Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Family

January 16, 2019

Homeschooling a parent’s choice, not the state’s

Decades ago, when I was first ordained a priest, I shared a prejudice that many people hold: I thought homeschooling families were odd. I believed schooling children at home deprived such children of opportunities to be with other children causing them to be less able to communicate with others, socially awkward and reclusive and narrow in their experience and understanding of the world that they would one day have to grow up in and navigate. Continue Reading...
November 28, 2018

Demographic decline: Ben Franklin’s two cents

Not one of Benjamin Franklin’s better-known works, but one worth reading nonetheless, is a brief 1751 essay called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. Franklin covers a lot of ground in just a few pages, and brings up quite a few ideas worth commenting on, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph and its relevance for the “birth dearth” we see in the West today. Continue Reading...
November 05, 2018

Judges: Parents must pay children’s bills into their 30s

Michael Rotondo rose to infamy earlier this year as the 30-year-old whose parents had to sue in order to evict him from their home. But across Europe, judges have ruled that parents must financially support their children well into their 30s, until they finish schooling – or until they find a job in the same field as their sometimes-esoteric degrees. Continue Reading...
June 18, 2018

Incredibles 2: Making superheroes great again

I saw Incredibles 2 over the Father’s Day weekend, and just like its predecessor, there’s a lot to ponder beneath the surface of this animated film. In the real world we’ve had to wait 14 years, but the sequel picks up basically where the original left off. Continue Reading...
April 25, 2018

Alfie Evans and the UK’s paternalistic subversion of parental rights

Alfie Evans’s father wanted his son to remain on life support and be allowed to go to the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome for additional treatment. Earlier today, though, the UK’s Court of Appeal—the highest court within the Senior Courts of England and Wales—denied that request and upheld a previous ruling removing life-support for the British infant. Continue Reading...