One of the students in my US history survey class this semester began his final family history essay by describing how close he feels to his extended family – and how close his relatives feel to him and to each...
Victoria E. Ott is James A. Wood Professor of American History and the coordinator of Gender and Women’s Studies at Birmingham-Southern College. This interview is based on her new book, The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in...
First, let me call your attention to Current contributing editor Daniel K. Williams‘s piece today at The Atlantic: “This Really is a Different Pro-Life Movement.” A taste: The enthusiastic embrace of the movement by white evangelicals in the Bible Belt...
Libra Hilde is Professor of History at San Jose State University. This interview is based on her new book, Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020)....
Court evangelical Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, recently tweeted: Is Trump really a president who values life? I assume that Perkins is referring to abortion here. But there is not a single baby in the womb who...
After the first night of the Democratic National Convention I tuned into Fox News. Laura Ingraham was on the air and, as might be expected, she was trashing the convention. I stopped watching after about forty minutes of analysis from...
The other day Joy (my wife) and Caroline (my youngest daughter) joked that my life has not changed a whole lot since all this social distancing and quarantining started. They are partly right. While I no longer go to campus...
The Trump Administration separated 1000s of immigrant children from their parents. If I am reading this article correctly, the administration does not know where these kids are located. They simply failed to write down where they sent them. It will...
I am always proud of my daughters, but I am especially excited for them this week. Caroline, a high school senior, is playing on Tuesday night in the Pennsylvania Intercollegiate Athletic Association (PIAA) state semifinal game in the hopes of...
From the “proud Dad” files: My daughter Allyson, a junior psychology and history major at Calvin College, has been writing (for money!) at a website called Listserve. Here is a taste of her piece “10 Wildest Filibusters in History“: The...
Over at The Anxious Bench, David Swartz of Asbury University argues that “family values” is a relatively knew idea in American evangelicalism. Here is a taste: “Turning hearts toward home”—a phrase Dr. James Dobson has repeated so often over the last four...
An oldie, but goody from the old Christian rock songbook. Pretty relevant today. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d1HCbyIg9o&w=560&h=315]...
Many of us know what this is like. From The New York Times: After Malia Obama went off to Harvard University last month, her father couldn’t hold back the tears. Barack Obama described that moment on Monday in a speech for...
I love this: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsQaB-GSvY4&w=560&h=315] A professor was Skyping with the BBC and his kids unexpectedly entered the room. Academics and others went nuts trying to deconstruct this. Some said this was an example of patriarchy. Others thought Professor Kelly’s...
Cultural critic George Scialabba revisits Christopher Lasch’s 1977 book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged and tries to rescue Lasch’s argument from the feminists who bashed the book when it first appeared. Sciaballa writes at The Baffler: It was not […]
Some conservatives are unhappy with the Pope today. They wish he would have said more about marriage and abortion in yesterday’s speech to Congress. Of course the Pope did allude to abortion with this line: “The Golden Rule also reminds us...
Frank Bruni Frank Bruni has been using his New York Times op-ed column to defend the institution of the family. Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic does not seem to like it one bit. In fact, he has even compared Bruni’s...
Jake and his daughters, Erin and Riley Yesterday my cousin Jake posted a letter to Twitter written by his 9-year old daughter Riley. Riley and her twin sister Erin are both hearing impaired (they wear hearing aids) and were thus […]
Here is part three of my continuing series on Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium.In sections 61-67 of Evangelii Gaudium, Francis addresses some major “cultural challenges” that Catholics, and I would add all people of Christian faith, must face. First, he goes after globalization. Francis...
Jim Daly A couple of weeks ago I was doing a public interview on religion and the American founding at an international conference on secularism at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. During the course of the conversation, Jacques Berlinerblau, the...
