Does Parenthood Make You a Good Person?

Vice President Kamala Harris

Let me answer my title question unambiguously: No. The very fact that we need child abuse and neglect laws demonstrates that childbearing doesn’t make people good, or improve their character. Childbearing is a biological process, in itself literally no higher in moral regard than passing a bowel movement. Any human being can do it, and the worst people you know probably have.

Conservatives have espoused the moral necessity of childbearing at least since I’ve followed politics. Radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger loudly demanded her listeners have more babies so frequently, that it was a recurrent Saturday Night Live joke throughout the 1990s. Certainly, not all babies were equal, as Vice President Dan Quayle’s dig at Murphy Brown’s fictional out-of-wedlock pregnancy almost certainly torpedoed his political aspirations.

This week, when incumbent President Joe Biden removed himself from nomination, kicking his support to Vice President Kamala Harris, conservatives reawakened the shopworn argument. I’m unclear who originated the dig, but it got adopted by Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance, and subsequently became a right-wing talking point. How can Harris govern America, they wonder aloud, without the experience of raising her own hatchlings?

The flaws in this argument should be so obvious that they don’t deserve refutation. Should be. First, there’s nothing politically necessary about having children. You know who else, like Harris, had stepchildren, but no children of his own? George Washington. Other Presidents have had distant, neglectful relationships with their children; tales of Theodore Roosevelt’s inability to corral his daughter Alice remain hilarious today, over a century later.

Besides, there are numerous reasons—illness, birth defect, injury—why a woman might be unable to bear children, and others—childhood abuse, professional ambition—why she might choose not to. None of these reasons are anybody’s business. Indeed, after years of complaining about the Biden Administration’s “Nanny State” policies, conservatives suddenly demand a national mommy? Friends, your messaging machine is broken.

Senator J.D. Vance

Parenthood has no magical redeeming qualities. As stated, we need child abuse and neglect laws to effectively prosecute parents who misuse their authority. Amid the furor over “groomers,” supposed advocates overlooked the fact that parents, not drag queens, are the people most likely to sexually abuse children. As civic organizations, community arts, and religion continue dwindling, trapping people indoors with their families and nobody else, this is likely to increase.

One need only look across the electoral aisle to witness this. While Harris prioritized public service over parenthood, Former President Trump has a strictly transactional relationship with his own children, who were raised by paid caregivers. He’s openly discussed his physical attraction to his eldest daughter, Ivanka, but gives little sign that he knows his second daughter’s name, Tiffany. Trump clan portraits look less like family than like hostage situations.

Okay, but let’s get Aristotelian here. From a philosophical perspective, we can say that something is necessary without being sufficient. Conventional eyesight is necessary for reading a printed book, but it isn’t sufficient, as one still needs the skill of reading, and probably a level of personal discipline too. Parenthood isn’t sufficient, and doesn’t magically make a person good. But is parenthood a necessary condition for goodness?

Of course not. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. Countless people without children have nevertheless accomplished great good for humanity and their countries, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Dolly Parton. One needn’t have kids to feel invested in their communities or value a healthy future for humankind; one only need recognize that other humans have feelings, ambitions, and dignity of their own, simply because they are human.

And that’s saying nothing about how expensive prenatal medicine, child care, pediatric medicine, and other obligations of parenthood are in America, during a time of diminished wages.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I don’t mean to disparage parenthood. Many of my best friends are parents, and indeed, I’m descended from a long line of parents, grandparents, and other childbearers. I greatly respect people who voluntarily accept the burden of parenthood and embrace its many responsibilities. Despite my dour comments in the opening paragraph, I’ve seen many people choose parenthood to channel their best, most constructive impulses.

Yet some of us haven’t had kids, for reasons unique to ourselves, and face constant pressure to procreate. From well-meaning aunts urging us to “fulfill our potential,” to J.D. Vance’s longstanding claim that childless people shouldn’t vote, singletons face vast formal and informal pressure to conform. By reducing people to their childbearing capacity, such pressures are literally dehumanizing—which, Vance’s campaign proves, may be the point.

A Tale of Two Sons

Hunter and Joe Biden

I doubt I could pick Hunter Biden from a police lineup. I know I’ve seen photos of him, frequently with his father, but they haven’t penetrated my consciousness. In the last nine days, as the predictably partisan fallout from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, I’ve noticed the recurring theme of “what about Hunter Biden?” Loyalists to The Former President keep trying to make Hunter-related scandals happen.

Lead among these voices has been Donald Trump, Jr. For eight days now, Don-Don has feverishly urged anybody who’ll listen to him, to please kick-start more media outrage surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and Paul Pelosi’s insider trading. I’ve personally witnessed Don-Don’s performative indignation from his Twitter feed (joining that bird-shit site is maybe my life’s biggest error). He’s also appeared on Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN.

Don-Don certainly isn’t alone here. Fellow conspiracy theorists include Laura Ingraham, Lauren Boebert, and Nick Adams. But Junior uniquely has skin in the game, as his father and namesake is actively accused of unauthorized document hoarding. If The Former President falls behind his mishandling of official government documents, it isn’t simply Don-Don’s reputation that falls with him; it’s his literal flesh and blood.

Therefore Don-Don has apparently decided the likely target is another person in similar straits: Hunter Biden. The current President’s only surviving son certainly has benefited from paternal connections. Hunter Biden attended Georgetown University and Yale Law, went straight from graduate school to a high-powered finance career, and became Executive Vice President of MBNA before turning thirty. To Don-Don’s eyes, the two sons maybe appear essentially similar in situation.

However, distinct differences between the two families exist. The Former Guy clearly considers all relationships, even those within his family, essentially transactional. Just as renters in Trump properties receive prestigious, centrally located housing in exchange for cash, Trump family members receive family connections in exchange for services. Ivanka, Don-Don, and Eric have been career business partners and campaign advisors for their father.

(Poor Tiffany’s face could be on a milk carton, for all I know.)

Donald Trump Jr. and Sr.

In other words, The Former President values his family to the exact extent that they provide him with wealth and power. Like a medieval French aristocrat, paternal love always carries an asterisk. Love serves the dynastic ambition. Should The Former President pop a rivet tomorrow, we’d probably see his three favored children immediately scrambling for advantage, much like Charlemagne’s sons fought over the empire their father rightfully stole.

Because Trump family love is transactional, Don-Don can’t imagine another well-connected family doesn’t work similarly. He’s conditioned to see economics, politics, and family as equally beholden to feudal prestation. Every Trump scion’s family position depends on their willingness to contribute to the business. Therefore, to Don-Don, the Biden family must have sordid connections, because unconditional love is for suckers and the poor.

