Tag Archives: Topic: Culture

WSJ.com: Trend-conscious teens look as if they just rolled out of bed, wearing layers of loungewear to class at schools across the country.

LifeNews.com: James Dobson, the founder and former president of Focus on the Family, has joined a number of social conservative and pro-life leaders have who announced endorsements for Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

OneNewsNow.com: everal prominent Christian leaders from across the country have signed on to lead the official “pastors and leaders faith coalition” for one of the GOP presidential hopefuls. The group was introduced during a recent nationwide conference call.

News from The Associated Press: The Greenville-Spartanburg area, home to many of South Carolina’s evangelical voters, should be prime political ground for Rick Santorum, a longtime anti-abortion crusader who was embraced by a group of Christian leaders meeting last weekend in Texas.

Mary C. Curtis at The Washington Post: The debate about how one chooses to practice any faith – or not – is public. While many still see the separation as benefit for both church and state, Santorum has said he judges Kennedy’s speech and his sentiments “appalling,” and he hopes South Carolina voters agree. When the divide is not just over religious doctrine but also the role of faith itself in government, the alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants isn’t puzzling at all. It makes perfect sense.

Mike Adams at Townhall: Common sense alone should have reigned in the SFCC administration. But it required the intervention of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Washington Attorney General. In the end, the student pro-life group prevailed . . . After the ADF intervened, there was a successful federal injunction against the speech code that was used to punish the LACC student for uttering “offensive” speech.

News from The Associated Press: A Polish court slapped a fine on a popular singer who bad-mouthed the Bible.

Mark Steyn at National Review: Whether or not that’s what Rick Santorum said, it’s certainly the case that “demographic winter” makes Europe’s troubles all but impossible to solve. As you have observed, demographic decline doesn’t have to be an existential threat. The population of my town in New Hampshire peaked in the 1820 census and then dropped steadily until 1940, and we survived it because (unlike the latter-day US and EU) we hadn’t erected a system of government that depended on looting the future to bribe the present.

Doug Farrow at Touchstone: Why fight same-sex marriage? Even in America, where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to. The optics are poor and the mandate seems uncertain. Prospects for victory appear slim. Resources that might be reserved for more important fronts—abortion, for example—are squandered in defense of an institution to which our modern urban society is no longer committed. Industrial economies, reprogenetic technologies, and new ideas of autonomy—not to speak of new moralities—have called into question many of the assumptions on which that institution has always been based.

MyFoxPhoneix.com: Kay Vergnetti and her husband Angelo raised their four children — it was time to travel, see Europe and go on cruises, but that all came to a screeching halt. “She remembers everything that happened that night at the altercation..every single thing,” said Kay. Child Protective Services removed their granddaughter Courtney from her mother and father after a violent fight. She was only 2½ years old.

Guardian.co.uk: Last year the Church of England published a legal opinion that makes it quite clear that it believes it is legal to discriminate against John, not because he is gay, since he is also celibate, but because he is not in the least bit ashamed of being gay. That is what sticks in the craw of the conservative evangelicals who oppose him.

CBS (includes video): A Ventura County Girl Scout is at the center of a national controversy after she released a video calling for a boycott of the group’s popular cookies over what she calls a “radical homosexual agenda”.

Religion Clause: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life yesterday released a new survey on what Mormons think about their place in American life. The report titled Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society . . .

CNN.com Blogs: America’s Protestant pastors overwhelmingly reject the theory of evolution and are evenly split on whether the earth is 6,000 years old, according to a survey released Monday by the Southern Baptist Convention.

CNN.com Blogs: Imagine the following scenario: A U.S. president is discovered to be spending his spare time taking a razor to the New Testament, cutting up and re-pasting those passages of the Gospels that he considered authentic and morally true and discarding all the rest.

The Washington Post: The Pew Forum poll, to be released Thursday, offers an unusually detailed look at an American-born religion at a time when voters are craving information about GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, a Mormon who was once a bishop in his church.

Forbes: No matter how you hold the lens of personal bias Millennials seem to be determined to divorce themselves from marriage.

