One book I found helpful in complicating narratives was Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. He pointed out early on that modern ethical debates are often fruitless because each interlocutor is proceding from entirely disparate premises and ethical frameworks that are untethered to the traditions that formed them. Women who are pro-choice are not "anti-life" in the sense that they are not primarily arguing about whether the child in the womb is a person or not-yet-a-person. Their concerns are more related to the strong sense that child-bearing can be very difficult and can be surrounded by a lot of injustice, especially in the worst kinds of cases that they don't feel equipped to be able to restrict blanketly. Pro-choice and pro-abortion are actually different things procedding from different primary committments. MacIntyre traces this same divide in a few other modern debates, and I think it holds true. We are often talking past each other because we haven't agreed on the premise or even how we are using language, and it isn't because one side is "evil," but because we haven't made the attempt to understand what they are actually arguing for and why.
That's in fact, the tragedy of modernity. It's like the curse of Babylon. We speak entirely different languages. When Leftists use the words "person", "human being", "dignity", "man/male", "woman/female", "killing", "sex", "baby", etc... they are speaking of entirely different things than I do when I use the same words. There can't never be a common ground if there can't be a shared language. I don't know if they are evil, but their language is for sure so.
I love how you connect it to Babylon. That's exactly right, and it's made more perniscious because the words sound the same. I was thinking about this recently when reading Hildegard von Bingen's Physica where she describes different medieval medical remedies, but I keep wondering whether she is describing the same thing I picture when she references different plants. So many of the plants we regularly consume have changed a lot over the centuries due to selective breeding and genetic modification, so when she says that kale and cabbage are injurious, I cannot be sure she is talking about the kale that many of my generation consume in large quantity or some less-edible ancestor of those plants. To understand what she is saying, I will need to understand what exactly she is referring to, not just the image that her words conjure in my own imagination. This issue arises in every attempt to translate an ancient text into our modern language and culture, but I think it is especially cogent when thinking about words which describe actual physical objects. It makes it easier to understand how we could be at cross-purposes regarding words that relate to abstracted ideas, which drift far easier than real things like cabbage.
“Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?” 👏👏👏
Mic drop aside… This was an incisive but charitable review for WoF, characteristic of your mission to find common ground and fruitful dialogue. Thank you for writing it!
Love all of this. At my alma mater, Hendrix College, I would have loved to hear from professors about academia and family life. My husband is a professor of Economics and we’re so lucky he has so much time off to spend with the kids, but as NTT faculty he has less pressure from above on his time. He didn’t choose teaching track for that reason exactly, but it contributed.
We also had excellent pre-ministry programs and I did more learning and discerning in those 4 years of Religious Life on campus than I did in seminary… I’m a pastor, and I would have loved these types on conversations around ministry, too. I know no other clergy in their 20s with 3 children, definitely not clergywomen. Why are we all delaying until after ordination or after XYZ milestone in ministry? Is there an unspoken rule about the sorts of appointments we’ll receive from the Bishop or how we’ll be perceived by our colleagues or congregations? I would have loved to hear from a variety of speakers with different family structures share about the intersection of professional ministry (lay or ordained, make or female) and family. What different kinds of ministry would look like with a family (Associate at a large church, Senior at a small church, hospital chaplaincy, etc). I turned down two “fancy” ministry career positions to instead stay home with my girls more often and take a less “fancy” halftime post—those decisions were so lonely, even though they were right. I would have loved to have an institution to call up and hear from other parents making similar choices, for prayer, support, friendship and strategizing.
I love your idea to open a Marriage Prep office on campuses. While I studied journalism, professors always brought it professionals from the field to discuss the job. But even then I noticed we never discussed the more important complement to job: family life. I would awkwardly ask these professionals about their family hopes and dreams. But it's wild to me that it was never discussed. Ten years later, I am figuring out how to navigate my career and my dreams for my family life on my own. Praise God I was able to find a suitable spouse. But it definitely feels like I'm blindly leading myself through something that I'd hope others in the field would help lead me through. People in my industry tend to have an attitude that journalism comes first, and I more and more see how unhelpful and insidiously toxic that attitude is.
In my religious high school, there was a unit in one class on evidence-based family formation. Basically summarizing the sociological and psychological research available at the time and translating it into the teacher’s recommendations for best practices: how to ask a girl on a date, how to evaluate whether to say yes or no, how to break up, how long to date before progressing though various milestones, how to decide whether to get married, how to think about marriage and children.