Don’t mistake me; I’m no Biden apologist. Hunter Biden probably could’ve advanced as fast or as far as he did without extensive family connections. The investigation of his financial entanglements has progressed glacially, I won’t disagree. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the investigation has been politicized; it only proves that there’s insufficient evidence for a dramatic Florida-style search.

But there’s a difference between saying fathers help their sons out, and saying fathers buy their sons influence. Just as working-class fathers teach their sons work ethic, military fathers teach their sons discipline, and famous fathers teach their sons “da bidness,” it’s not unreasonable for powerful fathers to teach their sons the avenues of power. For Don-Don, that means the avenues of Manhattanite business. For Hunter Biden, that means Washington.

Admittedly, family connections create ethically squishy areas. Hunter Biden left MBNA to become a lobbyist while Joe Biden was a Senator, which makes my skin crawl. And not only mine; National Review referred to Joe Biden as “the Senator from MBNA” because Hunter was a finance-industry lobbyist while Joe co-sponsored a bill partially deregulating the credit card industry. So don’t misunderstand me; I don’t believe anybody has clean hands here.

However, I believe there’s a categorical difference between saying fathers try to encourage their sons to emulate their values, and saying fathers and sons have transactional relationships. Don-Don’s desperate flailing to make last week’s Mar-a-Lago search be about Hunter’s laptop demonstrates a massive lack of vision, one which Don-Don learned from his father. Because some fathers love their sons, and some fathers use their sons.

And when you’re in one kind of relationship, it’s impossible to see the other kind.

On Needing To Be There For My Father

Left to right: my father, me, my mother, and my sister, on my parents' 50th wedding anniversary

I’m the kind of nerd who finds connections between whatever I’m doing right now, and something I saw while watching Doctor Who. The show’s looming presence in my life colors my values, interests, and ability to process experiences. This weekend, I spent copious time contemplating the episode “Twice Upon a Time,” in which a digital reconstruction of the Doctor’s comapanion, Bill Potts, says: “I am the real Bill! A life is just memories. I'm all her memories, so I'm her.”

My father admitted aloud on Saturday something his family had long suspected: his memory is going. His doctor screened him and declared his memory loss only moderate, nothing worse than men his age regularly face. His doctor cleared him to continue driving, though his ability to recognize landmarks is diminishing, and he needs his wife there to remind him where everything is.  He’s still my dad, but maybe a little less so.

If Bill Potts is right, if memories make us ourselves, where does that leave my father? Which memories are, precisely, “him”? At present, he hasn’t forgotten anybody’s names or faces, important life events, or major history. However, he’s sketchy on making new memories, which means having long conversations with him—as I learned this weekend—is becoming difficult. He needs my mother around to maintain his focus and remind him where he is.

I haven’t always been receptive to my father and his memories. Because he frequently had little interest in the present, and often wanted to live, morally, in the pastoral recollections of his youth, his memories often didn’t seem relevant to me. Now that they’re fading, I realize those memories have nobody left to keep them alive. He hasn’t recorded his thoughts, like mine in this blog; when his memories leave him, they will vanish forever.

Someday, maybe soon, he’ll start losing meaningful experiences from his past. What happens when, for instance, Dad gets restless and reaches for a cigarette, forgetting he quit smoking nearly ten years ago? Will that experience jar him? More important, will it jar him enough to make new memories? Or will it become something he has to experience time and again, because for him, the event is fleeting and momentary? When will it start changing him?

The science fiction I enjoy often romanticizes nonlinear beings, who experience all time simultaneously. Yet watching my father struggle this weekend, I thought: such creatures would be incapable of growth and development. When all meaningful reality exists right now, we have no ability to have new experiences, or put old experiences into context. We can’t grow. We can’t be better people than yesterday, nor have hope of being better people tomorrow. We just exist.

In my youth, as I’ve written before, I wanted to stop history in some beatified past, which happened to correspond with my father’s youth, though I favored the hippie culture he rejected. I wanted all change to halt. So did he, for different reasons. Yet watching him this weekend, struggling to drive around town without guidance, or have sustained conversations, I realized (and I think he did too) that halting change has horrific consequences.

Yet for him, that decision is made. Therapeutic memory treatments, he tells me, have made little impact. The present, for him, is dwindling, and the future with it; soon, this diminution will start squeezing his past, too. That means the burden falls on me, someone whose faculties remain intact, to experience past and future for both of us. Put another way, I have to take responsibility for being present with him, because for him, every moment will be this moment.

He’s losing the ability to change, but I’m not. My ability to respond, to adapt to his requirements, gives me new opportunities to incorporate his experiences into my own. While he’s losing the ability to grow individually, we can grow together, which means I have a rare opportunity to be there for him. I can help him exist outside the moment. I can be present for him, just as, in my childhood, he was present for me.

Because I think Bill Potts was ultimately wrong. We aren’t built from our individual memories; that’s arrogant and egotistical. Our experiences matter, but we require other people to put our experiences into context. Western individualism and neoliberal economics forget that we only exist together, collectively; my family, friends, and community give me context and meaning. Now, as his present retreats and his future shrinks, I can be my dad’s context.

Family and Loyalty in New Doctor Who

Companions from the Russell T. Davies years: Rose Tyler (Billie
Piper), Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate)

Who are Bill Potts’ parents? I asked myself that question while recently re-watching the tenth season of the revived Doctor Who. From the beginning of the series’ revival in 2005, family origins have mattered significantly in Doctor Who, with the Doctor’s companions making frequent return trips to their birth families. Yet this has diminished in importance, to the point where I can’t assert, with any degree of confidence, that Bill Potts even has a family.

Fans knew, when the series returned from a sixteen-year slumber, that it couldn’t resume exactly where it stopped. Audience tastes had evolved; where each Doctor Who story in the classic series was essentially independent and hermetically sealed, viewers today expect stories to build sequentially, for characters to have arcs, with a clearly defined beginning and a conclusion where we believe they’ve accomplished something. In the original series, only some companions had that, often only accidentally.

For every character like Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s companion, whose dark secrets came from time travel itself, and whose tragic consequences preceded her causes; or Turlough, the Fifth Doctor’s companion, whose entire life was a fiction manufactured to trap the Doctor, we had characters like Sarah Jane, literally the Doctor’s most popular companion ever, who literally got dropped off at the conclusion to a completely unrelated story, simply because actress Elisabeth Sladen’s contract was up.

When Russell T. Davies resurrected the title, he immediately established that his show differed by making the entire first episode center on Rose Tyler. She’s already encountered the monster and started fleeing for her life before the Doctor arrives, and when he does, she’s mostly chagrined. The Doctor’s backstory, and the changes he’s endured since the original series ended, emerge only by increments. For the first several episodes, it’s clearly Rose’s series, not the Doctor’s.