The Washington Post: As the dust settled after the Iowa caucuses, it became clear that a plurality of evangelical Christians had thrown in their hat with an unexpected, but strangely apt candidate. Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who lost his seat in 2006, performed substantially better than any of his rivals among born-again or evangelical Christians, with 32 percent of the coveted demographic’s vote.

James Antle III at WSJ.com: Are Democrats and Republicans now engaged in a ‘death struggle’ over dwindling resources, making gridlock and dysfunction more likely?

WorldNetDaily: The group’s outrage was prompted by the warning from the author of six New York Times best-sellers that the America that was founded and built by those who considered the Christian faith important is disintegrating.

LifeNews.com: On Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog, BreakPoint editor Gina Dalfonzo wrote a post about girls in India participating in a ceremony to rid themselves of names that mean “unwanted” in Hindi.

David Carroll Cochran at Public Discourse: So threats to religious liberty do not just harm individual believers. In seeking to corral, marginalize, and privatize religion, they endanger the health of religious institutions more generally, threatening to cut off a critically important source of moral reflection and orientation. This enfeebles rather than enlivens the moral content of our culture, a content that we all, believers and non-believers alike, rely upon to exercise our freedom.

Michael J. New at The Corner – National Review Online: However, subsequent Supreme Court decisions — most notably the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — have given state-level pro-life laws greater constitutional protection. There is a good chance that future Supreme Court decisions will continue this trend, so the state-level gains that pro-lifers enjoyed in 2011 bode well for the future of the movement.

Peter Oborne at the Telegraph: The figures seem to bear this out. Church attendance — which stood at around 50 per cent in the middle of the 19th century – had declined to around 12 per cent in 1979, or 5.4 million. By 1998 it had almost halved to 7.5 per cent and when the most recent census was conducted in 2005, it was discovered that only 6.3 per cent of the population, some 3.2 million, were regular churchgoers.

National Catholic Reporter: Like the number of marriages among Americans in general, the number of marriages performed in the Catholic church has been in decline over the past few decades. | Hat tip: IMAPP

LifeNews.com: As society continues its downward spiral, one would hope and expect Catholic universities to stand as a beacon in the darkness. Sadly, the actions of many Catholic educational institutions betray this hope.

Richard Land at WSJ.com: Polling from CNN shows that 57% of Iowa’s caucus participants were self-identified evangelicals, as in 2008, and they voted 32% for Rick Santorum. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry each received 14% of evangelical votes, with Ron Paul (18%) and Michele Bachmann (6%) taking all but a smattering of the remainder.

Ian McLean at VirtueOnline: The UK government has promised to launch a consultation on ‘how to make civil marriage available to same-sex couples’ in England and Wales. Note: HOW, not WHETHER. This reflects the astonishing social change in the last two decades in the UK and other liberal democracies.

CNSnews.com: Had voting in the Iowa Republican caucuses been restricted to voters under the age of 40, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas would have won easily, according to an entrance poll published by CNN.

NYTimes.com: As a teenager growing up in Butler, Pa., Rick Santorum spent Sunday mornings as an altar boy, taking wheelchair-bound veterans to Roman Catholic Mass. In the ninth grade, he announced his intention to hold elective office. “I’m going to be governor of Pennsylvania,” he declared, according to his brother Dan.

Middle East Forum: n the course of the present unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, it has become clear that questions of identity are going to be extremely important in deciding the future paths of the various countries in turmoil, not only as regards the divide between Islamists and secularists, but also concerning ethnic and sectarian tensions in countries like Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

The Washington Post: The British government’s latest Citizenship Survey reports that in the five years leading up to 2010, the percentage of declared Christians in the region dropped by 7 percent, although they nonetheless held solid at 70 percent.

Stonegate Institute: New citizenship rules that entered into effect on January 1, 2012 will require all applicants to pass exams on French culture and history and also to prove that their French language skills are equivalent to those of a 15-year-old native speaker. Moreover, candidates seeking French citizenship will be required to pledge allegiance to “French values.”

: Promote ideological fairness and freedom in the educational system, buy doing things such as supporting organizations like Alliance Defense Fund, the ACLJ and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, as well as participate on school boards, in public and private schools, on all levels of education.

Bloomberg: The West is using cultural means to divide China (PRCH), which needs to be alert to this threat, President Hu Jintao said in a Communist Party magazine.

