poverty

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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

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Media revelation: Two-parent homes are good for children. Religion questions, anyone?

The past two weeks have produced a boomlet in scholarly and journalistic revelations of facts that establish heavy disadvantages afflicting children not raised by two parents, who are more prevalent in the United States than any other nation.

This is a controversial topic and has all kinds of links to debates about religion, morality and culture.

Consider this from a lengthy New York Times op-ed Sept. 20, with this explosive headline: “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing.”

The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble. …

This article, by University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney, was based on her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” (University of Chicago Press). The Religion Guy has yet to read this book, which has won media praise as “important,” “compelling” and “a great service,” with a “top scholar” offering “reams of evidence.”

By coincidence, the same day the book was released, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and three Institute for Family Studies colleagues posted a piece (.pdf here) headlined “Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?” Their answer: Yes. It’s the latest such documentation from the Institute and the university’s National Marriage Project, which Wilcox directs. (Note: these social scientists are not saying spouses should remain in physically or emotionally dangerous marriages.)

These writings do not center on religious arguments or sources, but Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other clergy, and members of their congregations, will respond: “Duh!”


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An anguished 'nothing in particular' believer shakes up country music establishment

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An anguished 'nothing in particular' believer shakes up country music establishment

Oliver Anthony counted about 20 listeners when he performed earlier this summer at a produce market in coastal North Carolina.

That was before August 8, when radiowv posted his "Rich Men North Of Richmond" video on YouTube. More than 37 million views later, as of earlier this week, the unknown country singer from Farmville, Virginia, has become a culture-wars lightning rod.

When he returned to the Morris Farm Market, near Currituck, he faced the massive August 13 crowd and read from Psalm 37: "The wicked plot against the righteous and gnash their teeth at them; but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he knows their day is coming. The wicked draw the sword and bend the bow to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose ways are upright. But their swords will pierce their own hearts, and their bows will be broken."

Anthony then sang his NSFW (not safe for worship) hit about suicide, depression, hunger, drugs, politics, child sex trafficking and dead-end jobs.

"I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day / Overtime hours for bulls*** pay / So I can sit out here and waste my life away / Drag back home and drown my troubles away," he sang, with the crowd shouting along. The chorus began: "Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is / Livin' in the new world / With an old soul."

"Rich Men North Of Richmond" debuted at No. 1 in Billboard's Top 100, the first time ever for a new artist without a recording contract and mainstream radio support.

"The song was immediately politicized, even though there have always been country songs with singers lamenting the state of their lives and the state of America," said David Watson, a theologian and country-music fan. He is academic dean of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, near a Rust Belt poverty zone with historic ties to Appalachia.


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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

Conservative patriarch Edmund Burke died in 1797 in Beaconsfield, England.

This didn't prevent columnist Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, a Catholic conservative, from making Burke her write-in choice in the 2020 White House race. She wasn't the only voter who felt politically homeless, due to religious and moral convictions that clashed with the political and personal choices of President Donald Trump and, the odds appear good, president-elect Joe Biden.

Once again, there was no way to ignore issues linked to faith, morality and, yes, character. This was especially true with Catholic voters who frequent church pews.

Considering Trump, Noonan stressed the coronavirus crisis, where the president finally "met a problem he couldn't talk his way out of. I believe that's what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can't afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe."

What about the Democrat, a lifelong Catholic? Noonan predicted Biden would be a "hapless and reluctant conductor" on a "runaway train," especially on moral and cultural issues.

"The progressive left," she argued, "endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union.”

The bottom line: The political realities of 2020 left many Catholics and other active religious believers torn between political options that no longer seemed acceptable.


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Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

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Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

While fighting the coronavirus, medical professionals have offered a strategy now seen everywhere in America, Europe and other First World cultures.

Here's the battle plan: Stock up on food and other essentials and then stay home. Wear masks when in public and practice safe social distancing. Everyone should wash their hands frequently for 20 seconds using soap and hot water. People with fevers or other symptoms should go into quarantine.