Most importantly, Rose returned home in only her fourth episode. After one visit to the future, and another to the past, she immediately revisits home, something most original-series companions never did even once. Importantly, she revisits her mother and her old boyfriend, This proves fraught, but that doesn’t matter right now: Rose returns to her mother twice, and her boyfriend three times, in just her first season. Doctor Who basically becomes an emotional domestic drama.

Companions from the Steven Moffat years: Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur
Darvill), Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), and Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie)

This isn’t a complaint. Given the new-millenium audience’s interest in long-term consequences, it only makes sense to show how the Doctor’s seemingly carefree exploits create impacts on those left behind. But it also establishes a formula Davies found useful to repeat: all three companions from the Russell T. Davies years still lived with their parents, and all three returned home several times, including a visit that happened in episode four of every season but one.

The companions during Steven Moffat’s hitch had no such formula. From the beginning, we discover that Amy Pond still lives in the house where she grew up; but her parents are missing, something which becomes increasingly pointed as the series continues. The Doctor doesn’t even bring Amy home until episode six this time, and even then only long enough to collect Rory before popping off through time again. Home, this time, is a layover spot.

Eventually, through means too convoluted to explain again if you haven’t seen the episodes, that season ends with Amy heroically rescuing her parents from oblivion, celebrating her wedding at her father’s side. Yay for Amy, apparently. Except, after that episode, we never see her parents again. They’re scarcely mentioned. Rory’s father appears twice, once at some length, becoming one of Moffat’s more interesting characters, but doesn’t carry the same weight Rose’s or Martha’s parents do.

This pattern becomes exaggerated through Moffat’s run: we see Clara Oswald’s parents in one episode, but not with Clara. Clara has family she returns to, but the family for whom she nannies, not her own, and even they get written out after half a season. And Bill Potts? I only partially rewatched her season, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t recall her family mentioned, much less highlighted. Throughout Moffat’s run, families become increasingly unimportant.

Importantly, all three Davies companions ultimately return to their parents, and in codicils, eventually get married. Moffat’s companions don’t. Amy and Rory are trapped in the past, while Clara and Bill travel forever in some poorly defined afterlife. Moffat’s companions don’t come from anywhere, and they ride off over the horizon. Davies makes family both his characters’ origin, and their destination. Moffat makes characters exist entirely as they are.

And Chibnall? Too early to generalize.

Harry Potter and the Ties That Bind

Bonnie Wright (left) as Ginny Weasley and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter

It's been nearly three years since JK Rowling tweaked fans, by suggesting she got it wrong, and Harry Potter should’ve married Hermione Granger. Hermione and Ron, she says, have ultimately incompatible relationship needs, and would’ve ended up in the Wizarding World’s equivalent of couples counseling. Fans reacted, as they consistently have to Rowling’s dribblings of post-story revelations, with a mix of joy and horror suitable for US Magazine cover stories.

I disagreed with Rowling’s read when she first revealed it in early 2014. Harry’s feeling-oriented worldview would, I believe, clash horribly with Hermione’s more studied, cerebral approach. Where Hermione meets challenges by hitting the books and striving to learn more, Harry greets setbacks by charging ahead, Thomas Edison-like, and learning from his mistakes. So a Harry/Hermione marriage would’ve imploded anyway. But I still think Harry married the wrong witch.

Harry Potter should’ve married Luna Lovegood.

Bear with me here. Consider how Harry met his future wife, Ginny Weasley. While crashing at the Weasley cottage to avoid the increasingly autocratic Dursleys, Harry glimpses Ginny through a door. They never speak; she largely flits beneath his notice, while his legend looms so large that she’s dumbstruck and unable to say hello. Thus at first, they pass like two ships in the night.

During his later school years, Harry pursues a string of short, remarkably chaste romances with his schoolmates, most simply perfunctory nods to his coming-of-age while the real epic continues in the foreground. His arrival at Ginny, fairly late in his schooling, happens without much prologue; there’s little sense of what drew them together, unless you count mutual attraction (in the films, they’re both very pretty. Their children will be a supernova).

Rupert Grint (left) as Ron Weasley and Emma Watson as Hermione Granger

Okay, that’s fine. It’s a children’s series, and we don’t expect complete psychological realism. Except experts and fans have pored over these books in ways that make the Bible look underexamined, so perhaps this important subplot deserves more consideration. Because I’m not persuaded, from the evidence at hand, that this relationship will have sufficient staying power to transcend whatever happens after the Wizarding War is over.

Throughout the series, Harry keeps returning to the Weasley cottage in hopes of participating in a family. Harry’s desire for a family has driven much of his life’s narrative; he forges the Harry/Ron/Hermione troika in a train compartment because he’s desperate to belong somewhere. He prefers Gryffindor over Slytherin because he’d rather be unified by a cause with people he loves, than engage in strong politicking for the rest of his educational career.

Ginny, meanwhile, is drawn to Harry as a hero. As a young girl, she’s dumbstruck by his legend; as a young woman, she kisses him while he’s serving as general of Dumbledore’s Army. So Harry wants a family, while Ginny wants a hero. Harry marries the only Weasley daughter, basically to marry into Ron’s family, while Ginny marries the Boy who Lived. Maybe they both get what they want. Maybe it’s a fairy tale ending.

Except how will that last the trials of adulthood? The epilogue to Deathly Hallows reveals that, after a brief career as a professional Quidditch player, Ginny gets a sports journalist job with the Daily Prophet. Which probably sounds exciting to history’s best-paid author and her young, bookish audience. But Harry leaves sports for a career as an Auror. Yep, Harry gets a government job. Which, in post-Thatcher Britain, is probably a completely stultifying paper-pushing job.

So when Harry realizes that Ginny isn’t a carbon copy of her huggy, bombastic Mum, and Ginny realizes she’s saddled with a government goat and not the Duke of Wellington, this cannot end well for either. Meanwhile, they’ve named their only daughter “Lily Luna,” indicating they still consider Luna Lovegood an influence in their lives. Meaning Harry still thinks about the girl who once told him, “You’re as sane as me.”

Evana Lynch as Luna Lovegood

According to Rowling’s continuing updates, Luna has become a “magizoologist,” the Jane Goodall of the Wizarding World. Okay, she’s not the bosomy mothering type either, but while both Harry and Ginny settled down and got jobs, Luna continued venturing forth and seeing the world. This is the girl who, when Ron belittled Hermione in Year Five, followed her into the restrooms and dried her friend’s tears. So she remains both adventurous and maternal.

Throughout the books, the central characters call Luna silly names for her weird proclivities and her fondness for conspiracy theories. But when it comes to being a suitable spouse for a boy whose life has been surrounded by strife, and whose later years yield a career fighting evil, she just seems more interesting than a sportswriter. Maybe that’s because we see less of her in the story. But I really feel Harry would’ve been happier living with her, than the illusiion Ginny represented.

