Category: Family
The Masculinity Crisis is an Economic Crisis
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has led to much reflection on the state of the modern evangelical soul. One thing that stood out from the podcast is that Driscoll and many like him have capitalized on the perception...
“Unpaid Gestation” and the Abolition of the Family
Every day, 385,000 newborn babies enter the world. A fledgling group of theorists and writers is interested in reimagining how we think about these births and the children they produce. Using the provocative tagline “Abolish the Family,” this group of...
A Theology of Infertility
After years of secondary infertility, my wife and I discovered she was pregnant on Father’s Day of 2016. It was a stunning moment for us, a seemingly miraculous answer to prayers that we had mostly given up on. But three...
Eyes to See: On Disability, Spiritual Sight, and the Holy Spirit
When I was pregnant with my son David Samuel, born in the heat of last July, I wondered if I could make a sort of bargain with God. I knew David would be disabled, and I prayed either that God...
Resignations and Reunions: Industrialism’s Broken Promises
An epochal shift is underway; one that social scientists will dissect for decades. And it doesn’t bode well for corporate America. In what economists are calling ‘The Great Resignation’, one-third of the employed workforce—over 47 million laborers—quit their jobs in...
The Cost of Nurture
Christians and even some non-Christian philosophers regularly strive to ‘remember death,’ but few of us seem willing to remember our birth. Only a few paragraphs into Augustine’s Confessions, he recalls the grace of God given to him by his own...
The American Style in Traditionalist Parenting
Paula S. Fass. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. $19.95, 352 pp. Perhaps more than anything else, Paula S. Fass’s learned and engaging...
Suffer the Little Children
It is a hard thing not to love one’s children. It is not hard to resent them, to see them as miscreants or burdens, to think them selfish and base, to find their concupiscence by turns infuriating and repugnant. Neither...
A Legacy of Letters: Living and Dying Well in the Lives of My Great-Grandparents
A tiny Bella, wearing a striped sweater and a mostly toothless grin. My parents, glowingly happy with their new baby. My three great-grandparents, seemingly ageless.
Markets and the Strangulation of the American Family
Maxine Eichner was a lawyer with a new baby girl. At work, she felt pressured to keep up with the long work hours of her peers, but in her heart, she longed to be home with her baby. One day,...