NationalJournal.com: “If Barack Obama and the Democrats are counting on issues like same-sex marriage to help them in the general, they’re delusional,” said Keith Appell, a GOP political consultant.

CNN.com: A couple of years ago, my daughter and I were playing the classic board game “Life,” and her little car reached the roadblock at which everybody — absolutely everybody — gets married.

NYTimes.com (12/14): As the year ends, much of the talk around women — at least in the United States — has moved from empowerment and global gender gaps to the trend of young single women out-earning men and the rise of female breadwinners.

USCatholic.org: Church organizations are unhappy with the stance taken by the U.S. government to tie foreign aid to the assurance of homosexual rights.

Telegraph: A tax system that acknowledges marriage makes sense economically and morally, writes David Green.

Daily Mail Online: Callous raiders have shown little regard for the sacrosanct; striking churches in a Lancashire town in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Smashing stained glass windows for entry, the thieves have attacked eight churches near Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire in the last few weeks.

LifeSiteNews.com (video embedded): In an exclusive video interview with LifeSiteNews, Fr. Azevedo tells LifeSiteNews that Marxists have moved into the cultural sphere following the discrediting of their economic views, and are now seeking to subvert all of the institutions of society from within.

Religion Clause Blog: Supermarkets have become ‘ashamed’ of selling Christmas cards with religious themes, Christian leaders said yesterday. They claimed a creeping ‘multicultural indoctrination’ had led to an aversion to Christianity, and that shops were worried about stocking cards that might offend other faiths.

ChicagoTribune.com: Despite progress, discrimination still a problem for those whose gender identity doesn’t match anatomical sex . . .

Knights of Columbus at Christian Newswire: The Knights of Columbus-Marist Poll found that nearly two-thirds of adults nationally — 64 percent — think people should say, “Merry Christmas,” while less than one-third — 31 percent — believe the appropriate greeting is “Happy Holidays.”

Engage Family Minute (includes video): However, in this very informative video presented by the Family Research Council, Dr. Daniel Dreisbach, a very respected professor of law at American University shows that the Founding Fathers used the Bible constantly in their creation and establishment of the United States. Dr. Dreisbach’s new article, “The Bible in the Political Rhetoric of the American Founding,” is prominently featured in the current edition of Politics and Religion Journal.

The Washington Post: Europe is home to about one-quarter of the world’s Christians, compared to two-thirds a century ago, according to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Online here.

The Washington Post: Jenifer Bowen, the executive director of Iowa Right to Life, spent a recent evening at the Hoyt Sherman Place theater here listening to four Republican presidential candidates deliver faith-infused pitches to about 1,000 evangelicals representing one of this election’s most critical and conflicted voting blocs.

BBC News: In a speech in Oxford on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the prime minister called for a revival of traditional Christian values to counter Britain’s “moral collapse”.

Fox News: In other words, Pew’s 51% of unmarried Americans includes a very large number of “not-yet-married” Americans. In fact, what’s striking about Americans is that unlike folks in other developed countries, they still get married if you just give them some time.

Telegraph: The Health Survey for England found that men reported having 9.3 different partners on average, with a quarter of men boasting of more than 10 conquests.

Des Moines Register: However, Santorum said he does believe that radical Islam is a “very dangerous thing” and that the Islamic world must work with the United States “to confront this cancer within.”

Barely half of all adults in the United States — a record low — are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides . . .

Religion Clause: Yesterday’s Des Moines Register reports that less than a week after he was hired, Newt Gingrich’s political director for his Iowa campaign was forced to resign because of remarks he made about Mormons during a focus group in which he participated a day before he was hired.

Baptist Press: Girl Scouts USA’s recent revelation that its local chapters sometimes induct boys who try to live as girls, considered transgendered, is already having repercussions in Louisiana, where three troops at a Christian school have disbanded in disappointment.

Des Moines Register: “(Gingrich) is tremendous in debates,” said Brad Sherman, an evangelical Christian minister with Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville. “Part of me wants to say I’d love to see him debate Obama because I think he would chew him up. But I have to live by principle – and Michele Bachmann has proved it.”