Weeds in the Children's Garden

Johann Christoph Arnold, Their Name Is Today: Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World

Johann Christoph Arnold’s manifesto for renewing childhood’s infinite potential really excites this ex-teacher’s ideals… at first. I like his principles of nurturance and play as tools to develop well-rounded human beings. His exhortation for adults to spend time around children, insisting this gives us opportunities to rediscover life’s wonder. As Arnold asserts, humankind’s philosophical and religious traditions reward people who see life through the eyes of a child. Through childhood, life makes all things new.

Yet Arnold repeatedly undercuts otherwise masterly arguments by failing to recognize nuance. Presumably writing for middle-class parents besotted by modernity’s flush suffusion of distractions, he urges us to forego self-seeking behavior, much loved in today’s technological society, and dedicate ourselves to childrearing as a nigh-religious vocation. He apparently doesn’t recognize the many working-class families who, despite noble efforts, cannot dedicate copious hours to their children’s well-being. Many would desperately love to do so, but can’t.

Who wouldn’t admire Arnold’s vision of classical “kindergarten,” where children encounter a mix of guided play and incremental responsibility, as means to improve their minds without deadening their souls? Were such options readily available, this childless ex-teacher would gladly volunteer his skills. (Arnold’s “kindergarten” survives today mainly in Montessori schools.) The problem isn’t that nobody wants these opportunities, or disdains them; it’s that, at society’s bottom rungs, such opportunities exceed hardworking parents’ ability to pay.

Arnold perhaps doesn’t realize how hurtful some statements appear. He writes: “When we sit texting on a playground bench while our kids play alone, whose time are we saving?” Okay, we’ve all known parents whose children raise themselves because their noses remain buried in an iPhone. I've read the documentation. But everyone has individual circumstances. What of overworked blue-collar parents whose only personal minutes happen while kids run free? They aren’t neglectful; they’re just poor.

Some parents certainly neglect their children because they’re preoccupied with moddish distractions. Some. But Arnold entertains no other explanation at any length; for him, all failure to provide hands-on childhood nurturance stems preponderantly from bourgeois self-absorption. Many of my factory colleagues, many with working spouses and second jobs, would desperately love more time with their kids. But Arnold’s rebukes seem particularly hurtful, because my colleagues can afford neither hip smartphones, nor time at the park.

Too many blue-collar workers castigate themselves because they cannot spare childrearing time like they remember from their parents. Since falling backward on society’s economic ladder, I’ve watched co-workers reduced to rage or tears because they must entrust children to older siblings while they work graveyards, then to schoolteachers and paid caregivers while they sleep by day. They live paycheck to paycheck, unable to bequeath much when their kids hit adulthood. They don’t need further guilt.

Though Arnold resists mere instrumental valuations, and I understand why, the fact nevertheless remains that children are costly. Children require fed, clothed, sheltered, entertained, and educated for fifteen years or longer before they’re capable of making more than salutary contributions to family coffers. Certainly this doesn’t make children worthless; unless you’re Ayn Rand, all humans have value beyond simple economics. But it does force working-class parents to budget money, time, and other finite resources appropriately.

But wait—humans, including children, certainly do have economic import! Writing the above paragraph, I remember something Richard Stearns of World Vision wrote, that when his charity dug communal wells through bedrock in isolated African villages, families found themselves suddenly free to limit procreation, because they didn’t need children to fetch and carry water. Pre-industrial agrarian societies encouraged large families because children constituted the farm’s labor force. Until recently, children had innate value only laterally.

Therefore, Arnold’s vision of lost childhood inherently requires degrees of economic autonomy not shared equally. Even in economically stable America, families who don’t resemble the supposed aggregate find themselves unable to dedicate time to their children like they’d prefer. And lumping overworked, cash-strapped parents together with their negligent or heedless peers essentially serves to shame poor people for being poor. I’m sure Arnold doesn’t mean that. But his failure to differentiate nevertheless produces this result.

I applaud Arnold’s ethical framework. Many women and men, even lacking their own children, share Arnold’s vision, and dedicate lives and careers to education, advocacy, and enlightened childrearing. I taught for four years, and would’ve continued if I could’ve afforded the penurious wage. But Arnold paints with a broad brush, apparently unaware that individuals have differing motives for superficially identical actions. A society-wide problem requires a society-wide solution, not chiding individuals regardless of their circumstances.

Fear Your Children For Fun and Profit

“Moms of America,” the matronly voice intones from the radio, “stand up! And stop taking abuse from your kids.” Several women’s voices follows, “pledging” to squelch their adolescents’ disruptive behavior through the Total Transformation Program, which you can receive, FOR FREE, by calling a toll-free number. Just in time, too, since these moms are “living in fear of my son’s anger” and “letting my child’s behavior ruin my house.”

This ad frequently dominates radio programming in off-peak hours, especially on stations with older base audiences. You’ll also find ads on basic cable’s seedier stations, where promotional rates come cheap. It encourages parents, feeling overwhelmed, to purchase the Total Transformation Program, which markets at $350 outright, plus a further $50 monthly for 24-hour on-call support. Customer reviews on assorted websites suggest purchasers either wholly love or outright hate this program.

Quite apart from whether the program works (feedback from child development professionals is decidedly mixed), the ad’s content makes my skin crawl. By characterizing adolescent rebellion as “abuse,” it encourages customers to regard their own children as enemies, and their behavior not as bad conduct, but as relationship violence. It forces us to re-examine a word we often throw around somewhat flippantly. What, exactly, is “abuse”?

Consider other situations we call “abuse.” We may say that parents abuse their children, either through action or neglect, and adults in peer relationships may behave abusively. Capitalists, politicians, and media figures may abuse their authority. We also speak of “parental abuse” or “elder abuse” when grown children exploit or maltreat elderly parents in their care. Abuse happens when the powerful selfishly or maliciously misuse authority over peers or subordinates.

Teenagers and dependent youths have no authority. Mostly-grown kids descend into oppositional defiant behavior because they recognize that autonomy exists, and they don’t have it, but they don’t understand why. They rebel, lashing out in ways they’ll regret in only five or seven years, because they have no other visible options. Teenage tantrums occur because kids lack power, even over themselves. How, then, can they abuse anybody?

Short of outright violence, teenagers cannot abuse their parents, because they have only what authority their parents bestow. Kids may disrupt their homes and act like royal shits, but because parents have the ability to close access to autonomy, childhood revolt has limited shelf life. Your rebellious kid may exit the house stomping, but when dinnertime rolls around and restaurants prove prohibitively expensive, expect many tear-streaked apologies, and soon.

How, then, to interpret Total Transformation’s advertising campaign? Parents certainly fear their children’s temper, especially today, when economics and culture have extended the arc of infantile dependence well into adulthood. Many “children” remain reliant on their parents’ financial support, even long after they have their own spouses and kids. If sixteen-year-olds balk at living under their parents’ roof, try telling them they’ll still be there when they turn thirty.

