Weekend Roundup [5/15]

Weekend Roundup [5/15] May 15, 2015

Roundup

Introducing the Weekend Roundup, a new weekly feature of links and interesting finds from around the web. 

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What’s Diving the Kafkaesque Crackdown on Free-Range Parenting?” George Will, National Review.

Today’s saturating media tug children beyond childhood prematurely, but not to maturity. Children are cosseted by intensive parenting that encourages passivity and dependency, and stunts their abilities to improvise, adapt, and weigh risks.

What Is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?” Abigail Rine, First Things.

Students now arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant. Like, for example, “What is Marriage?”

Is Christianity Dying?” Russell Moore.

We do not have more atheists in America. We have more honest atheists in America. Again, that’s good news. The gospel comes to sinners, not to the righteous. It is easier to speak a gospel to the lost than it is to speak a gospel to the kind-of-saved.

Against Kant and Consumerism” Gracy OlmsteadThe American Conservative

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans’ love of autonomy could have grave consequences: he wrote in Democracy In America, “Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

What Doomed Bill Simmons at ESPN?” James Andrew Miller, Vanity Fair

The chief reason there was an abrupt announcement last week and that a drama-free, buddy-buddy ending didn’t happen is painfully simple, and simply painful: it was all because of Simmons’s latest appearance on the Dan Patrick Show, and his seemingly gratuitous slam at N.F.L. commissioner Goodell. He had performed a similar routine last fall, calling Goodell a “liar” on his own podcast, and earned a three-week suspension. Once was forgiven; twice was Bugs Bunny declaring, “Of course, you know: this means war.”

Maybe Time for Change” Frederick deBoer

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. 


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