Eliminating Suffering or Eliminating People?

Imagine sitting in a doctor's office and receiving this news:

Good morning, Mrs. Santos. I have the results of the screening test you had last week, 12 weeks into your pregnancy. The test indicates a high likelihood that your baby will be a typically developing child, and I want to make sure you understand the implications of this diagnosis. Typically developing children are at risk for a number of physical, emotional, and mental complications throughout their lives.

Although the risks are many, I will mention a few of the most prevalent. Your child has a 30 percent risk of obesity, an 8 percent risk of diabetes, and a 10 percent risk of clinical depression. Each of these factors can result in premature death. One in 166 children in the United States develops autism, and one in 500 dies within the first few months of life from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

In addition to the potential physical and mental problems, I want to make sure you've considered the financial costs associated with a typically developing child. Do you think you can afford to raise this child, given the current economic environment, rising health care costs, and the rising cost of higher education?

The decision regarding this pregnancy is entirely up to you. I just want to make sure you have the information you deserve, based on the test results.

Advances in technology are offering women more information about their pregnancy than ever before. Marilynn Marchione, of the Associated Press, reported last week on the increased use of genetic screening to “curb genetic diseases.” Those she interviewed see genetic screening as positive, a means to ensure that “some of mankind’s most devastating inherited diseases” will continue to decline.

Medical information can be useful in making decisions about trying to conceive children biologically, and even about how best to care for children once they are born. But when it comes to genetic screening, using medical information to eliminate disease often means using such information to eliminate life.

Genetic screening is available at three different points during pregnancy. First, before conception, a couple who is considering having children can be genetically screened to understand the risk of passing along diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s, and a variety of lesser-known conditions. But knowing that you are a carrier does not guarantee that your child will inherit the disease. In the case of cystic fibrosis, for instance, even if both parents are carriers, there is a 25 percent chance that their child will inherit the disease.

So if a couple knows they are carriers, wants to have biological children, and wants to ensure the children do not inherit the disease, a second round of screening is possible. Here, a couple can create an embryo or multiple embryos and screen them for disease. As Marchione reports, “a growing number [of couples] are screening embryos and using only those without problem genes."

Finally, prenatal testing is available once an embryo becomes a fetus. These tests typically identify chromosomal abnormalities such as Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome, the most common chromosomal abnormality), Trisomy 18, and Trisomy 13, among other disorders. At this point, a screening test may lead to genetic counseling, in which case a counselor will advise the parents about the medical risks their child may face throughout life. An amniocentesis can provide a definitive diagnosis in 99 percent of these cases, and based on that diagnosis, women have the choice to terminate, or proceed with, the pregnancy.

No parent wants a child to suffer. Screening tests at every level help humans to eliminate genetic disease and, therefore, human suffering. And yet Christians have good reason to be concerned about the use of these tests, and to advocate for the protection of human life, however it is given to us.

Screening tests offer general medical information. But a general medical summary never describes a particular person. And if it did, it could never provide holistic information about that person. Even the hypothetical typical child at the beginning of this article faces great risks of suffering and hardship in life. But to reduce any person — be they typically developing, or those with disease or disability — to a medical diagnosis is to treat them as less than human. We are more than a medical description.

Our daughter has Down syndrome. Studies show that 80-90 percent of women whose child receives a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate their pregnancy. (Many women, myself included, opt out of a prenatal diagnosis, so that statistic doesn’t indicate that 80-90 percent of babies with Down syndrome are aborted.) The abortion rate demonstrates a pervasive belief in our culture that a child with Down syndrome is undesirable. Statistics are not as easy to come by for the genetic diseases discussed in this article, but the number of births of babies with genetic diseases has dropped since genetic screening became available, presumably due to a higher rate of pre-implantation genetic screening and the subsequent rejection of diseased embryos (and even embryos who have the possibility of developing the disease) and/or abortions.

I’ve read about other moms who say they are concerned about the decreasing number of individuals with Down syndrome in our culture because they worry that their children won’t have friends and social and medical support. That’s not what worries me. What worries me is that having fewer individuals with Down syndrome in this world will harm the rest of us.

I worry about the impoverishment of our culture as we insist more and more on conformity to a biological norm, and perhaps more particularly, in the case of Down syndrome, to a norm that is related to IQ. In the case of genetic screening, I worry that we will reduce individuals to a medical diagnosis, and that we will begin to value humans based on physical health rather than on their reflecting the imago Dei. I worry that we will begin to believe that life is something we ought to control instead of a free gift from God. I worry that we will assume suffering makes life not worth living, rather than seeking to care for one another, seeking out God’s care on behalf of one another, in times of suffering.

I can say with confidence that our daughter Penny has been a great gift to me, to our family, and to our community. We would be missing out on the richness and fullness of life if she were not our daughter. Genetic screening offers possibilities for potential parents to make careful decisions about conceiving biological children. But when it is used to eliminate human life, genetic screening eliminates not just an embryo or a fetus. It eliminates a piece of our common humanity, and it impoverishes us all.

Amy Julia Becker is a writer, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, wife to Peter, and mother to Penny and William. She blogs at Thin Places.

Why Boys Are Failing in the Classroom

True or false: Our educational system gives boys an academic advantage.

Answer: A resounding yes, when Leave It To Beaver was the TV ratings champ. But Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons From An Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind (Amacon Publishing, 2010), makes a compelling, well-documented case that the opposite is now true. According to Whitmire, male students have been at a disadvantage for at least a generation, and the academic gender gap is widening.

Whitmire, a former editorial writer for USA Today, marshaled an impressive amount of research to support the thesis of his book: “The world has gotten more verbal, boys haven’t." He insists that instructional trends ranging from whole language reading instruction (emphasizing the recognition of words in context versus the decoding skills employed in phonics training) to math education that focuses on analyzing and solving word problems play to girls’ strengths.

The grim stats cut like a machete through every demographic: urban, rural, wealthy, and underserved boys alike are lagging behind their female peers. Whether it is an abnormally high percentage of elementary-age boys labeled "behavior problems," or the 60/40 percent female-male imbalance as the status quo on many college campuses, the female academic advantage has been a game-changer for an entire generation of children, says Whitmire.

“. . . I bought into the reports that schools were treating girls unfairly, shunting them aside in favor of aggressive boys thrusting their arms in the air to answer teachers’ questions . . . by hindsight, we now know that research was flawed. I was wrong to write those stories.” Why Boys Fail is more than Whitmire's mea culpa, however. It profiles promising pilot programs and suggests solutions ranging from big-picture federal studies to micro-level classroom teachers committed to providing boy-friendly books and (even) graphic novels as reading material for male students.

Will a systemic intervention mean that female students have to lose the ground they have gained? Whitmire says no: “Reaching out to help young men will in the long run help women as well. Anyone who doubts that needs to sit down and have a chat with Oprah about the damage the looming gender gaps have inflicted on the African American community. If national feminist groups change their position, so will the two national teachers unions.”