Instead of accepting adolescent rebellion as a necessary stage of impending maturity, Total Transformation encourages parents to consider it “abuse.” When we speak of child abuse, spousal abuse, or abuse of public trust, we’re describing prosecutable crimes. Unless, again, a teen’s misconduct escalates to violence, it misses this fundamental criterion. Yet Total Transformation encourages us to think in those terms, and it’s a short step from thinking to action.

While teenage misbehavior is hardly mandatory, it’s certainly common. Many kids must defy authority to understand why authority circumscribes their behavior. They need firsthand experience to recognize that rules exist for their protection, not to oppress or limit them. While some youth accept authority figures’ benevolent intentions, or find productive ways to assert their individual identity, others need a few bruises to grasp why they must limit their youthful impulses.

Instead, Total Transformation encourages parents to see defiant kids as criminals, foes whose lawlessness they must crush. They conflate compliance with goodness, resistance with evil. Docile, obedient kids are your allies; angry, lippy kids are invading barbarians who upset your stable home. Give us your personal phone, credit card information, and trust, they say, and we’ll teach you how to silence your children like the villains they are.

Back in the 1980s, various behavior modification programs offered to reprogram rebellious teenagers. Bad grades, crude language, and routine rule-breaking were redefined, often by non-specialists, as diagnostic of significant mental disorders. Kids got institutionalized for (no kidding) not loving their parents enough. The AMA and the National Institutes of Health called these programs “child abuse,” their graduates not so much obedient as suffering Stockholm Syndrome.

Whether Total Transformation’s program actually resurrects these attitudes, I don’t know. Some parents swear by it. But Total Transformation’s advertising actively courts the same mentality, the assumption that parents should effortlessly manage kids’ actions, that motivated torture facilities like Tranquility Bay. By encouraging parents to view their own children as enemies and criminals, I fear this campaign presages much grimmer trends in mental health.

The Delusionist's Wife

Pauline Hansen, Patchwork Reality: Happily Married to a Schizophrenic

I’m of two minds about this book. On the one hand, Pauline Hansen paints a harrowing story of her husband’s descent into adult-onset schizophrenia, a decline so gradual that nobody noticed until her family nearly imploded. Curtis Hansen’s madness unfolds with Christopher Nolan-ish creeping dread, like watching somebody else’s nightmare. On the other hand, Pauline could have stopped that nightmare by speaking up, and I start to wonder: why not?

Fourteen years and five kids into their marriage, the Hansens had reasonable blue-collar bliss. Two jobs, good community connections, and thriving family and religious life made them enviable when viewed from outside. But Curtis begins having dreams, which he believes prophetic. Pauline mistakes this for quirky behavior, and goes along. But quirks start accumulating, and Pauline uncovers small lies. None by themselves merit action. Nothing, individually, ever seems catastrophic.

Hansen’s account of her husband’s incremental madness has a horror movie’s imperceptible pace. I don’t make that analogy lightly. Weighing barely 140 pages altogether, Hansen’s memoir runs about as long as a Hollywood movie treatment, and like films, eschews introspection, preferring to emphasize action and interaction. Its narrative structure and tempo reflect films like Inception and A Beautiful Mind without directly copying them. Stephen King fans would feel comfy here.

Over nine years, Curtis gradually deciphers rules of The Game, an intricate reality show where wealthy investors subject the Hansens to experiments, testing their bonds. Pauline indulges Curtis’s rules while they seem merely annoying. But Curtis starts pursuing strange numerology. He makes life-altering decisions based on the colors of passing cars. He ultimately develops Capgras Delusion, believing his own children have been replaced by “proxy personalities.”

Curtis’s fantasy persists, partly, because momentary events verify it. Sudden gifts reflect his prophecy that somebody will bequeath them vast fortunes. Curtis believes somebody wants to tempt Pauline into infidelity, then a housecleaning client attempts a move on her. Since reality doesn’t actively contradict Curtis’s delusions, he becomes increasingly invested in The Game. The tests he uncovers, the ordeals he seemingly survives, make Jason Bourne seem small and unambitious.

Because Curtis reveals his secrets so slowly, Pauline feels no pressure to change. Each small concession fuels the next. But after dribbling details of The Game out for years, Curtis suddenly explodes, abandoning his job, smashing furniture with axes, and forsaking his children. Pauline extracts what’s going on by coaxing slow, painful confessions from Curtis. And he repeatedly swears her to secrecy before revealing even small details of The Game.

Here’s where my problem arises. Curtis’s supervisors call Pauline at home because Curtis vanishes for hours daily, and goes mute in public. Pauline’s children weep because Curtis stops talking to them. Pauline must make excuses to her parents and children when furniture vanishes with no explanation. Yet as Curtis turns Pauline into an unwilling liar, she continues concealing his destructive delusions… because she made a promise? Huh?

The horror movie analogy runs both ways. We understand Curtis’s decline, though we expect explanations (mid-thirties is awfully old to first manifest schizophrenia). But we don’t understand Pauline’s enabling. Like the bikini-clad coed who stupidly opens the haunted closet, this decision elicits not horror, but catcalls from the audience, who wonder why the character doesn’t realize she’s trapped in a slasher flick. Pauline’s own motivations simply need more explanation.

Pauline repeatedly references her religious faith. Indeed, the widening gap between Curtis’s faith and his actions is one major barometer that his cognition is impeded. I’d reconcile this problem by quoting Proverbs 20:25—“It is a trap to dedicate something rashly and only later to consider one’s vows.” Curtis extracts promises falsely; Pauline shouldn’t throw good money after bad by continuing to defend his indefensible actions.

Thus Hansen presents two narratives. In one, Curtis descends into his private reality, seeing himself starring in The Truman Show. In the other, Pauline doesn’t ask necessary questions, upholds false promises, and inadvertently indulges Curtis’s weird divination practices. Surely marital fidelity must require her, eventually, to call her husband’s bull. After all, by any reasonable definition, Curtis’s behavior toward her and their kids had already turned abusive.

Hansen’s portrait of her husband’s illness is both harrowing and humane. She demonstrates that schizophrenia doesn’t turn good people into psycho nut-jobs; people remain worth loving, even amidst their own madness. But she doesn’t shine the same all-seeing light on herself. Her enabling behavior isn’t incomprehensible, but needs some explanation beyond “he’d sworn me to secrecy.” Otherwise, I can do no better than to quote myself: “Huh?”