It was very formative for me and though I did not follow all the recommendations exactly, they were always in the back of my mind as a benchmark for what to expect and how to do a relationship well.
And it sent the message that if a spouse and kids is something you might want eventually, you probably need to start thinking about that in high school or early in college. (Not that that’s when you need to get married, but that’s maybe when you need to go on a proper get-to-know-you date to practice the skill).
So I would love to see a lecture series hosted by the Marriage Office with similar content.
It would need to be presented in an authoritative way to help encourage shared norms/background expectations within the campus community (not “to each their own!”)
My most recent reading that really filled in a historical movement for me was Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol Du Bois. I picked it up because I really enjoyed Suffs, the musical that covers the last 5 years before the passage of the 19th amendment and I wanted to learn more about what from the musical was historical fact and what was creative license. I found it a helpful history of the suffrage movement in the United States and how it impacted and was impacted by other social movements of the time (abolition, temperance, etc) Here's my favorite thing that I learned from that book; the 14th Amendment establishes birthright citizenship, and the language is, "All persons born in the United States . . . are citizens." The 15th Amendment is commonly thought of as establishing the African American right to vote because it reads, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." After the passage of the 15th Amendment, supporters of women's suffrage argued, "If women are persons, and persons can be citizens based on birth, and citizens can vote, then women should be able to vote!" And the response was basically, "But women aren't "whole persons" and also that's not what we meant." Say it with me now; women are not defective men!
Honestly, any version of Cal Newport’s “lifestyle-centric career planning” philosophy would really benefit college students. Especially women, whose careers have a higher need for malleability. I remember absorbing a lot of messaging that emphasized career achievement and ambition, even at a university that was pretty family-positive (lots of faculty with large families or dual-professor couples). The personal side was rarely spoken about, even at conferences focused on family issues. Even though I had a strong desire for marriage and family, the practicalities of childcare, infant feeding logistics, etc. weren’t something that ever occurred to me to think through. Which sounds nuts looking back, but my own mother never talked about those considerations as she never had a career after college (it was still the 70s and pretty normal to quit work once you got married, let alone get pregnant).
Also, a basic seminar on health insurance/medical billing literacy and social services. For families, this is now just as important as how much money you make. My family didn’t have great insurance when I was growing up and as a result my parents tended to avoid dealing with medical stuff and anything related to money. My first baby was medically complicated and that was a great crash course on insurance issues. To the extent you can predict medical expenses, using insurance smartly and confidence in negotiating bills can make a small salary stretch much farther. This is also a big area where parents have to advocate for their children.
I love this post! I’m sitting in a Walmart parking lot getting ready to get a week’s worth of groceries for my family of six, so I’ll be thinking about a lot of this later, but I just want say two things: I just ordered Defenders of the Unborn, and I’m so excited to read it! And a book that complicates a narrative: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John Barry. Complicates the city on a hill, first Thanksgiving, Puritan founding, etc. , and tells, as usual, a much more interesting story.
If I ran a marriage office I would require all male participants to participate in volunteer caregiving, ideally at a childcare center. Caregiving is the ideal unpaid internship of for marriage prep world.
As a grandfather who looks after and delights in caregiving for my grandson I think this would be a very good idea. It is always good to have wide experience and to understand things from another perspective.
This is why I would also say that I would 'require' all female participants to take up courses or unpaid internships in more father centered roles such as home maintenance.
And while I'm at it I would also point out that this type of comment illustrates a common theme about feminisms in general, which is a 'demand' that men should spend more time doing things for and trying to understand women but puts no reciprocal requirement on women to do the same for men. It's all rights (aka demands) and no responsibilities. These attitudes are so common place that I am almost convinced that this is an evolutionary trait intended to maintain a constant pressure on 'man'kind to step up.
Feminism is not only a contentious term it has become vacuous, a symbol, endlessly defined and redefined. I am very unconcerned with whether men or women call themselves feminist, because that is somewhat of a given---it is only really worthwhile to talk about what they even mean by the term, which is what we should be doing anyway.