However, those higher-ups may prove to be the most resistant to Whitmire's conclusions. Many have bought into the “boys have the academic advantages” paradigm, and have shaped education to fit it. Whitmire, the father of two daughters, believes that both boys and girls can succeed — but not without intentional construction of a new, inclusive paradigm that affirms (celebrates, even!) gender differences.

I read Why Boys Fail with interest. My husband and I home-schooled our daughter and two sons, all of whom are now young adults. Our kitchen became a classroom when our school district jumped on the whole language bandwagon in the late 1980s. Though gender bias had nothing to do with our decision at the time, the research presented in Whitmire’s book validated what I observed in my own home. I learned early on that I needed to tailor both the material and my approach so that it would connect with each of my kids. Their gender differences played a role in that tailoring process.

Whitmire’s ideas are provocative, to be sure, and some educators will dismiss the book as a call to return to an era where Dick, Jane, Spot and Puff taught children to read, and boys enjoyed unfair academic advantages. This misses the point of Why Boys Fail, which is a well-written invitation to begin a new and necessary conversation about creating an academic environment that is fundamentally just, in order to ensure that no child, male or female, gets left behind.

Michelle Van Loon is the author of two books on the parables of Jesus, and blogs at TheParableLife.blogspot.com. A shorter review of this book can be found at Englewood Review of Books.

Pregnant Olympians Are Not 'Selfish'

Last Friday a friend forwarded me a link to an article titled “Are Pregnant Athletes Selfish?” She guessed correctly that I might have something to say about it. It took one glance at the big black letters of the headline for my hackles to rise. The subtitle, “Olympic curler Kristie Moore is five months pregnant. Is this okay? Our OB/GYN reacts,” didn’t help calm me down.

Before I could get to the doctor’s reaction, my mind fumed over the fallout if indeed this doctor deemed curling too dangerous for a pregnant woman. Among other things, I'd have to guess a good chunk of the world’s pregnant women have little if no choice but to haul heavy things while shuffling over ice. It’s called “life” for pregnant women in winter.

As it turned it, I had no reason to fume. The doctor affirmed the same thing my OB told me throughout pregnancy. In considering whether or not in fact is was “okay” for Canadian Kristie Moore, who is 51/2 months pregnant and due May 27, to curl — and possibly become the first pregnant woman to win a gold medal — she wrote, “Olympic athletes are presumably some of the most fit people on the planet, so it's absurd to think that curling when you're five months along would do anything but benefit mother and baby. A happy, fit, endorphin-filled mom is a great place for a baby to grow!”

So, that settles that, right? We can watch Moore and her darling baby bump compete with ease, even excitement? And then we can all move on. Or, am I the only who’s still bugged by the initial question, especially since it headlined at a presumably “pro-woman” site?

I know I may be knee-jerking here, but I’m so tired of the “selfish” dart that gets flung at pregnant women and moms when they are doing the things they love. And no, I do not mean activities like smoking while pregnant or drinking while driving with kids in the back.

I mean the "selfishness" of doing the things we’re called to do that are healthy in body, mind, and spirit, but that may not align with certain cultural ideals. Like competing in the Olympics while some might prefer pregnant women to sit tidy at home, nesting or something.

I have been called selfish as a mom for everything from working for a paycheck to worrying about identity (which I wrote about, in a book, for a paycheck). But the selfish dart-throwing started when I was pregnant with my first son, when I continued to volunteer as a dog walker at the local humane society. Up and down hills. Over snow. Over mud. All the while with a dog tugging at the end of the lead.

Was I selfish? I don’t think so, but I was asked that all the time. I loved walking those animals. I was good at it. I consider homeless animals to be among the “least of these” that Jesus speaks of, and felt called to do it.

Knowing this certainly helped shape my answers to the questions I was bombarded with: “What if a dog jumps on your stomach?” “What if you fall?” “What if a dog bites you?” What if. What if. What if.

Yes, what if — for any of us? I’m not saying we should disregard danger, especially as it pertains to children. Like most other mothers, I not only want to safeguard my kids but also want to safeguard myself for my kids! But we often go to extremes. We become so consumed with safety that we often let it override our callings, or what God would have us do, as mothers or otherwise. And getting to a place where we can venture on, without fear, is the antithesis of selfishness. It’s living in fear, without trusting God, that often leads to a self-consumed life.

The selfish question is one we need to stop asking pregnant athletes or pastors or teachers or dog-walkers. Yes, we are all selfish, because we are all broken. But most of us mothers — with children in our arms or still in utero — love our kids enough to know what might harm them, and we scurry from that. But many of us also love ourselves and our God enough to know that life has risks — that using our gifts and following our callings have risks, too — and that perhaps the most dangerous place to parent from is one of fear.

Caryn Rivadeneira is the author of Mama’s Got a Fake I.D.: How to Reveal the Real You Behind All That Mom. She lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with her husband, three kids, and newly adopted pit bull. Visit her at CarynRivadeneira.com.

Gay Marriage Leads D.C. Archbishop to End Foster Care Program

The other shoe has dropped here in Washington, D.C., in a long conflict between the local Catholic diocese and the District of Columbia.

After warning for months that the District's pending same-sex marriage law — slated to go into effect March 2 — put its 80-year-old foster care program in jeopardy, the Archdiocese of Washington formally ended its program February 1.

It is the third Catholic diocese in the country to do so. The archdioceses of San Francisco and Boston stopped their adoption programs in 2006 after their respective states legalized gay marriage (California has since repealed its law) and made it clear that local Catholic Charities affiliates would have to work with homosexual couples.

The District's law would obligate all outside contractors working with the city to recognize gay couples by giving spousal benefits to such couples and allowing them to adopt available children. The Archdiocese of Washington refused to do this. Its Catholic Charities affiliate has turned over its caseload of 43 children with 35 foster families — along with 7 staff members — to Bethesda, Maryland-based National Center for Children and Families so as not to disrupt client care.

The foster care and adoption programs were among the 63 social service programs that the District paid Catholic Charities about $22.5 million to run. Of that amount, $2 million went to the foster care program. Because of the large amounts of money involved, it is highly unlikely that Catholic parishioners could raise enough funds to make up the difference.

When Donald Wuerl became the archbishop of Washington in 2006, many of us thought his main battle would be dealing with pro-choice Catholic politicians. Instead, his Rubicon has proved to be the D.C. marriage issue, a battle I am guessing he did not anticipate. He is now caught between the proverbial devil and the deep blue sea. The Vatican is adamant against allowing gay couples to adopt. As for the District, one of the most liberal areas in the country, it is not surprising that, with a Democrat in the White House, local gay activists began pushing for the right to legally marry.

When the D.C. city council passed a bill allowing gay marriage in fall 2009, the archdiocese served notice that the bill did not contain a meaningful religious exemption for contractors who believe marriage is solely between a man and a woman. A storm of invective ensued, mostly from politicians and activists who blamed Catholics for manipulating the political process. Two hundred local clergy, including the local Episcopal bishop, banned together to denounce the archdiocese. Most of the local media trashed Archbishop Wuerl for his stand.