The "Everything's Okay" Gospel

Roy Page (with Sarah Horton), A Letter to Evan: An Average Dad's Journey of Discovery and Discernment Through Divorce

Oklahoma advertising executive Roy Page’s life shattered one year: Alzheimer’s took his father, his promising athlete son required invasive surgery that sidelined him from key games, and his marriage collapsed. Page’s sixteen-year-old son Evan got lost amid the catastrophes. So Page wrote Evan a letter, trying to bolster their relationship while resolving his own foundering life. That letter grew into this sadly self-serving Christian memoir.

I wanted to like this book. Authors have penned many thousands of pages about divorce and its family impacts. But most focus on small children; nearly-grown youths get short shrift. Page could’ve closed a glaring gap in this field, if he’d opened himself to his own shortcomings. However, he squanders the opportunity, spinning a mix of personal anecdotes, capped by gnomic morals that exonerate himself and trivialize what’s really happening.

Page essentially fails the Dave Test. Reverend Frederick Schmidt invented the Dave Test when his accepted seminarian bromides didn’t comfort his brother Dave through terminal brain cancer. Schmidt submits all Christian axioms to ten questions; Page fumbles, by my count, eight. These include, but aren’t limited to: “Can I avoid using stained-glass language?” “Can I give up my broken gods?” And most fundamentally: “Can I say, ‘Life sucks’?”

No, Page cannot say that. He cannot just be there with Evan, hurting. Instead, he performs appalling verbal gymnastics to justify why his divorce was inevitable, but not his fault; why prolonged physical absence doesn’t make him less present; why his time-consuming business demands were acceptable from a Christian man with a family. In Page’s telling, only vague abstractions are ever his fault. Cruddy circumstances just happen to him.

After dribbling out details for chapters and chapters, Page finally divulges the narrative of his divorce around the two-thirds mark. It’s the familiar story from his economic bracket: he ran the business, she ran the house, and their worlds scarcely intersected. Eventually, separate lives, lived at cross-purposes, ended their relationship long before courts vacated their marriage. They became two strangers, linked by their house and kids.

Except Page’s telling stays really, really abstract. In ten pages, he never says anything more specific than “The more passive I became, the more resentful she was of the burden of responsibility she carried.” Many marriages survive passivity and resentment. Why not his? People who know Page have posted counternarratives online, which aren’t mine to repeat. Briefly, people use vague, noun-free sentences to deflect banalities like blame or remorse.

This tone permeates Page’s entire memoir. Life’s blessings, like a successful business, resourceful kids, and community standing, Page treats in detail, praising God and his own ingenuity. Setbacks, like his twenty-year marriage’s collapse, remain fuzzy and accidental. Page tries to model his fathering skills on God’s Fatherhood, but in ways that don’t require him to actually be physically present for his wife and children.

Notably, while Page extols churchgoing and Christianity as family ethics, I counted only two Scriptural citations in a 200-page book. He quotes Jack Canfield, Babe Ruth, and Bill “Falafel” O’Reilly far more than God’s Word. For this white, upper-middle-class professional, Christianity is about what you get, not what you give. Page compares himself to Job, but only for the earthly goods Job lost and regained, not the pained debate.

Jack Canfield and BillO become what Schmidt calls “broken gods,” those man-made placebos that fail to sustain in dark hours. Instead of purging accumulated artificial reassurances, Page doubles down on the status quo, reassuring himself, and Evan, that everything’s okay, God’s in control, and weekends spent hunting and fishing make us family. Given the chance to make a new life with his son, Page opts to retrench his existing habits.

Instead of calling believers to new life, Page’s gospel ratifies this life, and this world’s standards. It requires no taking stock, no repentance, no change. It lets Page continue his jet-fueled former life unhindered, provided he darkens the church door often and uses Christian lingo. For Page, Christianity is a shield, an appurtenance he uses when need arises, when he, like everybody, clearly needs complete resurrection from this world’s ways.

Roy Page strikes me as a man who believes sincerely without examining deeply. He hasn’t purged worldly influences from his moral framework, and therefore justifies himself without needing more than cosmetic changes. Page and Reverend Schmidt could profitably have long, deep conversations, because Page is still a work in progress. He just doesn’t realize his own need, because his worldly privilege has shielded him from life’s harsher buffets. For now.

Mom and Dad as Learning Coach

Jen Lilienstein, A Parent's Playbook for Learning

If I learned anything in my teaching years, it’s that most “remedial” students don’t really have a problem with the subject. They have a problem with the system. Teachers and students talk past each other, and even eager students become discouraged because school seems like an adversarial environment. Education innovator Jen Lilienstein wants to give parents and teachers the tools to make kids better learners.

Many learning experts don’t actively analyze students’ learning until roughly high school, or older. Lilienstein focuses on grade school ages, adapting the concept of “multiple intelligences,” as popularized by researchers like Howard Gardner and Thomas Armstrong. This holds that human cognitive abilities, like your child’s learning ability, are separate, distinct components, not one big “mind.” Students have more ready individual access to certain intelligences than others.

The classroom model we take for granted, which all of us who went to public (state) school shared, is not necessarily the best way to learn. Lumping kids together based on age and geography, and stuffing them into a classroom with one teacher who may or may not understand them, is cost-effective, but pedagogically inadequate. Even more so today, when budget cuts pack fifty kids into many urban classrooms.

But unless you can afford to homeschool your kids, which most working parents can’t, you rely on schools to prepare your children for their adult roles. That means parents must translate often prolix concepts into approaches children can understand. Your child hasn’t learned to close that gap. As a former teacher, I can attest that if you and your child don’t close that gap early, you never will.

Lilienstein uses an abbreviated version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an inventory test designed to highlight personality strengths. She divides kids into eight learning categories, each of which could hypothetically subdivide further—use this book as an introduction, not a blueprint. Each learning type has its own distinct processing patterns, and parents and teachers can maximize learning by playing to these strengths.

Imagine your child loves activity learning, like art or sports, but has difficulty with reading. Lilienstein suggests teaching your child to finger-spell words in sign language, as a way to make English an activity. Or what if your kid prefers short bursts of activity over the tedium of book learning? Consider adapting Trivial Pursuit to make learning competitive, ensuring a measurable goal at the end of the process.

And not just your kids; Lilienstein suggests ways her principles can smooth communications with their teachers, too. Though she writes primarily for parents, Lilienstein encourages teachers to participate in the learning customization process. She has a lengthy section on group learning, allowing teachers to partner students with peers whose complementary abilities let them go farther. I don’t fully trust this idea—research on collaborative pedagogy is at best contradictory—but for teachers who share this value, Lilienstein’s analysis will help design better group environments.

Lilienstein divides her book according to learning category, signaled by helpful visual icons. This will especially come in handy for parents whose kids have different learning styles. My parents sincerely tried to help, but because my brain doesn’t work like theirs, their tutoring sessions frequently ended in tears. If they’d had this book thirty years ago, my life might look very different, and our relationship would feel much less strained.