There's more. City and state lockdowns are essential to "flatten the curve" of new cases. Governments encourage waves of coronavirus tests. Hospitals collect ventilators to save critically ill patients. Mass transit is discouraged. Scientists rush to create a vaccine and develop new treatments, such as transfusions of antibody-rich blood serum from recovered COVID-19 patients.

Now, imagine selling those plans to the million-plus people jammed into the Kibera shantytown near Nairobi, Kenya -- Africa's largest urban slum.

“Our solutions are primarily for those who can afford it," said Dr. Mike Soderling, organizer of the Health for All Nations network for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. "To whose advantage? … The big question: What are we going to do -- what can be done -- in the slums of Kibera?"

In America, news coverage of the crisis continues to be dominated by infection rates and death statistics, while politicos focus on the New York Stock Exchange and political polling about the 2020 elections. The lockdown-weary public celebrates any signs of normality witnessed in restaurants, big-box stores and sports stadiums.

Missionary doctors and activists active in Third World lands have a different point of view. Thus, 200 or more took part in a recent Lausanne webinar focusing on strategies for the COVID-19 battles they know will eventually reach the people they serve. Participants in this discussion kept asking painful questions, such as:

* How do slum-dwellers practice "universal hand-washing hygiene" without running water?

* Is it possible to practice respiratory hygiene in cultures in which masks are a stigma -- signs that individuals are carrying a life-threatening disease?


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The New York Times finds some acceptable Bible-quoting pastors. Guess their politics!

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I'll admit to some snark with the headline, but bear with me.

Despite the editorial caterwauling over any diminishing of the so-called "Johnson Amendment" barring political endorsements from the pulpit, a reporter at The New York Times editors have found a posse of Bible-quoting ministers they can "endorse" with a favorable news story. But you can quickly see which side of the political divide these preachers are on, and that's a journalistic problem.

"Ministers Look to Revive Martin Luther King’s 1968 Poverty Campaign," the headline reads, and it's the kind of feel-good story -- from one perspective, at least -- that newspapers like to report. Here, after all, are a group of clergypersons willing to risk arrest for public protests against a piece of economic legislation, in the nonviolent tradition of the late King.

Read this longish excerpt to get a flavor of the piece:

When 12 religious leaders in collars and vestments were arrested last week in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, they were reading Bible verses about caring for the poor, and doing it so loudly that their voices could be heard at the doors of senators’ office suites nine stories above.
It was to little avail: The Senate went ahead and passed a tax bill early on Saturday, promoted as relief for the middle class, that mainly benefits corporations and the rich — and that many economists say offers little or nothing for the poor.
The middle class and its discontents have occupied so much political and media attention lately that poverty has been crowded out. But some prominent religious leaders are gearing up for a campaign to try to put it back on the nation’s agenda in a way that it hasn’t been in decades.


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New podcast: Breaking bread, while listening for hints of Godtalk, in Waffle House America

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To put things in country-music terms, this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to listen to that) is about pain, sorrow, alcohol, divorce, blue-collar families, coffee, hard times, opioids and God.

Oh, and waffles.

If you don't live in Waffle House America, let me explain. We are talking about a chain -- in 25 states -- of old-school, Southern-style dinners that serve breakfast 24/7 and attract large numbers of workers and rural folks who don't work normal schedules.

If you want to laugh about the Waffle House world, you can listen to the country-fried tribute song by Stephen Colbert (a native of South Carolina) and alt-country star Sturgill Simpson, entitled, "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Knuckleheads."

But the podcast isn't really about laughter. It's about the complex issues that affect ministry to many hurting people in this slice of the American people.

My chat with host Todd Wilken focused on my "On Religion" column this week -- which is about a United Methodist pastor in Alabama who is doing some interesting things while trying the reach working-class people. His name is Pastor Gary Liederbach and he uses his local Waffle House as his unofficial office on weekday mornings.

This anecdote sets the tone:

One recent morning, Liederbach sat down at the diner’s middle bar, where the line of side-by-side chairs almost requires diners to chat with waitresses and each other. He didn’t see the empty coffee cup of a rough, 50-something regular whom, as a matter of pastoral discretion, he called “Chuck.”
When Chuck came back inside from smoking a cigarette, he lit into Liederbach with a loud F-bomb, blasting him for taking his seat.

 


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Trump, the Paris climate change accord and the accepted Kellerism that shaped the coverage

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Trump, the Paris climate change accord and the accepted Kellerism that shaped the coverage

Some of you undoubtedly will consider this post naive.

If that includes you, please take a moment to bust my bubble in the comments section below. Hopefully, you'll do that only after you read this post to its end.

Nonetheless, I think it's worth acknowledging an unspoken Kellerism, one I'm taking the liberty of labeling the Ultimate Kellerism.

(Kellerism is a GetReligion term referring to the newsroom attitude that a particular issue has been sufficiently settled -- to the satisfaction of a newsroom's leaders -- so as to negate the need for dissenting voices to receive fair and accurate coverage.)

Moreover, I believe it's worth pointing out now because of its behind-the-scenes role in the uproar over President Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change accord.

The Kellerism in question?

That would be the widely, if not near universally, shared human belief that the pursuit of ever more material wealth trumps -- sorry, but the word seems appropriate -- all other human motivations, and should be the prime determinate when making political calculations. This is a doctrine so universally accepted that it is guiding both the politicos and the journalists (on left and right) involved in this story.

Or, to put it another way, that jobs and personal finances are what people care about above all else. It's corollary is that this is so because material security is the quickest way to achieve the sense of inner security that is the deepest of human cravings, and perhaps the most difficult to satisfy. (More on this below.)


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Pope Francis in Kenya: AP gets some details, but misses the 'big idea,' in his message

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Pope Francis has been on the road, again, which means that it's time for more stories about the political implications of his sermons and off-the-cuff remarks to the flocks of people who gather to pray and worship with him.

This is business as usual, of course. Want to play along and see how this works in a typical Associated Press report?

OK, first we'll look at the many excellent details from one of the Kenya talks that made it into the AP report, which ran in The Washington Post with this headline: "Pope calls slum conditions in Nairobi an injustice."

As you read several chunks of the story, ask yourself this big-idea question: What does this pope believe is the ultimate cause of this injustice?

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Visiting one of Nairobi’s many shantytowns on Friday, Pope Francis denounced conditions slum-dwellers are forced to live in, saying access to safe water is a basic human right and that everyone should have dignified, adequate housing. ...
In remarks to the crowd, Francis insisted that everyone should have access to water, a basic sewage system, garbage collection, electricity as well as schools, hospitals and sport facilities.
“To deny a family water, under any bureaucratic pretext whatsoever, is a great injustice, especially when one profits from this need,” he said.

Now, I think it is fair to ask: Is safe water the "big idea" in this talk, or is the pope saying that safe water is a symptom of larger problems? Hold that thought, as we head back to the AP text:


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Paging Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The ghost that haunts many urban teens

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Two or three paragraphs into this riveting Wonkblog essay in The Washington Post I began having flashbacks, and not the good kind. 

The key thought: Where is the late, great Democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan when we really need him?

The headline opens the door and it's a very important door, if you care about social justice and the urban poor: "What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it." Here is the opening of the report, which has a Baltimore dateline for perfectly logical reasons:

BALTIMORE -- In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms.
They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders. Monica Jaundoo, whose parents never made it past the eighth grade. Danté Washington, a boy with a temper and a dad who drank too much. Ed Klein, who came from a poor white part of town where his mother sold cocaine.

They talked with the sociologists about teachers and report cards, about growing up to become rock stars or police officers. ... Later, as the children grew and dispersed, some falling out of the school system and others leaving the city behind, the conversations took place in McDonald’s, in public libraries, in living rooms or lock-ups. The children -- 790 of them, representative of the Baltimore public school system’s first-grade class in 1982 -- grew harder to track as the patterns among them became clearer.

What shaped these young and, quickly, troubled lives?


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