Tag: family

Claremont, CA. ABC’s hit series “Modern Family” has returned to the air for its second season. It’s the “modern” elements of the “Modern Family” that...

Many a time, I have seen my friend doting on his little seven-year-old half brother, picking him up from school, cooking for him, and keeping his classmates’ junk food at bay. Staying abroad and settling into some sort of upwardly mobile immigrant comfort would go against the grain of years of habit.

How do we explain a culture that tells children that sex doesn’t matter much, that “girls can do anything boys can do,” and at the same moment is treating the sex of infants in the womb as a critical, determining fact?

Tradition supposedly bears the thumbprints of Roman patricians with browbeaten wives or frustrated monks who shivered in mediæval abbeys.

My grandma didn’t put up a Christmas tree. She didn’t bake pies. And she didn’t make fudge. Her kitchen was silent. I believe it was her way of mourning, not just the loss of her husband to the grave, but the loss of her children to schedules that kept them so busy they had no time for visiting and storytelling.

We are here, in part, because choices made in big places have worked against rural places and rural people.

Perhaps out of these fissures and the current populist turmoil, someone might be able to craft a new, more coherent, and more promising Christian and Democratic coalition.

But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit together?