One book I found helpful in complicating narratives was Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. He pointed out early on that modern ethical debates are often fruitless because each interlocutor is proceding from entirely disparate premises and ethical frameworks that are untethered to the traditions that formed them. Women who are pro-choice are not "anti-life" in the sense that they are not primarily arguing about whether the child in the womb is a person or not-yet-a-person. Their concerns are more related to the strong sense that child-bearing can be very difficult and can be surrounded by a lot of injustice, especially in the worst kinds of cases that they don't feel equipped to be able to restrict blanketly. Pro-choice and pro-abortion are actually different things procedding from different primary committments. MacIntyre traces this same divide in a few other modern debates, and I think it holds true. We are often talking past each other because we haven't agreed on the premise or even how we are using language, and it isn't because one side is "evil," but because we haven't made the attempt to understand what they are actually arguing for and why.
That's in fact, the tragedy of modernity. It's like the curse of Babylon. We speak entirely different languages. When Leftists use the words "person", "human being", "dignity", "man/male", "woman/female", "killing", "sex", "baby", etc... they are speaking of entirely different things than I do when I use the same words. There can't never be a common ground if there can't be a shared language. I don't know if they are evil, but their language is for sure so.
I love how you connect it to Babylon. That's exactly right, and it's made more perniscious because the words sound the same. I was thinking about this recently when reading Hildegard von Bingen's Physica where she describes different medieval medical remedies, but I keep wondering whether she is describing the same thing I picture when she references different plants. So many of the plants we regularly consume have changed a lot over the centuries due to selective breeding and genetic modification, so when she says that kale and cabbage are injurious, I cannot be sure she is talking about the kale that many of my generation consume in large quantity or some less-edible ancestor of those plants. To understand what she is saying, I will need to understand what exactly she is referring to, not just the image that her words conjure in my own imagination. This issue arises in every attempt to translate an ancient text into our modern language and culture, but I think it is especially cogent when thinking about words which describe actual physical objects. It makes it easier to understand how we could be at cross-purposes regarding words that relate to abstracted ideas, which drift far easier than real things like cabbage.
Fascinating!
“Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?” 👏👏👏
Mic drop aside… This was an incisive but charitable review for WoF, characteristic of your mission to find common ground and fruitful dialogue. Thank you for writing it!
Love all of this. At my alma mater, Hendrix College, I would have loved to hear from professors about academia and family life. My husband is a professor of Economics and we’re so lucky he has so much time off to spend with the kids, but as NTT faculty he has less pressure from above on his time. He didn’t choose teaching track for that reason exactly, but it contributed.
We also had excellent pre-ministry programs and I did more learning and discerning in those 4 years of Religious Life on campus than I did in seminary… I’m a pastor, and I would have loved these types on conversations around ministry, too. I know no other clergy in their 20s with 3 children, definitely not clergywomen. Why are we all delaying until after ordination or after XYZ milestone in ministry? Is there an unspoken rule about the sorts of appointments we’ll receive from the Bishop or how we’ll be perceived by our colleagues or congregations? I would have loved to hear from a variety of speakers with different family structures share about the intersection of professional ministry (lay or ordained, make or female) and family. What different kinds of ministry would look like with a family (Associate at a large church, Senior at a small church, hospital chaplaincy, etc). I turned down two “fancy” ministry career positions to instead stay home with my girls more often and take a less “fancy” halftime post—those decisions were so lonely, even though they were right. I would have loved to have an institution to call up and hear from other parents making similar choices, for prayer, support, friendship and strategizing.
I love your idea to open a Marriage Prep office on campuses. While I studied journalism, professors always brought it professionals from the field to discuss the job. But even then I noticed we never discussed the more important complement to job: family life. I would awkwardly ask these professionals about their family hopes and dreams. But it's wild to me that it was never discussed. Ten years later, I am figuring out how to navigate my career and my dreams for my family life on my own. Praise God I was able to find a suitable spouse. But it definitely feels like I'm blindly leading myself through something that I'd hope others in the field would help lead me through. People in my industry tend to have an attitude that journalism comes first, and I more and more see how unhelpful and insidiously toxic that attitude is.
I would definitely have more social dances (with instruction) at my alma mater!
It worked out well for the IHP!
In my religious high school, there was a unit in one class on evidence-based family formation. Basically summarizing the sociological and psychological research available at the time and translating it into the teacher’s recommendations for best practices: how to ask a girl on a date, how to evaluate whether to say yes or no, how to break up, how long to date before progressing though various milestones, how to decide whether to get married, how to think about marriage and children.
