Youth Ministry Initiative

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 107:

Evolutionary psychology goes back to the work of Charles Darwin on sexual selection and the emotions.8 Darwin was certain that the factors shaping evolution – free variation and natural selection – also influence our mental and emotional life. Most evolutionary psychologists today reject the idea that humans are moved only by genes and environment.9 The term sociobiology,” because of its association with reductionism, has fallen out of favor and been replaced by evolutionary ecology, behavioral biology, behavioral ecology, or evolutionary psychologry. In this book we frequently use the term “evolutionary ecology” to remind the reader that this discipline holds a view of families that sees them as a part of an interlocking environment. Evolutionary theory influences the psychology and ethics of American pragmatism – Peirce, James, and Dewey – who in turn inform the philosophical stance of this book.10

Notes:
  1. 8 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: Murray, 1959), and idem, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Murray, 1871).
  2. 9 E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975).
  3. 10 For a discussion of William James as an evolutionary psychologist, see Don Browning, Pluralism and Personality (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1980), 52-58, 156-77.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 106-107:

Because old social supports are not present for many families, and new communicative skills have not been learned, an explosive situation is developing worldwide in which husbands and fathers are becoming increasingly absent from their mates and offspring.6 According to McLanahan and Sandefur, fathers’ residential absence does harm to their children for two reasons. The first has to do with what sociologists call social capital: the likelihood that the father has resources in social networks…McLanahan and Sandefur then gave a second explanation – a biological one – that does not replace but supplements the first. They wrote, The fact that both adults have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parent would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for the child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.7 In short, biological connectedness, they are suggesting, adds intensity of affection, identification, and investment, and when it is missing, something important is lost.

Notes:
  1. 6 Aaron Sachs, “Men, Sex, and Parenthood in an Overpopulating World,” World Watch (March-April 1994): 12-19.
  2. 7 Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994), 38.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 103, 104:

Richard Good goes a bit further. What is love in families for Richard? It is a mutual sense of giving each other freedom to be what you want to be.” This is Richard Good’s understanding of the Golden Rule – a kind of reciprocal freedom or reciprocal psychological space. Richard doesn’t believe that anybody “really sacrifices themselves.” Sacrifice “is too strong a word. Compromise is a better word.” To change oneself for a relationship “means that the relationship isn’t it…The relationship goes where I go. Otherwise there would be some sort of indication that there was something significantly wrong with me.”…For Sarah Miles and Richard Good, marital love seems to be primarily a tool of self-expression and self-fulfillment. Mutuality is important but is defined mainly as a contract designed to enhance the fulfillment of the partners.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 103:

Commitment, pledge, a covenant that includes God, learning how” to love, not just “being in” love – these features mark the way that love functions in the Turner family. It is, as we have learned, very Protestant, very agapic. From another perspective, the strong emphasis on duty makes it close to the thoughts of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who historians say was quite Protestant in tone as well.
5 But in contrast to Kant, the juicier goods of love – sexuality, delight in children, fun, vacations – are also important in the Turners’ view. They are secondary, however, to the central features of pledge and commitment, which must stay in place even if these other goods and satisfactions deteriorate or vanish.

Notes:
  1. 5 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 39. Although Kant does not explicitly discuss love in this book, the model of obligation developed in the categorical imperative has frequently influenced various modern formulations of the meaning of love.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 101-102:

At one extreme, some Christians have identified love with self-sacrifice on behalf of the other,” be that other husband, wife, child, neighbor, stranger, or enemy. This meaning of Christian love has been associated with the Greek word agape. In its most radical form, summarized by Anders Nygren in his Agape and Eros (1953), this view disconnects self-sacrificial love from enjoyment, delight, pleasure, or self-fulfillment.1 Love becomes, in his view, largely duty, commitment, and fidelity without thought of return from the other. At the other extreme, love is identified with the fulfillment of the individual who loves. To love another is to feel elation, enrichment, passion, even pleasure. This form of love is associated with the Greek word eros – a word prominent in Greek philosophy and Catholic theology but absent in the New Testament.2 Erotic love, as philospher Alan Soble calls it, is “reason based”; it is grounded in an assessment of the admirable qualities of the object of love.3 Another “middle” view defines love as mutuality – what this book often calls love as “equal regard.” Some scholars believe this is the meaning that medieval Catholic theology gave agape when they translated it into the Latin word caritas (charity).4 Love as equal regard, as we use it, includes elements of eros and sacrifical self-giving, although it subordinates both to equal concern for others and self. We believe that love as equal regard also was central to the meaning of agape as this word was used in the New Testament, although some Protestant theologians such as Nygren have overlooked this meaning and associated Christian love too strongly with self-sacrifice. Most important for this book, we believe that love as equal regard is the most adequate view of love for families. Other forms of love are recognized, even in the Christian tradition. There is love as phila (friendship), libido (lust), cupiditas (love for the temporal), storage (parental love), and amor sui (self love or self-regard). But what model fo love is genuinely Christian? What model of love provides the most adequate understanding of love for families? Which models of love do we detect in the moral ecology of our five families?

Notes:
  1. 1 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953).
  2. 2 Garth Hallet, Christian Neighbor-Love: An Assessment of Six Rival Versions (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1989).
  3. 3 Alan Soble, The Structure of Love (New Haven, Conn: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 4.
  4. 4 For discussion of the various meanings of caritas, see Nygren, Agape and Eros, 55-56, 449-562; see also Louis Janssens, “Norms and Priorities of a Love Ethics,” Louvain Studies 6 (1977): 207-38.
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From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 54:

The challenge of single parenthood also raises the issue of absent fathers. Since 86 percent of single-parent families are headed by mothers, what, on the whole, do fathers contribute to the children they bring into the world but do not live with? Is their contribution important, or can it be easily replaced? In addition to the economic loss suffered by mother-headed households, fathers in general do not spend much time with their children after a divorce or separation. A study of divorces in central Pennsylvania reported that only a third of fathers saw their children at least once a week within two years after the divorce. A 1981 national survey found that the overall situation was worse and that only one child in six saw his or her father as often as once a week.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 51:

All of these explanations for family crisis have some validity, bur the cultural factor of inordinate individualism – the desire to attain more expressive and utilitarian satisfactions for oneself – is critical…If people are to balance individualism and mutuality more satisfactorily, they must have a clearer and more powerful ethic. This is what the love ethic of equal regard, surrounded by the Christian story, tries to accomplish.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 71:

We develop our love ethic of equal regard in close relation to the concept of kin altruism, the preferential treatment people tend to give to their biologically related family members. This helps us show why the family with intact, biologically related parents should be given a prima facie priority in our cultural, ethical, and educational scale of values. The fundamental family issue of our time may be how to retain and honor the intact family without turning it into an object of idolatry and without retaining the inequalities of power, status, and privilege ensconced in its earlier forms.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 59:

Ordinate forms of individualism must be affirmed as a fundamental aspect of life. Ordinate individualism – or individuality – has special meaning in our time for women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. But we located individual fulfillment within an expanded definition of love – what we call a love ethic of equal regard. This model of love rigorously balances the obligations of regard for others with a legitimate and energetic regard for oneself and identifies the social, economic, and cultural elements required to sustain it.

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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 57:

When examining more recent data from one of their longitudinal studies, McLanahan and Sanefur found that 87 percent of children from two-parent families receive a high school degree by age twenty, compared to 68 percent of children living with one biological parent, a difference of 19 percent. When adjustments for race, education, and place of residence are made, the number of school dropouts that is associated with the absence of one biological parent is 15 percent, still a sizable figure.26

Notes:
  1. 26 McLanahan and Sanefur, Growing Up, 10.
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