I see two inherent risks with this book. First, kids could easily conclude adults will cater to them. Parents and teachers must emphasize that, while we want to utilize their learning strengths, they must learn to take the initiative. Lilienstein calls this a “playbook,” and illustrates the cover with a coach’s whistle, on purpose: while adults may call the play, students must run it in a field they cannot predict.

Second, parents could approach this book too passively. Many adults, like me, graduated from the “come in, sit down, shut up” pedagogical approach, and we learned to run the system by going along to get along. Teaching our children to be active learners requires breaking our own molds and thinking in innovative ways. We must constantly adapt Lilienstein’s guideposts to children’s growing minds, meaning we must grow, too.

Lilienstein wrote this book as a companion to her website, Kidzmet.com. Consider using both together to ease your child through the difficulty of school. Because we all need to learn, and cannot all afford private tutors, Lilienstein’s thoroughly researched assistance can make the difference between kids frustrated and discouraged by the system, and self-guided learners, ready for adult life.

Passion for the New Bachelorhood

Joe Keller, Single Effort: How to Live Smarter, Date Better, and Be Awesomely Happy

Two generations ago, feminists rebelled against the idea that an unmarried woman must necessarily be merely waiting for a husband. Now the tables have turned: we accept women who remain single, but look askance at male bachelors. Joe Keller survived a painful midlife divorce and returned to bachelorhood, only to discover that, like millions of single men, he lacked core survival skills. So he set about to rectify this lack.

I wish more of what Keller writes in this book qualified as common sense. We’d all like to live in a clean house that celebrates our interests while looking inviting to women. We all think men know how to meet and court women. Yet common sense and experience reveal that bachelor living skills, which look so obvious in romantic comedies, are very rare on the ground. Keller helps close that gap by combining careful research with hard-won experience.

The title comes, obviously, from the effort of living single in a world geared to couples. But it also describes Keller’s belief that we can make one effort fill two goals. Keeping your house isn’t just about having a presentable place to sleep; it’s a way to maintain a relationship with your kids, and a cue to dates about your personal qualities. Self-improvement efforts, such as fitness classes, can double as low-pressure opportunities to meet women.

Some of Keller’s advice is specific to divorcés: How to divide your marital possessions. How to make not just a living space, but a life worth living, at an age when you didn’t expect such upheaval. How to decorate a house so your kids feel at home, but your date doesn’t think you’re still hung up on your marriage. Some of this isn’t divorce-specific, though, considering that many engagements and courtships can outlast modern marriages.

Other advice applies to men at any relationship stage, and even to unmarried women. What do you need to make a complete kitchen? How do you keep a clean house on a single person’s tight time schedule—and when do you consider it a good investment to hire a professional cleaner? What household appurtenances are worth the money, and which will turn into mere household clutter? When the time comes, where can you meet a potential mate?

Joe Keller

Keller provides welcome guidance on living skills such as how to manage a kitchen. Too many bachelors live on carb-rich takeout, which shows on their waists, and their marriage prospects. Keller’s eminently readable, jargon-free guide to kitchen practice includes how to handle common ingredients, follow simple recipes, and pair food with wine. Your beltline and billfold will thank you for the knowledge. So will your date.

Speaking of dates, Keller dedicates the second half of his book to the presumption that, even if you’re single now, you don’t expect that for the rest of your life. Midlife courtship is categorically different than college romance, and many of the standards, like where to meet women and how to comport yourself, have changed. Dating is its own unique skill set, especially when you and she may both have kids, and Keller breaks it down into manageable, bite-sized nuggets.

For instance, many men see courtship as external. We don’t take the effort to make ourselves marriageable material. How we groom and dress make more of a difference than we care to admit. Likewise, bars and other meat markets make lousy places to meet committed spouses. Keller provides useful, nuts-and-bolts suggestions of ways to go where the women are, so you can meet and get to know them on favorable terms.

Perhaps Keller’s most important advice is not about dating, or housekeeping, or surviving the divorce. Underlying nearly every piece of advice, Keller wants to make sure you remain willing to live with yourself. You will never keep peace with your ex, maintain a relationship with your kids, build a life and career worth maintaining, and meet your next possible spouse, unless you first can stand your own company. That’s harder than it sounds, but Keller is there to help you out.

Many midlife bachelors have a passive attitude to being single. After all, our parents probably expected us to meet our spouses in school or early in our work lives; they never instilled the skills for late life singlehood. Keller provides the guidance we wish we’d had earlier on how to remain active in our own bachelorhood. Don’t wait for a wife to take control of your life. Be the man worthy of such a wife, now.

A Conversation With Society's Unremembered Side

Natasha Trethewey, Thrall: Poems

In her latest collection, poet Natasha Trethewey explicitly calls herself black, but engages in elaborate dialogs with her white father. This dichotomy drives much of her prior work, and she continues to explore what may be America’s most important question in the Twenty-First Century: when you have more than one heritage, how do you decide which one you are? Just as important, how do you decide which one you are not?

Modern sociology asserts that race has less to do with skin color, and more to do with how society treats us. Trethewey delves into that with questions about, for instance, how people made patronizing assumptions about a black mother walking a fair-skinned daughter, or the unstated assumptions of Monticello tour guides. These assumptions start to permeate our lives, sometimes against our will:

I did not know then the subtext
     of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—

the improvement of the blacks in body
     and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites—or that my father could believe

he’d made me better.

(“Enlightenment”)

Trethewey follows two parallel tracks in this exploration. Many of her poems draw their inspiration from classic art on themes of race and admixture. The above quote, for instance, begins with Jefferson’s official portrait, hanging at Monticello, and transitions to the present, when father and daughter visit the historic site. Not all the poems so forthrightly address how the past impacts the present; you may have to tease it out, but it’s still there:

Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the body’s lacuna,
     the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,
a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking
     pulled above the knee...

                    ...One man always
     low, in a grave or on the ground, the other
up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,
     the other a body in service, plundered.

(“Miracle of the Black Leg”)

Thus a recurrent theme of religious art, thankfully now abandoned—the dead negro’s leg transplanted onto a sick white man, like the dark body were an old Studebaker in a salvage lot—speaks to the present, when we still treat some people as resources to enrich others. Though Trethewey’s current commentary is largely implicit, such grim acknowledgments linger under much of her verse, a darkly ironic wink from poet to audience.

Natasha Trethewey

Trethewey’s artistic unpacking moves from medieval altarpieces, as above, through post-Renaissance artists like Diego Velazquez and his slave, Juan de Pareja, to a relative modern like George Fuller. (Trethewey does not reproduce the art here; Google Images is good for that.) Her ekphrastic examinations don’t much comment on themes of race, though. She prefers to let the work itself reveal the artists’ unacknowledged assumptions.

