THYME [click to read] just reported on TIME reporting on the Pew study's finding that more people are abandoning 'traditional marriage.' Further study might make them want to rethink it. As modern culture seeks to take apart and discard an institution that has served society for thousands of years, the evidence of the destructive fallout of such thinking is already mounting.
Fragile Urban Families [cick to read] by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal.
"Poverty is on the rise, according to census data, and now affects 14.3 percent of the population, up from 13.2 percent in 2008. A stumbling economy obviously explains the recent uptick. But those who think that poor urban families’ problems have an economic fix would do well to pick up the fall issue of The Future of Children, a journal jointly published by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Brookings Institution (I sit on its advisory board). The articles in the issue are based on findings from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which has followed 5,000 children and their urban, primarily minority, parents since the kids were born in the late 1990s. The FFCWS now constitutes the most extensive, long-term database on the family lives of the urban poor we’ve ever had, and the dismal picture that it paints of low-income, unmarried couples and their children has nothing to do with the Great Recession." -- Kay S. Hymowitz
Solidarity Forever [click to read] by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.
"In these dark times, any sign of social progress is welcome. By social progress we mean, of course, equality between the races and sexes, or—as we must now call them—the genders. The good news comes from Lyon, the second or third city of France, where last month a group of youths, generously outraged by the prospect that their elders and betters will not now be able to retire at 60, but will have to work until they’re 62, decided to throw stones through storefront windows and overturn parked cars as a gesture of intergenerational solidarity. Who says that youth are inconstant? They did it three nights running." -- Theodore Dalrymple
Roman amphitheatre and ruins in Lyon...
...and Santiago Calatrava's futuristic TGV train station next to Lyon's Saint Exupéry Airport. Photos by Bob Kirchman.
Last night I visited STRIVE, a ministry to [and by] young adults in our community. Mark, a local youth Pastor talked about Servant Leadership. It was obvious that this young man was an example of such thinking in his own life and he exhorted those listening to learn to lead by learning to serve.
Outside of the military it is rare to hear young adults being given such a message in our modern culture. Mark spoke of the joy in deferring personal gratification for greater gain. His simple talk, free of theological jargon, covered so many points that I cannot do it justice in the telling. More importantly, we all were listening.
We need to be cultivating the next generation of leaders, praying earnestly that G-d would raise up a new generation of D. L. Moodys and George Müllers. It is comforting to think that I shook hands with one last night!
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