Wuerl and his bishops fought back, insisting they were not abandoning the city's poor nor its children by threatening to pull out of its social service programs. They pointed out the city had changed the rules on the ground, making them ineligible for contracts, grants, and licenses for programs ranging from immigration services to foster care.

The outlook for religious organizations involved in charity work is not good. The Salvation Army lost $3.5 million in social service contracts with the city of San Francisco because it would not provide health benefits to gay employees' partners. The Boy Scouts are not allowed to meet in government-owned buildings because of its stance on gay Scout leaders. A spokesman for a D.C. Catholic Charities affiliate told me that coupled gays are employed among its 850-member work force, so that it's a matter of time — after March 2 — before someone threatens a lawsuit unless his or her gay partner gets health insurance. The juggernaut is here.

There is much strong sentiment on this issue. When I wrote a front-page piece on the issue last week, I got 57 comments off the bat, the majority of which criticized Catholics. An anonymous local Catholic blogger set out the issue quite clearly by saying that the question is not if, but when the archdiocese is going to end up in court over this.

Catholic dioceses around the country undoubtedly are watching what happens in Washington. The city council has rammed through the legislation — which it refused to put to popular vote — even though they knew this would tie up the more conservative religious groups. Meanwhile, most observers in D.C. agree that Archbishop Wuerl was left with no morally acceptable choice but to withdraw the foster care and adoption programs, which are on the front lines of this debate. Expect him to eventually pull out of the other $20.5 million worth of contracts as well.

Top 10 Posts of the Past 30 Days

(10) "China's Own Marriage Crisis," by Alicia Cohn // Comments: 6
Gender imbalance due to sex-specific abortions signals imminent crisis in the Chinese family.

(9) "Hookup Culture: Mostly a Myth," by Donna Freitas, guest blogger // Comments: 8
Last Sunday's NYT piece only perpetuates the idea that college students are hooking up frequently, and that if they aren’t, they should be.

(8) "Iris Robinson, Jesus Loves You More Than You Will Know," by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 2
Speaking grace and truth into Ireland's sex scandal involving a born-again Christian woman.

(7) "Is Self-Promotion Sinful?" by Marlena Graves, guest blogger // Comments: 15
A lesson in soul care from J. D. Salinger, who lived in seclusion for a half-century.

(6) "Women at Halftime: Where to Go Next?" by Julia Duin // Comments: 9
For many women, turning 50 means the best is yet to come.

(5) " 'I Lived Next Door to a Brothel'," by Davita Maharaj, guest blogger // Comments: 7
Guilt is a poor motivator for fighting slavery and sex trafficking. What my sister calls 'active hope' is much better.

(4) "Saved by Spanking," by Caryn Rivadeneira // Comments: 15
Reconsidering the controversial form of discipline in light of a new study — and timeless Scripture.

(3) "Dr. Grace Augustine: Avatar's Christian Character?" by Amy Julia Becker // Comments: 14
Well, Christian-ish, anyway. Na'vi spirituality seems to mix pantheistic and monotheistic beliefs.

(2) "When to Leave If You Can't Cleave," by Alicia Cohn // Comments: 20
Homebound adult children in Italy are called ‘big babies.’ But can staying at home be a mature choice?

(1) "Saving the Life of a Shaken Baby," by Christine A. Scheller // Comments: 10
Byron and Susan Mondoks' adoption of their granddaughter, abused by her birth father, unearths the meaning of love in action.

A New Frontier in Pro-Life Stem-Cell Research

A team of researchers at Georgia’s health science university, the Medical College of Georgia (MCG), announced last week that they are conducting a clinical trial using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood as a treatment for cerebral palsy. The trial will build on a successful series of past tests using adult stem cells in regenerative medicine.

“Evidence up to this point has been purely anecdotal,” said James Carroll, chief of pediatric neurology at the MCG and principal investigator on the study. “While a variety of cord blood stem-cell therapies have been used successfully for more than 20 years, this study is breaking new ground in advancing therapies for brain injury.”

MCG's is the first clinical trial using adult stem cells approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and comes on the heels of last month’s announcement of the first FDA-approved trial of embryonic stem-cell treatment. FDA approval generally means enough funding and prior research has accumulated to make a heavily regulated FDA review worthwhile.

While there’s not exactly a competition, scientifically speaking, between the two different approaches, the fact that the government now supports embryonic stem-cell research underscores the importance of ramping up research into other methods (like cord blood stem cells).

The study’s success means children ages 2 to 12 taking part in the trial will show improvement in neurological development and motor skills after three months. Due to previous, non-clinical trials, researchers expect that the results will provide evidence that treatment with cord blood stem cells can improve quality of life. "For the purposes of this study, we're not looking at stem cells as a possible cure, [but] rather whether stem cells can help change the course of these types of brain injuries in children," Carroll said.

If successful, the trial, which uses cord blood pre-stored by the parents of children included in the trial, could increase the opportunities to create larger cord blood “banks” that would make matching cells available to more people. Because stem cells taken from the donor have the highest transplant success rate, many parents now choose to “bank” their newborn’s cord blood immediately after birth, should a need arise later in life. However, a wider and more available public “bank” of donated cord blood would theoretically aid advancing research into this type of treatment and help families who cannot afford to reserve their own “bank” space (or who are not informed of the option). There are very few cord blood banks in the United States.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) encourages public cord-blood banking as “an invaluable service to those afflicted with leukemia and immune disorders.” It also notes that there are no risks to the mother or child (before or after birth) in donating cord blood, with its rich stem cell harvest: “[B]ecause the cord blood is collected after the baby is born and the umbilical cord is clamped and cut, it does not affect the baby or the birth experience.”

Ongoing research into cord blood could produce revelations into the miraculous design God put in place for each child forming in her mother’s womb. In response to news about such worthwhile developments in the science, you and I might take time to consider whether making such a donation could be a simple, personal way to support scientific research that affirms God’s great gift of life.

Why I'm Giving Up Counting Calories for Lent

As one of the 40 percent of Americans who makes New Year’s resolutions, in January I started going to a local gym three times a week. Wanting to stay active during Chicago’s long winter, I soon saw those lectures about the benefits of exercise from my dad — a former Marine with the health of a marathon runner — bear out. I felt energized and refreshed. I slept better. Stresses from the workday melted away as I jogged, stretched, and laughed out loud at Seinfeld reruns to boot. I found myself thanking God for making our bodies capable of tremendous strength and grace. Exercise became another facet of glorifying him.

For a while, at least.

Then the counting began. The gym is typical fare for Western-style health centers: an affordable private chain, it aims to make the gym experience personalized, pain-free, and highly measurable. For every step taken on the treadmill and every rotation on the elliptical, digitized numbers tell you how far, how long, how fast the pace and heartbeat, which body parts used, and, of course, how many calories gone.

For a Type A, task-oriented person like me, watching those burnt calories stack up felt like progress, like a sweaty checkmark of accomplishment. And it made me — who, medically speaking, does not need to lose weight and does not struggle with overeating — want to burn more calories each time, often with no “that’s enough” in sight. If the numbers ever stopped motivating, then copies of Shape, Women’s Health, and Self were readily available at the front desk to make sure I didn’t forget the goal.

Predictably, I began thinking in terms of caloric merits and demerits, as eating became a necessary (though, thankfully, usually enjoyable) activity that counteracted my gym achievements. Fixing brown rice and steamed vegetables for dinner was to keep on the straight and narrow; choosing the cupcake or brownie at a party was a failure of nerve and soul. The fitness-and-healthy-eating routine became a way to gauge my spiritual health — a way to congratulate myself for being a “good girl.”

The health-food and weight-loss industries know the power of adding morality into their often-contradictory messages, overwhelmingly aimed at women. Jean Kilbourne, who has written extensively on advertising’s effects on women, notes an ad in her book Can’t Buy My Love that epitomizes how we think in “good food / evil food” terms. It shows a chocolate sundae on one side of the page and a low-calorie shake on the other. The sundae is labeled “temptation,” while the shake is labeled “salvation.” Another ad, for lean pork, features the tag, “We lead you to temptation but deliver you from evil.”

Yet confusingly, advertisers also goad us on to indulge in guilty pleasures, to deal with stress, bad relationships, and loneliness by treating ourselves with delectable sins (the entire branding mechanism of Haagen Dazs and Dove Chocolates).

Michelle Lelwica, a religion professor at Concordia College in Minnesota, says this kind of advertising oils the wheels of what she has named “the religion of thinness.” In a post for Psychology Today, she writes, “. . . the promise of a ‘born-again’ body [is] part of a broader societal network of beliefs, myths, rituals, and moral codes that encourage us to find ‘salvation’ (i.e., happiness, health, and fulfillment) through the quest for a better (read: thinner) body. . . . [I]t has many of the features of traditional religion, even though it fails to deliver the salvation it promises and sadly shortchanges the spiritual needs to which it appeals.” This religion’s underlying creed — “I will be happier when I’m thinner” — is pervasive in the U.S., where eating disorders afflict 7 million women and 1 million men, and where, according to one study, 42 percent of 9- and 10-year-old girls say they are trying to lose weight.

How is a Christian to avoid the religion of thinness, the idol that says happiness is found not ultimately in God but in getting a small waist? You won’t find me downplaying the benefits of eating healthily, exercising routinely, and getting good sleep. Nor will you hear me saying that laziness, overeating, and gluttony (the latter being as much about self-indulgence and control as about too much food — you can indulge with rice crackers) are not sins. God loves and cares about our bodies, as he has made them temples of his Spirit and said he will raise them one day, just as he did Jesus’ body (1 Cor. 6:14-20).

But, as we enter the season of Lent, a time when Christians worldwide fast to remember their hunger for God, I find myself compelled to take up another spiritual discipline: forgoing calorie counting at the gym and dinner table. For me, the habit is a scrupulous way to establish that I’m a “good person” rather than someone in desperate need of the salvation that being thin can’t offer. And it often turns mealtime into a chore instead of an enjoyment and occasion for praise. Fasting, after all, is not about avoiding something bad; it is about giving up something good — and only for a time — in order to remember who made it good in the first place. Fasting prepares us for the marriage supper with the Lamb, which I take to mean an actual, embodied feast, not just a spiritual metaphor.

Here’s to hoping that by giving up the calorie count — and the religion of thinness that it so easily leads to — I regain a gratitude for bodies, food, and the God who blesses both.

Hookup Culture: Mostly a Myth

When I picked up the Style section of The New York Times last Sunday, I was excited to see the front-page feature, “The New Math on Campus,” a look at how the gender imbalance on college campuses (60 percent women, 40 percent men at some schools) is affecting the dating scene. I research, write, and lecture on sex, romance, and abstinence on college campuses, and especially on how these life experiences relate to students’ quest for meaning in general and spiritual and religious commitments in particular. The article quoted young women bemoaning the dearth of datable guys at UNC Chapel Hill, which they say means all the guys get to be players — at least for a while, living it up with any girl they want because the girls are desperate:

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.” Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

This kind of talk from women on campus is something I hear all the time during lecture visits to university campuses and in my research. So I wasn't surprised when reporter Alex Williams mentioned hookup culture. He turned to sociologist Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, for more information.

“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” [Bogle] wrote. “This results in more casual hookup encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hookup, women end up losing out.”

Yes, this is true; women do say this, and my research supports it. But there is another side to the story that we don’t hear often enough. It’s something many college men say when safely behind closed doors, about how they like hookup culture about as much as the women do — which is to say, they don’t like it one bit. They just feel pressured to say they do in public. While it’s socially acceptable for women to admit that hooking up is not for them, it’s generally considered social suicide for a man to say the same thing.

While I was reassured that Williams quoted a few guys on campus who said they didn’t simply want to take advantage of all the “bed-hopping” available, overall I worry that this front-and-center NYT piece about dating on campus is going to exacerbate what is likely mostly myth: that not only are college students hooking up all the time and loving it, but that at colleges where there is a greater gender imbalance, guys go even crazier with hookups so it’s even better for the guys, and girls just have to live with it and join in. My guess is that your average guy on campus is not interested in bed-hopping and would rather go on a nice date and find a long-term relationship. But articles like Williams’s help to perpetuate and even ratchet up the pressure to hook up all the time and pretend you are loving it, even if you are not.

Which brings me to my last and most important point, one I always make when I am talking about the topic: Hookup culture on college campuses is a culture of pretend.

People hook up, sure. And the chances that students at Catholic, private-secular, and public institutions will hook up at least once during college are high. (The chances are substantially lower at evangelical private colleges.) But the reason I talk about hookup culture as a culture of pretend is because students believe their peers hook up far more than they do, and the feeling that everyone is hooking up all the time and loving it is pervasive, even oppressive. What drives the pressure to hook up, to pretend you are hooking up if you are not, to say you like hooking up (even if you don’t, especially if you are a guy), is not so much the desire to be sexually intimate as the sense that everybody is doing it, and I need to do this too, because it’s part of what it means to be in college.

So take "The New Math” with a grain of salt. Hookup culture is everywhere, and its effects are dramatic on the college experience, but it is always more talk than action. It’s the effects of all the talk that we need to really address — getting a handle on that side of things will do more to transform hookup culture than anything else.

Donna Freitas is a visiting religion scholar at Boston University and author of Sex and the Soul. She wrote about one way to encourage abstinence among young people in the January 2010 issue of Christianity Today. She spoke with associate editor Katelyn Beaty about her research in August 2008. Her.meneutics contributor Lisa Graham McMinn reviewed Sex and the Soul in the same issue.

