From a Netscape article on the effects of divorce:

Kids of Divorced Parents: Unsettling News
Children whose parents are divorced may have the best intentions not to repeat the same painful mistakes in their own marriages, but the reality is that they face unfavorable odds. According to researchers from the University of Utah, if one spouse comes from divorced parents, the couple may be up to twice as likely to divorce. Spouses who are both children of divorced parents are three times more likely to divorce as couples who both come from intact families.
“Growing up in a divorced family greatly increases the chances of ending one’s own marriage, a phenomenon called the divorce cycle or the intergenerational transmission of divorce,” says Nicholas H. Wolfinger, assistant professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Family and Consumer Studies and author of “Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages.” Wolfinger’s research is based on the National Survey of Families and Households, which included detailed information on family background for 13,000 people, and the General Social Survey, which surveyed 20,000 people over a 30-year period.
After a decade of study, Wolfinger has reached the following conclusions about the children of divorced parents. They are more likely to:
–marry as teenagers.
–cohabitate.
–marry someone who is also a child of divorced parents.
–They are one-third less likely to marry if they are over 20.

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The following was provided in an e-mail from the Diocese of Ohio concerning opportunities to help with Katrina relief through the Episcopal Church.

I listened to an African American kid on NPR yesterday give an essay for Youth Radio about being spanked by his father. He hated being spanked, of course, but he said in hindsight he deserved it and it made him sure that his parents cared enough to do something “that hurt them more than it did me.” He said all we have to do is watch the kids in the mall to know the difference it makes. White parents with kids who are out of control are prime examples of parents who try to bargain with their kids and talk to them about not doing this or that, rather than disciplining them, which he said is what African American parents do with their unruly kids by spanking them. He and his friends would brag with each other about who go the worse “woppin’.”
I really don’t think this kind of story would have appeared on NPR just 10 years ago. Corporal punishment, after all, is nothing more than child abuse, or so conventional wisdom would have us believe. Of course, when conventional “wisdom” bears no resemblance to reality it will eventually be overturned, but not without a great conflict. Kids need boundaries and consistency that provide guidance. Kids also need to know that their parents are adults/parents and will go to whatever lengths necessary to guide the growth and development of their children in order to prepare them for the real world – and to protect them from the real world. Kids also need to learn that behavior has consequences – good and bad – and that they will be held responsible for their acts, with a good measure of mercy, grace, and forbearance thrown in for good measure.
We are seeing the final days of Modernism – or at least the “Age of Aquarius” generational zeitgeist. We all know that Modernism and the ideals coming out of the Enlightenment were shown to be unattainable and fundamentally flawed throughout the 20th century. Utopia born of humanity continually improving through education, yadda, yadda, yadda, is not the reality of the world as we live in it. It just isn’t. That is not to say that education, and all that, is not important or that such things do not help or contribute to the overall improvement of society.
We are also bearing the brunt of the misunderstanding of human nature and societal dynamics that propelled common thinking in academia, government, and the social sciences and services organizations from the 1950’s through the end of the 20th century. Common sense is coming back into vogue!
I have also heard and read more and more about the demise of current understandings of “diversity” and cultural relativism. We are seeing the resurgence of belief that we can make moral and social judgments about what is good, just, and better. Some cultures really are better and more advanced than others, not just “different.” It is okay to say to immigrants that they need to adapt to American culture and learn English as the national language (or the culture and language of any country) – a melting pot and not a mosaic.
The danger, of course, is that reactionary forces will attempt to pull society back into some kind of fantasy world of yesteryear. Hopefully, the pendulum will not swing too wildly.

This, from another Episcopalian blogger, Doghouse, commenting on conflict between those who hold to the Englightenment/Modernism and those who move in Post-Modernism. He writes about the need to come up with an alternative name for “Post-modernism,” but this paragraph caught my attention. I’ve been saying something similiar for a while now, but this guy says it much better than I do.
“It has been important to keep the term up until now to make it clear that the rationalistic assumptions of Modernity have been rejected. Despite impressive technological and medical advances, the utopian goals of the Enlightenment failed. The grand experiment where humanity shook off the fetters of religion and took up the reigns of existence only resulted in advanced bloodshed, world wars, the A bomb and now terrorism. What started with such loud promise at storming of the Bastille, finally died with a whimper two centuries later with the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Read the whole thing here.

When did hitting fists together become the prominent way of greeting between guys? I know subcultures have been doing it for a while now, but it is now mainstream.
I’ve also read two different articles about how American males are discovering another way of greeting – hugs!
So, fist hitting or hugging, which is it, and will it replace the good ole’ shaking of hands?