Washington Times: Gingrich tough on women, gays in military
“Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich is siding with social conservatives on how the U.S. armed forces should treat gays and women, according to a survey released Monday . . . Mr. Gingrich . . . told the Military Culture Coalition he would have voted against allowing open homosexuals in the military and, as president, would favor an extensive review for repeal of the gay ban known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The former House speaker also does not favor women in direct ground combat units.”

Des Moines Register: Romney says he hasn’t changed stance on gay rights
On allowing gays to serve openly in the military: “That’s already occurred. I’m not planning on reversing that at this stage.

Military Culture Coalition: Romney Endorses Gays-In-Military (LGBT) Law; Gingrich Opposed

MCC Releases Results of 2012 Presidential Candidate Survey

Local churches have traditionally claimed 14 of the 21 Palisades Park display spaces to illustrate the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. But atheists managed to get all but three of the spaces this year because of a new city lottery system.

NYTimes.com: Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, a conservative advocacy group popular with evangelical Christians here, has been saying supportive things recently about Newt Gingrich, suggesting that social conservatives are open to looking past his extramarital affairs and two divorces as they make a choice in the Republican presidential race.

Washington Times: A little-noticed shift in the once-hostile attitudes between evangelicals and Catholics may prove a significant aid to Mr. Gingrich, who has been surging in recent polls around the country.

News from The Associated Press: Lowe’s Home Improvement has found itself facing a backlash after the retail giant pulled ads from a reality show about American Muslims.

Two Columbia University researchers, Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, were poring over U.S. Census data when they noticed a statistical anomaly: Americans from China, Korea and India have relatively few daughters.

Canoe.ca: A posh Montreal suburb has decided to remove a nativity scene and menorah from town hall rather than acquiesce to demands from a Muslim group to erect Islamic religious symbols.

LifeSiteNews.com: Contraception has been a “clear factor” in the steep decline of parishioners at Catholic churches across the United States, says Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Michigan.

NYTimes.com: From tribesmen to billionaire philanthropists, the social value of generosity is already well known. But new research suggests it also matters much more intimately than we imagined, even down to our most personal relationships. esearchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women.

Elizabeth Marquardt & W. Bradford Wilcox at The Atlantic: These modern day portraits of parenthood raise vital questions: Do women and men today experience parenthood differently depending on whether they are married or unmarried? And, if they are married, is parenthood itself an obstacle to a good marriage? In a new report “When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable” (PDF), just published in the latest issue of the State of Our Unions, we examined nationally-representative survey data, including a new, nationally-representative study of more than 1,400 married couples (18-46), to respond to these questions.

UPI.com: Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say.

Kimberly A. Strassel at WSJ.com: Rick Perry has God first and foremost on his mind these days. Unfortunately for the presidential aspirant, a lot of Iowans don’t—or at least not when it comes to voting. If there’s an untapped mine in Iowa, it’s the state’s cultural conservatives. That huge and influential electorate propelled Mike Huckabee to an Iowa victory in 2008, but today it remains fractured.

The Aquila Report: Overture 009 from East Iowa Presbytery requests an amendment to W-4.9000 in the Book of Order be approved that would uphold session and pastoral discretion in their responsibility for the covenant of marriage. The proposed amendment deletes every reference of “man and woman” and replaces it with “two people.”

This understanding no longer exists in our culture, and some argue that when Americans began divorcing in high numbers, redefined marital sexuality via contraception use, and reduced marriage to mere commitment, it set the stage for our current same-sex marriage debate.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Townhall: During the Christmas season, we actually tend to be more thankful for things that we more easily overlook at other times of the year. Things as foundational as family, friends, and a warm place to lay our heads at night become focal points.

Family law has changed during the past 50 years to the detriment of child well-being, paving the way for the arguments in support of same-sex marriage. But there is a new strategy available to us to respond to this situation. The second in a two-part series.

Toronto Star: The Institute for Canadian Values held a news conference Tuesday morning, condemning the premier for a section of the new anti-bullying legislation that allows for all publicly funded school boards to “host gay clubs.”

The Supreme Court was more right than it knew during the past two centuries as it identified the state’s interest in marriage as children and their formation. The first in a two-part series.