I Am an Etsy
on Nov 21, 2009Diane Koss makes plush monsters and sells them from Cutesy but not Cutesy on etsy.com. She asked our mutual friend Rob to tell her about some people he knew with a few facts about them.I am humbled and honored to be an etsy. I will try to live up to...

Slave to Parental Love
on Nov 20, 2009Regular reader Black Sea sent this wonderful response to one of my earlier posts. I thought it too good to leave in the Comments tail. This bit of pop trivia may interest you. I was this morning watching on Youtube the video of Bryan Ferry's 1985...

The System Works: Abstinence-Only Sex Education Doesn't Survive the Test of Reality
on Nov 19, 2009When welfare reform was passed in 1996, Pres. Clinton compromised to get conservative votes by including funding for abstinence-only sex education programs in schools. As Sarah Kliff shows in the October 27th Newsweek, abstinence-only programs have...

Marriage is Not a Luxury Good, But a Transformative Practice
on Nov 18, 2009Two of my fellow sociologists, Laurie Essig and Lynn Owens, offer an attack on marriage that is fairly typical of what they call "critical" sociology. They view marriage as a kind of magic that the privileged add to themselves. They conclude thatWhe...

Married Parents are Happier
on Nov 17, 2009There has been some back and forth about whether kids make parents happy or unhappy. A new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies says that kids make married parents happier. This makes sense to me. Marrying and raising a family together as a del...

Calvin at 500
on Nov 15, 2009This year is the semi-millennium of John Calvin's birth. My congregation has been celebrating with a three-week Sunday school session on Calvin and his legacy. Naturally, Presbyterians turn a birthday party into an opportunity for school.I got to t...

Chef's Animals
on Nov 14, 2009My mother sent me an email of "What chefs do when they are bored." They are really great. Here are just a couple.

Darwin's Evolutionary Context
on Nov 13, 2009Last night David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin gave a lecture at Centre. His book was read by all the first-year students. This is Darwin year for two reasons - the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publ...

"Fireproof" is a Decent Marriage Movie
on Nov 12, 2009"Fireproof" is about a couple on the brink of divorce working back to real love and respect for one another. It is explicitly evangelical and a little clunky. But its heart is in the right place. It gets Southern evangelical culture right (it is s...

On "Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers"
on Nov 11, 2009David Brooks has an interesting column on the way some people use cellphones and texting to create a fluid market in sexual hookups. The data come from New York magazine's sex diaries, submitted by readers. Brooks' main point is that in courtship in...