I went to SixFlags Great Adventure yesterday with Ashton and a close friend of his, Chris. Chris used to be a high-school teacher and taught in California, Boston, and Florida. He got so fed up with the attitudes and actions of both students and administrators that he left teaching.
One example he gave that caused him much frustration in one particular district concerned assigned daily duties for teachers outside the classroom. In this particular school, certain teachers were assigned the duty of breaking up sex between students during the school day. This was not a poor school, but a successful public school with a dress-code, etc. The school had security cameras that caught guys putting on condemns while the girls lifted up their skirts and the two would go at it in – in front of cameras. “Let’s skip class and go have sex!” Chris, seeing what was going on via the cameras, would then go and break up the activity. He was quick to add that this problem was not only in this particular school! He also said that at least they were wearing condoms. I guess so.
Sex, for so many, has simply become a recreation activity. It has lost is uniqueness and “specialness.” I remember hearing a marriage counselor saying once that sex was like a Band-Aid. The more you play with it by putting in on and pulling it off, the more it loses its stickiness and its effectiveness. The counselor talked about sex losing its ability to act as a bonding agent in marriage relationships, resulting in more loneliness, less intimacy, infidelity, adultery, and divorce.
I believe sex is one of many primary means by which relationships are held together. If it simply becomes recreational and something to play with – putting it on and pulling it off – we lose one very important aspect of successful married relationships. We are bearing the whirlwind of “free” and “non-consequential” “love.” It is a great confusion between love and lust. Sex as a recreational activity may be fun at the moment, but long term the consequences of havin’-all-this-fun is nothing less than failing and dysfunctional future relationships. I think that then leads to much more loneliness, isolation, and a profound lack of fulfilling and life-giving relationships.
I see this in many gay guys who have played with sex for so long that the confusion of sex, love, and lust has caused them to be unable to form long-term committed relationships, which results in extreme loneliness, heartache, and with some great illness. This isn’t something that is specific to being a homosexual, but is the result of the homosexual subculture accepting with great gusto the whole “free-love” notion. This is, of course, common among heterosexuals as well, but our cultural boundaries still said to hold off and value sex as something deeply shared only between two people who have committed themselves to one another for life. These boundaries seem to be in their final collapse among most young people, and I suspect will result in a profound increase within their populations of the same things we witness among those who have gone before them. Sex is a wonderful and enjoyable thing, but like anything used in ways it is not intended and then abused, it turns into something that destroys.

I moved to New York City 10 months after 9/11 and the City was still shaken. (I was actually here on 9/14 and a few days thereafter.) Every morning my train arrives at Penn Station in Manhattan and I walk through the station under Madison Square Garden and exit on 7th Ave. Walking through the station, I still have a hard time accepting the presence of all the soldiers with automatic rifles, gasmasks, body armor, and I’m not counting the NYC police, Amtrak police, Port Authority police, and security personnel.
Three years after arriving in NYC the city seems to be generally back to “normal” – economic activity, tourism, and the like – but the police and the army (and I’m sure other policing entities) are now randomly searching personal bags in the subways and stations. It isn’t like the airports, it’s just, “I need to check you bag!” as you’re walking to an exit or entering a station.
How can I believe we are winning the “War on Terror” when I look around me and it seems we are “progressing” towards a police-state. How can I believe that our foreign and domestic policies are making us safer? Seeing an every increasing police and military presence “protecting” us (and that isn’t meant to be pejorative) does not make me feel safer. It makes me feel as if the situation is only getting worse. Why else over the span of three years is the police and military presence so much more pronounced? Is this how we are to judge success?

This op-ed by Jim Wallis is reprinted from a recent edition of The New York Times.
The Message Thing
By JIM WALLIS
Since the 2004 election, there has been much soul-searching and hand-wringing, especially among Democrats, about how to “frame” political messages. The loss to George W. Bush was painful enough, but the Republicans’ post-election claims of mandate, and their triumphal promises to relegate the Democrats to permanent minority status, left political liberals in a state of panic.
So the minority party has been searching, some would say desperately, for the right “narrative”: the best story line, metaphors, even magic words to bring back electoral success. The operative term among Democratic politicians and strategists has become “framing.” How to tell the story has become more important than the story itself. And that could be a bigger mistake for the Democrats than the ones they made during the election.

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I have yet to see someone’s bags being searched in the subways or buses here in New York. Since anyone can refuse to be searched if they want to, this really is not much of a deterrent. If someone does not want their bag checked, they simply can refuse and they will be turned away from the transit point. If someone has a bomb in their backpack, all they have to do is go to another bus stop or subway station.
The searches are random. If someone planned to set off a bomb, they could easily see that police were searching bags and leave.
I really do think this is an example of civil liberties being sacrificed in the name of safety and security when the action being taken does not advance either one bit.

I am torn. Most of my life I have identified as a “conservative” (actually I have identified myself as a “progressive-conservative” – my word and it is not oxymoronic). I still have an affinity for Libertarianism, but not the free-drugs, etc, bunch. Anyway, it is very difficult for me to claim the label of “conservative” these days because of what these stupid culture wars have encouraged in those people who are the driving force of today’s “conservatism”. It has become accepted practice in politics and in the culture wars to have the end justifying all the means. At least in the past, there was a professed repudiation of this way of thinking, but no more. This is profoundly against my understanding of the interplay of the ends and means that should be employed by Christians.
I’ve been reading recently of the rise of conservatives in the liberal bastions of the media and academe in this country. It is impossible to be unaware of the conservative swing in this country since the early 1980’s. I do not believe that today’s conservatism as espoused by those in the forefront of the movement is a true conservatism. With the rise of the Religious Right, who most politicians seem beholden to or afraid to challenge, conservatism has become a movement with the intent to impose a very narrow and strict religious perspective upon the rest of the citizenry.
I cannot support this kind of conservatism.
I am torn because I’m glad to see conservatives gaining power and influence in once liberal dominated areas. I am torn because if the Religious Right’s brand of “conservatism” is the form making the inroads, then I cannot support the advance. My allies, however, do not become liberals. Moderates, yes. Conservatives who are not intent on imposing fundamentalist Christianity on the country, yes. Liberals that a little more to the right, yes.
There will be a reaction against the Religious Right once they gain enough power to truly begin imposing their agenda. Until that happens, and when it happens, there need to be people who can articulate a progressive-conservative or moderate message. Anybody? Anybody? There are some, I know. God bless ’em!