My parents were the kind of people that were always learning. My mother was very crafty and was always tackling a new sewing project and my father was always reading and always ready to take the time to teach us children things about nature or science. They modeled this for us and taught us to love learning as well. It was about discovery, and tackling new things, and about always seeing life as an adventure.
I am fascinated by watching Sally learn about the world and seek to make sense of it, and I love watching the role literature other media play in shaping her understanding of the world and the questions she asks. In our family, Doctor Who opens the door for interesting questions and discussions—because while Clara Oswald may die and come alive again, Sally will not.
I think my reticence to start with the “so what do you do” question when I meet women with chidlren reflects of a simple truth: As long as women are single or childless, they are generally seen as just as capable and ambitions as men are. In contrast, as soon as women marry or have children it is assumed that they are focusing their primary energies elsewhere.
While I talk a lot about my background here on my blog, I generally maintain some level of distance. Today I want to close that distance by sharing an email from a young woman who was a close friend of mine growing up. We’ll call her Kate. Her email reduced me to tears and reveals a lot about just how this sort of culture functions—and about how and why shunning occurs.
Forward Thinking is a values development project created in collaboration with Dan Fincke of Camels with Hammers. Dan is introducing our next prompt today (head on over to see it!), but in this post I will pull together some of the responses to this month’s prompt: “What do we owe our parents?” A total of five bloggers wrote posts in response. Let’s take a look at what they had to say, shall we?
After I wrote my posts on academics and socialization, I realized that there is another way homeschooling affected my life—and it’s no less significant. In fact, it’s a whole lot more significant. Quite simply, homeschooling affected my life because it changed my parents. When I was born, my parents were fairly ordinary evangelical Christians. That didn’t last. Their involvement in the homeschool movement introduced them to a cocktail of insidious new ideas.
Given that one of the ten commandments orders children to honor their parents, Christianity seems to emphasize filial duty. Leaving Christianity means I no longer believe I have a divinely-mandated obligation to my parents. Further, my parents caused me a great deal of pain when I first started stepping out on my own and forging my own life, and that can’t help but affect our relationship. But they’re still my parents.
I told Sean earlier that I think today pretty much sums up our lives together, and I wasn’t kidding. Marriage and parenting are things that are beautiful and enriching when you zoom out and take a long view, but will naturally have bumps and turbulence along the way. Just like life. And in many ways, today was a really good picture of that.
It seems author Jonathan Last thinks my IUD caused the fiscal cliff. And every other problem the United States is facing, for good measure. In this post I look at Jonathan Last and his new book, What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, with its prophesying of a demographic collapse with disaster to follow. Race suicide, a dismissal of ideas like paid maternity leave, and a suggestion that the solution to the coming demographic disaster is religion. Oh yes.
Last week Dan Fincke introduced the next prompt of the Forward Thinking project: “If it were up to you to design one or more basic models for messaging and for ritual through which people were to regularly mark deaths together, what would such ceremonies be like?” This isn’t a topic I’ve thought very much about, or had much experience with, but I’ll try to pull together a few tentative thoughts nonetheless.
The way children construct their understandings of the world is fascinating. I recently learned that Sally, based on her lived experience thus far, was operating under the assumption that children always grow up with a mommy and a daddy. This wasn’t intentional or taught, but is rather simply born out of the fact that, at this point in her life, she she has not yet known any children from LGBTQ families.
Christian author Jerry Jenkins has written a book on building “hedges” around your marriage to protect it, but his list of hedges focuses on restricting his activity around other women rather than building a deep and healthy relationship with his wife. I explain how evangelical ideas about sin and gender roles contribute to a focus on the outside rather than on the inside, and also examine how patriarchal gender roles affect male-female friendships.
Follow Patheos on
Copyright 2008-2013, Patheos. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Patheos Privacy Policy | Site developed by Avalon Consulting, LLC
Follow Patheos
Atheist: