Measure What Matters by Ian Rowe

Measure What Matters by Ian Rowe

If we truly want to improve outcomes for children, we must have the moral courage to measure student-achievement outcomes by family structure as routinely as we now do by race, class, and gender. We must create a more complete picture to understand the forces affecting student achievement. More important, we must expand solutions and interventions to assist young people in finding pathways to success, especially in vulnerable communities—and help people understand that they have power in their individual choices, and that their own decisions shape their destiny, despite structural barriers associated with race, class, and poverty. Educators should explicitly communicate to children of all races the importance of finishing one’s education, getting a job, and forging a strong and stable family life. And a strong and stable family life usually entails marriage before children.

YES!!

The World That Christianity Made by Graham McAleer

The World That Christianity Made by Graham McAleer

Our meekness and gentleness are hard-earned, the product of centuries of intra-Christian conflict. The woke are naïve if they think rights stand on anything other than historical contingency. The idea of human rights was worked out by Pope Gregory’s canon lawyers. They are an historical artefact, like Christianity itself. Holland is not a believer, but he does want the West, and the woke, to acknowledge their on-going reliance on St. Paul’s belief that a crucified criminal was God.

I love this argument stating how much modern civilization owes to Christianity.

Rémi Brague’s bracing critique of modernity’s low-rent logos by Richard M. Reinsch II

Rémi Brague’s bracing critique of modernity’s low-rent logos by Richard M. Reinsch II

In Curing Mad Truths, French philosopher Rémi Brague argues that the modern world is dying because it cannot answer the question of why it should live. To answer that question will require humility, according to Brague, because it is medieval truths about God, man, reason, and nature that are necessary for renewal.

A needed book asking us to return to old things for our very survival. 

Was the Nuclear Family a Mistake? by David Brooks

Was the Nuclear Family a Mistake? by David Brooks

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time.

Brilliant analysis of the problem. Misguided solution.

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide by Christopher Caldwell

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide by Christopher Caldwell

Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children, can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots. 

But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights. “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?” You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.

And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.

Fascinating piece getting to root of our political divisions. Andrew Sullivan addresses this argument here.