Female Olympians, Missing in Action

The dreams, the sacrifices, the glory, the pageantry, Bob Costas — I don’t care if the Winter Olympics are the “less fun cousin” of the Summer Games, for the next two weeks I intend to plant myself in front of the TV and watch as much of the action in Vancouver as possible, starting with tonight’s Opening Ceremonies.

In Olympic tradition, 216 athletes will march behind our flag tonight as members of the U.S. Olympic team — 123 men, 93 women. But, according to Olympic Women and the Media, a new book by University of Alberta professor Pirkko Markula, the women will have received only 5 percent of pre-Olympics media coverage, and will receive only 25.2 percent during the Games, despite composing half of the team. When those female Olympians do receive attention, Markula notes, it tends to be for their appearance rather than their skill.

Case in point: American skier Lindsey Vonn. She’s competing in her third Olympics at age 25, is the current world champion in the Downhill Super-G, and a two-time World Cup season overall champion. She’s considered America’s best hope for gold in Vancouver. But when Sports Illustrated featured her on the cover of their Olympic Preview issue last week, Lindsey Vonn, world-class athlete, became Lindsey Vonn, Olympic sex symbol.

On the cover, Vonn wears her Team USA uniform, standard gear, and what at least resembles standard tuck form for her sport. The cover ignited a controversy over the sexualization of female athletes, though perhaps unfairly, since it’s nearly identical to the 1992 Olympic Preview cover, which featured male skier A. J. Kitt. But then Vonn appeared again in this week’s issue: the annual Swimsuit issue. Vonn, along with three other female Olympians, wears a bikini in the snow to promote her Olympic bid.

Sports Illustrated features women on its cover 4 percent of the time. For a weekly magazine, that means about 2 out of every 52 issues. And with the Swimsuit issue accounting for one each year, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for acknowledging female athletes.

It’s a problem, certainly, that we can’t seem to talk about female athletes without talking about sex. Male athletes are certainly not exempt from this kind of objectification — think Tom Brady or Michael Phelps in GQ. It’s a problem that’s indicative of our culture’s tendency to glorify beauty and sex above all else. But it points to an important question: Is it even possible to admire athletes for their strength, grace, and mastery of their sport without inherently objectifying their bodies?

Athletes at peak condition can make their bodies perform feats that the rest of us can only dream of — flying through the air with feet attached to two strips of wood, landing a quadruple loop on top of frozen water, dunking a basketball over the heads of giants. This is why we watch: to marvel at the capability of the human body to push, and at times to defy, its own limits. When it comes to sports — as Shirl Hoffman points out in Christianity Today’s February cover story — we can all too easily make an idol of sports, and the athletes who excel at them, because they truly can amaze and inspire.

The tendency can be to reject any celebration of the physical as a distraction from what really matters. But God created our bodies as well as our hearts, and in those gold medal moments, athletic achievement can actually point us to God’s grandeur. We can watch a figure skater gracefully accelerate into a controlled spin and marvel at the awe of a God who created the human body with the ability to achieve such beauty here on earth. Its beauty points to something transcendent — to a perfect beauty, to God himself.

That’s what I’ll be watching for this Olympics. How about you?

Singing Praises in Port-au-Prince

I had known this day would come. My husband, a pre-med student, had been planning a month-long trip to northern Uganda for a social medicine course, and January 12 was his departure date. I thought that would leave me spending the month at baby showers, coffee dates with friends, and with time to catch up on old movies that he never likes to watch.

What I didn’t know was that a 7.0-magnitude earthquake was about to crush Haiti and send me packing in the middle of the night to catch a January 13 flight to Port-au-Prince. I waved goodbye to my husband as I headed to the airport, while he packed his bags to catch his flight to Uganda that afternoon.

For three weeks, I worked side-by-side with Haitians and Americans who had come to help with relief efforts. As a disaster communications officer with World Vision, my task was to assist journalists who had flown in from around the world, helping them tell the stories of Haiti’s survival. A previous deployment to Thailand during the Myanmar cyclone and work with World Vision in Ghana and Haiti in 2009 had prepared me for long days, sleepless nights, and the challenge of working in close quarters with colleagues for long stretches with little rest. Precious sleep was usually on a cot in a sleeping bag; other colleagues were on the floor or in tents on the lawn.

But what we were living with — or without — paled in comparison to the needs of Haitians we worked with every day. Nearly all were grieving the loss of friends and loved ones and struggling to find food and water for their families. They were fearful of a future quake and of a future unknown in a country fraught with political corruption and abject poverty.

I remember one young man, Patrick, whom I met soon after arriving in Port-au-Prince. He was living in an abandoned football field–turned–makeshift camp near World Vision’s office. The sun beat down on families as they crowded underneath tarps and bedsheets stretched out over their heads. As our team approached to find out how we could help, Patrick spoke to me.

“I lost everything,” he said. “My wife, my children, my family. Please help me.”

I realized then that, even if we could provide him with food and water, there was little we could do to help him heal from this grief.

And it wasn’t just the families outside our base who were suffering. Our staff had lived through the same terrifying 45 seconds; all, with God’s mercy, come out safely on the other side. But many were sleeping outside because they had lost their homes or were afraid to sleep inside. When I offered my cot to a colleague, she said, “I’d rather see the stars in the sky” than the four, concrete walls of her home.

The daily commute of World Vision’s local staff meant driving past rubble, surrounded by morbid reminders of disaster along the streets. “My friend died in that bank,” one staff member said. “I knew the owner of that store. We haven’t heard from him since the earthquake,” said another.

For the staff in Port-au-Prince, there is no escaping; the capital is their home. Death and destruction are now a part of their everyday conversations, much like I talk to friends about dinner plans or the weather.

Yet I saw in them a deep faith. At the end of a particularly busy day, I heard singing coming from one corner of our team’s compound. The familiar strains of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” wafted over the concrete wall and into the parking lot where I was standing.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see.
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.

What kind of mercies had they seen that morning? Fewer bodies on the street? One fewer child crying out for missing parents? A family finally “safe” under the shelter of a plastic tarp? I wondered how I might respond if the earthquake had hit my home here in Boston, and destroyed my town, killed my friends, and orphaned so many children.

I’ve been back from Haiti for a little over a week, and I haven’t figured out the right way to respond to the now-familiar question, “So, how was Haiti?”

Depressing? Overwhelming? Challenging? Sure. But could I claim the words of James and “consider it pure joy” to “face trials of many kinds” (1:2)? Our teammates had already led by example, praising the Lord through their songs, their prayers, and their daily work. They believed Isaiah’s words about the Lord bringing “a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (61:3). Now it was my turn to learn to exhibit the same kind of joy I had seen in my teammates the past three grueling weeks.

Laura Blank is a disaster communications officer with World Vision based in Boston.

Theologian Fleming Rutledge wrote for Her.meneutics about the question of theodicy in natural disasters in "Where Was God in the Earthquake?" The CT Liveblog has extensively covered relief efforts for and pastoral responses to the earthquake. Both Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, and Michele Bond, of the State Department, opined on the American Christians who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country last week.

Did You Consider Having an Abortion?

Everybody knows someone who considered having an abortion. It may be a friend, cousin, sister, aunt, or your own mother … and you may not even know about it.

Even if you didn’t watch the Super Bowl last Sunday, you probably heard about the pro-life ad funded by Focus on the Family that featured Pam Tebow talking about the birth of her son, Florida Gators quarterback Tim. In the weeks leading up to the grame, pro-choice groups such the National Organization for Women protested its airing, calling it divisive and the subject inappropriate for a sports event.

But CBS stuck by its decision, and after the ad aired, many wondered why the ad generated so much controversy. The ad never mentions abortion, and Tebow’s choice of life for her son is implicit. The ad offers viewers the chance to hear more of the Tebow story by visiting Focus on the Family's website, and according to the organization, that’s exactly what viewers did. A Focus on the Family spokesman told the Catholic News Agency that by Monday, 760,000 had watched the full-length version of the Tebow story at the website.

USA Today reports that the ad achieved its goal by generating “a torrent of new attention” for Focus on the Family, ranking the ad’s success on its consumer notice, viewership, and social media impact.

So now pro-life voices are beginning to wonder: Other than creating name recognition for Focus on the Family, what was the point of the ad?

According to Focus on the Family President Jim Daly (speaking before the ad aired), “The Super Bowl ad isn't meant as an aggressive attack on abortion. The message we're trying to go for is, Yes, there is a choice right now . . . and I think the better choice is life."

Duke University theologian Amy Laura Hall, speaking to the Chicago Tribune, questioned the idea of celebrating the “miracle baby” who, despite the odds, was born healthy and grew up to be a Heisman Trophy winner. According to Hall, “The basic gist is clear: Save your pregnancy, wager for life, and you too might win the grand prize of proud motherhood.”

Hall’s point is that parents of special-needs children should be encouraged, too. But she’s essentially making the same point as Joy Behar, who said on The View that Tebow could just as easily have turned out to be a racist or pedophile as a football star. Choosing life — the choice Pam Tebow made — is not gambling on the value of the child, it's realizing the child has value at all. For Christians, it’s not wagering for life, it’s believing God has plans to give you hope and a future far better than you could plan out for yourself (Jer. 29:11).

If only there could be a whole line of ads saying "I'm (insert name here), and I was almost aborted." Those children are out there, and whether they grew up to have special needs, a green thumb, an artistic eye, two left feet, or a muscular 6’3” physique, it is wonderful to hear about them. They should be celebrated, as Focus on the Family’s tagline suggests. Certainly, attaching a celebrity name to the celebration garners more media attention, but that is typical of our society, and focusing attention on the good reasons to not get an abortion — like the children who were allowed to grow up — seems like a good thing.

If we don’t talk about that huge percentage of our generation who came “this close” to being aborted, we are neglecting to point out that life is just as much a “choice” as abortion. And it’s a good one. Beyond that, though, it’s possible that we could be failing the women who think considering abortion, for whatever reason, means they’ve already made their choice, and there’s no going back.

How many women feel like they can't talk about the fact that abortion crossed their mind? I think we should hear more stories, more often, and more publically from the women who considered — but didn’t have — abortions, and the children who resulted from that choice.

Alicia Cohn previously interned at Christianity Today magazine. She has written for Her.meneutics about stem-cell research, Christmas, Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, Anne Graham Lotz, parental rights, journalists in North Korea, Juanita Bynum, the Breast Cancer Bible, and The Stoning of Soraya M.

Botox: A Threat to Our National Security

One of my favorite Bible passages is from Psalm 34. Verses 4 and 5 read: "I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed" (ESV).

I have seen that kind of radiant beauty on those whose hearts are contented in God, who are eager to proclaim all of his blessings and mercies upon their lives. I firmly believe that is the most attractive beauty there is, because it edifies and builds up others. Yet I also know the strong pull of the cosmetic and cosmeceutical industries and the promises they make to stall or turn back the ravages of time. So I write this post with a bit of ambivalence, knowing the money I spend at various salons.

That said, I have never been Botoxed. My dermatologist did inform me a few years ago that it was time to start, because it would keep my fine lines from becoming deep wrinkles. I frowned (deepening those lines) and shook my head. There was no way I was going to stick a neurotoxin in my face, I announced. I was sure that in 20 years, we'd discover why that was a bad idea. She looked at me placidly and said, "I hope not, because I have a face full of it." Maybe she was looking at me in wide-eyed horror, but I couldn't tell.

Likely it won't take 20 years. We are now discovering a new problem associated with the Botox craze: an increased risk of terrorism. The Washington Post recently ran an article about how officials fear that the toxic ingredient in Botox could become a terrorist tool:

In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more — "as many as you want," he told buyers — from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.

Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.

No Chechen factory has been found, but a search for the maker of the highly lethal toxin in Rakhman's vials continues across a widening swath of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. U.S. officials and security experts say they know the lab exists, and probably dozens of other such labs, judging from the surging black market for the drug.

Al Qaeda is known to have sought botulinum toxin. The Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization, and other groups have bought and sold counterfeit drugs to raise cash. Now, with the emergence of a global black market for fake Botox, terrorism experts see an opportunity for a deadly convergence. "It is the only profit-making venture for terrorists that can also potentially yield a weapon of mass destruction," said Kenneth Coleman, a physician and biodefense expert.

That last quote is important. I recognize that criminal elements can run scams on most anything to finances their ventures. In some ways, we can't take responsibility for what they choose to contort. But in an age of responsible consumerism, we also cannot ignore what kind of markets our consumption creates.

This article contains sobering news. I don't offer it to shame women who have had Botox treatments, nor to add one more temptation to those who are prone to fear. I offer it because I had never heard about this potential link to terrorism. And I believe that having this kind of information helps us to consider our actions and motives from a broader perspective. It challenges us to rethink what is packaged as normal and acceptable.

We live in an age that sells us a lie: that somehow or another we can get around the aging process. But we can't. Not in our own strength. Sickness, aging, and death are a consequence of our own sinfulness. They are inevitable consequences, but they are not irrevocable. Because there is One who paid the penalty for our sin and gave us his righteousness in exchange, this is not the end of the story. Jesus triumphed over death! His sinless life and substitutionary death on the cross for our sins has averted the Father's righteous wrath for all of our wrongs. Through this divine rescue, we can repent and receive Jesus' gracious gift of forgiveness, reconciliation with God, and life everlasting. And added to those amazing gifts is a new, glorified, and ageless body.

Carolyn McCulley is the author of Radical Womanhood and blogs at SoloFemininity.blogs.com. She has written on Half the Sky and redemptive media for Her.meneutics. This post was adapted courtesy of the author.

Saving the Life of a Shaken Baby

Justice is what love looks like in public, so says Princeton professor and pop philosopher Cornel West. When we think of justice though, we generally think of that which is found in courts or through political activism, or, failing these avenues of redress, what will be found at the judgment seat of Christ. But sometimes, justice is found in extraordinary acts of familial love.

