Family

My friends talk a lot these days about how to spend more time with others in person. We sincerely wish we could be more present with the people we care about most. And we all acknowledge that our screens get in the way. We want to be personally attentive, but battle the incessant magnetism of our...

The hullabaloo concerning Harrison Butker’s (an NFL kicker of repute) defense of the glory of motherhood has caught my attention. In a single speech Butker has become the face of traditionalist home-and-family Christianity and a new punching bag for conscience-stricken progressives. Young...

I cannot recall how many times I met people who honestly told me that they did not want to have children because children would just interfere with their lives. They viewed children as a burden, rather than a blessing. In fact, a certain woman frankly told me that she was too selfish to have a...

Last week I noticed that Ryan Gosling was nominated for an Oscar for playing Ken alongside Margot Robbie’s Barbie in last summer’s hit by the same name. Robbie, incidentally, was not so nominated. I won’t watch the film, but I recall reading that the plot features a wayward Ken promoting patriarchy...

Perhaps there was a time when parents generally over-disciplined. Today too we must believe that “correcting [children] unduly” is a sin against the fifth commandment. [i] But the more common modern problem seems to be insufficient discipline. Couple our cultural moment of permissiveness with the...

Editor’s Note: Pregnancy care clinics in San Diego County—the author’s residence, have recently been under serious attack to be shut down. Please see the footnote below about today’s December 5 meeting with San Diego County Supervisors and how to influence them. [1] My wife and I had determined we...

I woke up this morning to David French’s New York Times Opinion article. [1] To be honest, it left a bad after taste. It wasn’t that everything he said was either wrong or inflammatory, it wasn’t. In fact, there were some interesting comparisons. For example, French insightfully suggests that the...

It had been a long, hot summer. The heat wave outside seemed to match the heat wave in my own heart of anger, chaos, disappointment, fear, grief, insecurity, loneliness, and physical pain. One night things seemed particularly bad. I was overwhelmed with the different needs of each of my four...

The much-loved hymn, ‘I greet thee who my sure Redeemer art’ – included in the Strasbourg Psalter of 1545 and attributed to John Calvin – contains the lines, Thou hast the true and perfect gentleness, No harshness hast Thou, and no bitterness These words have often drawn comment, or been quoted...

Carl publicly concedes that he’s no match for our special guest’s husband after losing their “mustard-colored trouser” Facebook contest a few years ago. That guest is Catherine Stewart, and she’s the editor of Surviving the Fishbowl: Letters to Pastor’s Kids. Catherine reveals what motivated her to...