It was very formative for me and though I did not follow all the recommendations exactly, they were always in the back of my mind as a benchmark for what to expect and how to do a relationship well.
And it sent the message that if a spouse and kids is something you might want eventually, you probably need to start thinking about that in high school or early in college. (Not that that’s when you need to get married, but that’s maybe when you need to go on a proper get-to-know-you date to practice the skill).
So I would love to see a lecture series hosted by the Marriage Office with similar content.
It would need to be presented in an authoritative way to help encourage shared norms/background expectations within the campus community (not “to each their own!”)
My most recent reading that really filled in a historical movement for me was Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol Du Bois. I picked it up because I really enjoyed Suffs, the musical that covers the last 5 years before the passage of the 19th amendment and I wanted to learn more about what from the musical was historical fact and what was creative license. I found it a helpful history of the suffrage movement in the United States and how it impacted and was impacted by other social movements of the time (abolition, temperance, etc) Here's my favorite thing that I learned from that book; the 14th Amendment establishes birthright citizenship, and the language is, "All persons born in the United States . . . are citizens." The 15th Amendment is commonly thought of as establishing the African American right to vote because it reads, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." After the passage of the 15th Amendment, supporters of women's suffrage argued, "If women are persons, and persons can be citizens based on birth, and citizens can vote, then women should be able to vote!" And the response was basically, "But women aren't "whole persons" and also that's not what we meant." Say it with me now; women are not defective men!
Honestly, any version of Cal Newport’s “lifestyle-centric career planning” philosophy would really benefit college students. Especially women, whose careers have a higher need for malleability. I remember absorbing a lot of messaging that emphasized career achievement and ambition, even at a university that was pretty family-positive (lots of faculty with large families or dual-professor couples). The personal side was rarely spoken about, even at conferences focused on family issues. Even though I had a strong desire for marriage and family, the practicalities of childcare, infant feeding logistics, etc. weren’t something that ever occurred to me to think through. Which sounds nuts looking back, but my own mother never talked about those considerations as she never had a career after college (it was still the 70s and pretty normal to quit work once you got married, let alone get pregnant).
Also, a basic seminar on health insurance/medical billing literacy and social services. For families, this is now just as important as how much money you make. My family didn’t have great insurance when I was growing up and as a result my parents tended to avoid dealing with medical stuff and anything related to money. My first baby was medically complicated and that was a great crash course on insurance issues. To the extent you can predict medical expenses, using insurance smartly and confidence in negotiating bills can make a small salary stretch much farther. This is also a big area where parents have to advocate for their children.
This book is spectacular on pushing back on medical bills and saved me $2000: https://amzn.to/4rpSG1f
I love this post! I’m sitting in a Walmart parking lot getting ready to get a week’s worth of groceries for my family of six, so I’ll be thinking about a lot of this later, but I just want say two things: I just ordered Defenders of the Unborn, and I’m so excited to read it! And a book that complicates a narrative: Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John Barry. Complicates the city on a hill, first Thanksgiving, Puritan founding, etc. , and tells, as usual, a much more interesting story.
Some Jewish schools have affiliated matchmakers and/or dating/marriage counselors.
If I ran a marriage office I would require all male participants to participate in volunteer caregiving, ideally at a childcare center. Caregiving is the ideal unpaid internship of for marriage prep world.
EXCELLENT
As a grandfather who looks after and delights in caregiving for my grandson I think this would be a very good idea. It is always good to have wide experience and to understand things from another perspective.
This is why I would also say that I would 'require' all female participants to take up courses or unpaid internships in more father centered roles such as home maintenance.
And while I'm at it I would also point out that this type of comment illustrates a common theme about feminisms in general, which is a 'demand' that men should spend more time doing things for and trying to understand women but puts no reciprocal requirement on women to do the same for men. It's all rights (aka demands) and no responsibilities. These attitudes are so common place that I am almost convinced that this is an evolutionary trait intended to maintain a constant pressure on 'man'kind to step up.
Feminism is not only a contentious term it has become vacuous, a symbol, endlessly defined and redefined. I am very unconcerned with whether men or women call themselves feminist, because that is somewhat of a given---it is only really worthwhile to talk about what they even mean by the term, which is what we should be doing anyway.
The Blind Watchmaker is one of the funniest humor books ever written. I had really a good time reading it.