Such is the case for Allie Rae Mondok, a little girl whose birth father shook her in January 2007 until her brain was irreversibly damaged. His one abusive act left Allie legally blind, paralyzed, comatose, and on the verge of death. But Paul Cote, then 22, quickly confessed to having abused his daughter several times a week during the few months that Allie and her then 19-year-old mother, Charity Mondok, lived with him and two other roommates in a San Francisco apartment. X-rays revealed old injuries including shoulder and rib fractures. Cote told Allie’s doctor that he would sometimes grab his 10-month-old daughter by the neck and choke her. He also force-fed her until she vomited. All of these things he did knowing that they would only make things worse, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

In his final act of violence against Allie, Cote shook her vigorously for what he said was 20 seconds and then he squeezed her hard, because she wouldn’t go to sleep. Finally, she went limp in her bed, and a roommate called 911.

When Allie finally emerged from her coma, it was not to life as any of the Mondoks had previously known it, but to a future that doctors described as incredibly grim. Charity relinquished her parental rights and later attempted suicide. Her parents, Bryon and Susan, began a year-long process of becoming adoptive parents to their granddaughter. In order to do this, they left their home in Florida (which was subsequently lost to foreclosure), along with Bryon’s job as a missions pastor, and their 18-year-old son, Aaron, who lived with friends until they returned.

Susan moved into the hospital with Allie for the better part of eight weeks. During her stay, Allie was virtually inconsolable, says Susan. “For a long time, we just lived with no hope . . . because when you have a kid like this who cried all the time, there was no consoling her, there was no making her happy. The nurses would come in and say, ‘How do you handle sitting here with all this crying all the time?’ and I think I just tuned her out after a while, but she would cry sometimes ten hours. . . . We just said, ‘Well this is our life. We’ve got to move on with her and hopefully she’ll get better.’ ”

Even when they felt hopeless, Susan and Bryon held onto the faint possibility that Allie would improve, and she did. A speech therapist taught her how to suck from a bottle; then the feeding tube that had been keeping her alive was removed. Bryon says, “It was a major turning point when she started taking food by mouth. She had no possible source of self-soothing. She couldn’t get her hands in her mouth. . . . She didn’t get fed ever, so once we were able to start giving her a bottle, things changed drastically. She stopped crying.” What her father could not accomplish with his anger, her grandparents and others accomplished with their love and devotion.

According to Susan, Allie’s first case worker told them she was not their friend, but the veteran who replaced this naysayer fought for them to get custody. He said grandparents don’t usually get involved in these situations. Susan couldn’t believe it. She wondered, What grandparent wouldn’t take their grandchild?

Eventually the Mondoks moved back to Florida and rented a spacious, waterfront condominium in the same complex where Paul’s mother lives. Paul's mother sees her granddaughter and the Byron and Susan regularly, but declined to be interviewed for this story. She reportedly had been planning to return to her home in South America before her son did the unthinkable. Despite her own grief, she changed her plans and faced potentially hostile caretakers to help ease the suffering her son had caused. Aaron Mondok moved back in with his parents so that he too could support them and his niece/little sister.

Charity told me she’s afraid to have more children. The authorities made her feel like a criminal for not knowing that Paul was abusing their baby. Never mind that she was at work when the abuse occurred, and the two other adults in the home didn’t know either. She says she had never known abuse and thus didn’t suspect it. She is grateful to her parents for taking on a situation that she could not handle. She’s doing well and sees her family every couple months.

One day when Allie was still in the hospital in San Francisco, Paul’s father came to visit. Susan says he told the inconsolable child that Paul loved her. Susan was livid. Although she would rather Paul get help than spend years in prison, she says, “To me love is an action. When you love someone, you don’t put them in a coma.”

No, you die to your own hopes and dreams and devote yourself to their care. And in the process, a little girl receives a measure of justice that far exceeds whatever the courts dole out to her abuser or activists accomplish through their efforts. She gets to have a meaningful, abundant life.

A bevy of specialists have worked with Allie since she was shaken three years ago. When I visited her in Florida late last year, I met a happy, curious little girl and two devoted parents. Susan says she doesn’t allow herself to think about where Allie might have been as an ordinary 3-year-old because it would sink her. Bryon says he doesn’t have time for anger. He’s too busy with love. The whole family is.

For more information on Shaken Baby Syndrome, visit the website of the Shaken Baby Alliance. For more on Byron and Susan's life with Allie, visit their personal blogs.

Is Self-Promotion Sinful?

J. D. Salinger, best known for his teen-angst novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), died last week at the age of 91 after living as a recluse for 50 years on his 90-acre compound in Cornish, New Hampshire. His death leaves the literati frothing at the mouth as they wait to see whether he left behind a treasure trove of manuscripts. Although Salinger never published another novel, he earned recognition for the collection Nine Stories and two compilations, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Shortly after publishing these, Salinger retired into a half-century of seclusion.

Though there were elements of Salinger's personal life that were reportedly unsavory, I believe we can learn from his efforts to spurn fame and self-promotion because they can lead to phoniness, something Salinger abhorred.

This time last year, through a series of events, I was encouraged to submit a manuscript for publication. The senior editor at the first publishing house said my writing was “like the best of the best” in my genre. That was a true confirmation of my calling. Here’s the rub: I didn’t make it past the marketing department. Although they esteemed my writing, I was a no name. They couldn’t take a risk on me, especially in hard economic times. I was dejected for a while, but, per the request of an editor at another publishing house, I sent it off. This time the senior editor told me that I was a good writer but that I “had to have an audience built up” before I wrote a book. In the publishing world, it’s called “having a platform.” Apparently my platform was not big enough.

I truly appreciate these gracious editors and their advice, and I don’t fault them for their decisions. The bottom line is that they have to make money. But now I find myself in a quandary. Before I learned of this platform business, I believed my motives for speaking, writing, hosting a radio program, and blogging were as legitimate as they could be for a sinful human.

Now, whenever an opportunity to do any of these arises, I wonder, Am I doing this only to build a bigger platform? Is this just self-promotion? Sometimes, “You have to have an audience built up before you write a book” gets translated into, “Throw yourself down from this high point of the temple" (do something spectacular to get attention) (Matt. 4:5-6) or, “No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world” (John 7:4). Some readers might accuse me of scraping my conscience or of being oversensitive; on the other hand, some may think that I’m using this very post to promote myself.

And that’s where Salinger comes in. He has something to say about this in Catcher. When protagonist Holden Caulfield’s sister, Phoebe, asks him why he doesn’t become a lawyer like their father, he says:

[T]hey’re all right if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives . . . but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. . . . Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because . . . you really wanted to . . . be a terrific lawyer with everyone slapping you on the back. . . . How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t. (p. 172)

Salinger isn’t the only one. In 2005, stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle shunned the limelight when he walked away from his outrageously successful show on Comedy Central. In an interview with Time magazine, Chappelle said that part of the reason he walked away is because he didn’t like who he was becoming. He had to reevaluate; that is part of why he escaped to South Africa for a while. “Coming here [to South Africa],” he said, “I don’t have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I’m interested in the kind of person I’ve got to become. I want to be well-rounded, and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well-balanced. I’ve got to check my intentions.”

