reformed. Modifying the law is only one way, and often not the best, to do that: “…unless we create a virtuous society, it’s not a society that’s going to endure. So the right things should be encouraged and the wrong things discouraged. Today, roughly speaking, there is zero taboo against fornication.”

Read more on Buckley on Law and Christian Morality…