While I am no Salinger or Chappelle, and I have no fame to walk away from, I still think we can learn from them without over-spiritualizing. How much of what we do as Christians and churches is about promoting ourselves? Are we using the church as a vehicle to make a name for ourselves? Are we one of Salinger’s phonies, or are we being obedient to Christ? (And, as Salinger asks, how would we know we weren’t being phony?)

This is something we have to wrestle with. There may be occasions when platform-building is called for, but there will be other times (more than we care to admit) when we have to forsake fame and “building a platform” by stepping away to reevaluate and to humble ourselves. As Chappelle said, “Your soul is priceless.” Or, in the words of Jesus, “What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” (Matt. 16:26).

Marlena Graves (M.Div., Northeastern Seminary) is a resident director at Cedarville University. She blogs at His Path Through the Wilderness, and has written for Her.meneutics about students who experience same-sex attraction.

When to Leave if You Can't Cleave

When is the right time to leave home? Italian government minister Renato Brunetta thinks it’s age 18, and recently suggested a new law to require it.

[M]ost developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentive parenthood — quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. It’s no coincidence that the countries most prone to bamboccioni and parasite singles are the world’s oldest and fastest aging, with the lowest fertility rate: Japan, Germany and Italy are already in net population decline.

I wrote recently about modern China, where very different social pressures have also created a problem of demographics and economic peril. But I don’t think it’s fair to conclude that living at home is symptomatic of delayed adulthood. No, the real problem is not grown-up children living at home, but their using it to shirk responsibility and hard work.

Many of my childhood friends were raised with inherent assumptions about “leaving the nest.” However, most of them were also female, and whether unspoken or understood, most expected that by the time they reached 18 — or about 21, if they went to college — they would find someone to marry. Leaving home would then be the natural next step. Leaving home in order to cleave to a mate would provide its own compensation, in other words.

At 26, unmarried, and currently living at home again (temporarily?), I could tell my friends that life does not always follow a series of steps. Instead of bamboccione, in the U.S. we have “boomerangers”: a Pew Research Study from November 2009 found that 13 percent of parents with grown children had one of them move back home within the past year, while the number of adults ages 18 to 29 has decreased since 2007. (The study linked the trend to the economic recession.) Plus, although I used to think of marriage as a clear-cut signal to leave home, it is not always as definitive as we tend to think.

Last May, Lisa Graham McMinn wrote for Her.meneutics that having her daughter and son-in-law move back in had blessed her. I think Christians, of all people, should be brave enough to consider alternatives to society’s idea that autonomy signals true adulthood. By bowing to social pressure, it would be just as easy to miss God’s best plan for our lives clinging to home as leaving home too fast.

Beyond my childhood assumptions, I have discovered that there are many ways of “cleaving” (the same word is translated in other versions as “hold fast” or “cling”) outside of marriage. Many of my fellow college graduates, male and female, ended up cleaving to their college roommates or friends for stability after school ended. Meanwhile, I have traveled — alone —yet always circled back to my roots. I don’t think mandating an arbitrary deadline for leaving home or for any other stage of life is appropriate. Avoiding the temptation to cleave to someone or something in a situation that God has not designed requires personal discernment.

In your own life, did a certain age, circumstance, or stage of economic stability signal the time to leave home? Are you still waiting for the right time, or do you feel you left too soon? Would you ever go back?

Reading to Enrich a Child's Soul

While American children and young adults might be reading more than in years past (says a 2009 study from the National Endowment for the Arts), they also are on the whole spending more time lost in a media blitz. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported last week that kids ages 8–18 spend an average of 7.5 hours a day consuming TV, movies, and music.

In a media-saturated and -distracted age, Sarah Clarkson hopes to reignite a love of reading books among families and children. Read for the Heart: Whole Books for Wholehearted Families (Apologia, December 2009) is Clarkson’s roadmap to books worthy of family reading and study. Her lists are substantial — the chapter on children’s fiction lists 51 authors, many with more than one book — so for families looking to add more reading into their routines, or for lovers of lists and of reading, Read for the Heart is a valuable resource.

Clarkson, based in Colorado and currently writing a children’s novel, spoke with Ruth Moon about the delight of children’s books and her philosophy of choosing good books.

What’s the value of adults reading children’s books?
Children’s stories distill big concepts down to the level of the simply true and beautiful. Some beautiful children’s books — the Chronicles of Narnia or At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald — have some of the deepest ideas in the world distilled into the simplicity of what you can tell a child. Children’s books can say true things about the world in a way that all the adult thinking and introspection and description can’t capture.

Why is it important to read to children?
It is astounding what words do for children’s brains. Reading helps them to make sense of information, and vocabulary is key to succeeding in any area of school. If a child isn’t read to or spoken to often, they won’t be able to proceed in math or science. Reading is constantly enriching the mind to be able to think more broadly and deeply. Everybody should be reading on a regular basis, but especially children during the years they are being educated.

What gave you the idea for the book?
I went to England for a C. S. Lewis Foundation conference and heard Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), speak. He was speaking on poetry for the conference, but he mentioned a report on reading. In his work at the NEA, he had been part of one of the largest surveys ever done on literacy in America.
When I got home I ordered the reports, and it was shocking. Reading had declined in every area and across every age group. [Editor’s note: 2009 was the first time in 25 years that the NEA saw an uptick in literary reading.] I had been writing book lists for people for years, and people had been asking me what I loved about books. Reading the reports made me realize, I want to write a book about this.

How did you compile your lists of recommended books?
I compiled all the lists I remembered reading, went to three or four really bookish friends, and did some research on Newbery Award winners. I chose the books that I felt had high literary quality, clear pictures of what it meant to be brave or heroic or good, and were beautiful and fun — books to enrich a child's soul.

How does new technology affect the way we read?
It removes the space of contemplation and puts everything you do at a higher speed. The Internet is an endless chain of small bits of information, so you’re never going to the deep places of communication; you’re swimming on the surface of ideas. The experience of reading a book is a slower process, because you’re holding the book in your hand and going page by page. It gives you more time to integrate ideas into processes and the way you think, whereas reading things on the Internet is more transitory.

What is your philosophy of reading children’s novels?
It’s important that a book portrays true things about the world, especially about childhood. A good example would be E. Nesbit. Her books, like The Railway Children and The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, are fun and beautiful stories about families and kids. Nesbit was anything but orthodox in many of her views — a member of the Fabian Society among other things — but she was still able to picture good and beautiful things about childhood and the world.

A second consideration is what a book portrays about the world: Does it portray good as good and evil as evil? Does it portray the consequences of actions? Does it reward virtue, and does the good guy come out on top in the end? Every book a child reads is building their expectation of how they see the world and what’s expected of them in life. Every book should have those clear moral pictures in them.