But art is a form of memory, and memory builds the heart of identity. Trethewey refuses to get mired in the past; instead, she always uses the past to comment on the present. Because we inherit a mixed society, born of mingled heritages, we always exist outside ourselves, commenting. Trethewey embodies that in a specific way, since she considers herself black, but her only surviving parent is white.

Perhaps, for Trethewey, art serves as the frame story for the conversation with her father that moves throughout this collection. Sometimes she literally speaks with her father; other times her father serves as shorthand for the less obvious half of her bloodline. Yet where such discussion could turn bitter (consider Amiri Baraka’s poems about his white first wife), Trethewey maintains both an affection and a closeness that channels Elizabeth Bishop:

To see a flash of silver—
     pale undersides of the maple leaves
catching light—quick movement
     at the edge of thought,
          is to be pulled back
to that morning, to the river it flashes still:
               a single fish
breaking the water’s surface...

(“On Happiness”)

Trethewey indulges a few of the contrivances that have become almost mandatory in current poetry: irregular left margins, sometimes sawtoothed or gently scalloped, sometimes jagged as lightning; in-line lacunae in place of punctuation. But she eschews the virtuosic flourishes that confound wider audiences. Trethewey’s verse is remarkably lucid and forthright, without losing the insight we associate with the word “poetry.”

This collection asks hard questions, and provides no facile answers. But Trethewey’s words stick with us because we ourselves are mixed—perhaps not in such obvious and literal ways, but nevertheless. Her verse causes profound, moving disquiet because we can look at it and recognize ourselves.

The Wandering Christian and the Lost Blessing

John Hagee, The Power of the Prophetic Blessing

On the one hand, I appreciate Pentecostal pastor John Hagee’s attempt to reclaim an ancient Jewish tradition as part of the Christian heritage. The blessings distributed by patriarchs, prophets, and Christ should be part of our faith, as they were for Jesus Himself. On the other hand, Hagee has not written the book he promised in the dust flap copy, and certainly not the book a scholarly Protestant like me would want to see.

When God called Abram out of Ur to found a new nation, God poured a blessing on the chosen patriarch. Isaac famously blessed Jacob (at Esau’s expense), a blessing that observant Jews have used as a model for parental blessings for centuries. Time and again, the Gospels talk of Jesus “blessing” the multitudes, and as Hagee notes, Jesus’ blessing was probably similar in form and content to Jacob’s blessing on his sons and their tribes.

So far, so good. I both like and agree with Hagee’s core thesis. Christians really should reclaim more of our Hebrew heritage. But then Hagee goes off on tangents. He throws in lengthy diatribes against evolution and abortion, and multiple discursions on Christian Zionism, all in just the early chapters. The point Hagee actually set out to make disappears, sometimes for dozens of pages. It feels like he’s begging me to disagree with him.

For instance, his Christian Zionist fulminations completely ignore that the modern state of Israel is largely secularized. Observant Jews emigrating internationally today are more likely to move to the United States than Israel. Likewise, in his jeremiads against evolution, he notes that Scripture says we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God, and exclaims (repeatedly) “You did not evolve!” He never says what makes the two exclusive.

It got to where, every time I put the book down to cook dinner or go to work, it took an effort of will to pick it back up again. He had a Scripturally solid core in his book, but he chose to ornament it with buzzwords and side remarks designed to connect with a pre-made conservative Evangelical audience. Did he perhaps include these irrelevant parenthetical digressions as an in-group signal? If so, that’s risky, because it also excludes new audiences.

Hagee crossed the final line with me in a text box which read: “Think on this. When a believer is in the middle of God’s will, he has perfect peace even during the greatest crisis of his life.” Beg your pardon? Was Job out of God’s will when he couldn’t take the pain anymore and cried out? Was Elijah out of God’s will when he felt he’d been abandoned by the straying nation? Scripture doesn’t seem to think so.

Claims like this alarm me, because they tell people suffering routine, human struggles of faith that they have already failed. If I believe Hagee, then when some setback or personal tragedy fills me with worry or grief, I start reprimanding myself for straying from God’s will. That seems like a small God to me, who cannot accommodate our fears and doubts without treating us like apostates. The God I worship is bigger than that.

Scripture certainly doesn’t blame Jesus for weeping at Lazarus’ tomb. It doesn’t devalue His blessings for praying at Gethsemane that God take this cup from Him. It doesn’t diminish His claim to divinity for Him wondering on the cross why God had forsaken Him. If the Son of Man can feel such suffering and doubt, yet remain the giver of eternal life, how arrogant must I be to think that I can never face life’s misgivings or turmoil?

In essence, Hagee tries to do too much, with the unsurprising result that he talks himself into a corner. He bounces from topic to topic so fast that he does none of them any justice. In so doing, he short-changes his core thesis, confuses people who don’t share his evangelical argot, and alienates readers like me who expect a heartier level of insight. As an ardent Christian, I should be among Hagee’s audience, yet this book leaves me frustrated.

Hagee is not the first to deal with these topics, and certainly not the best. While I think Hagee’s heart is in the right place, his incoherently inclusive style, frenetic wanderings, and questionable exegesis leave me cold. Trent and Smalley address the same topics in The Blessing, without the hyperbolic boasting or the cow paths. I like Hagee’s point, I just don’t think he’s the one to sell it.

The Movie Maker Learns To Type

Kevin Fox, Until the Next Time

Ever since Sidney Sheldon spooled a sheet of Boise Cascade into his old manual typewriter, every movie maker has wanted to write a book. In the back matter of his second novel, The Disappeared, MR Hall admits he started novel writing because it lends him perceived legitimacy. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as such; Stef Penney proved a good writer is a good writer, regardless of medium.

But Penney and Hall learned the difference between writing media. Books, which tell their stories with language and operate on a slow-moving part of the audience’s psyche, are not interchangeable with the screen. TV and movies, based on images and movement, speak to our reptile brains, which is why Will Ferrell is no PG Wodehouse. TV writer Kevin Fox, who produced Lie to Me, one of my favorite recent shows, proves that knife cuts both ways.

You can read Fox’s debut novel one of two ways. If you treat it like the suspense thriller the marketing boyos purport, you have an anarchic mishmash of stereotypes, boilerplate storytelling techniques, and short, frenetic scenes better suited to the big screen than to fixed type. If you treat it like a Monty Pythonesque satire of the thriller genre, then the confusing formulaic building blocks become part of the joke. I just can’t tell which approach Fox intends.

On his twenty-first birthday, Sean Corrigan inherits the journal of an uncle he didn’t know he had, along with a stack of cash, an airline ticket to Ireland, and a sacred mission to uncover the truth. Unfortunately, several pages are missing from the journal—apparently the pages containing the most important secrets of his fugitive uncle’s life. Every time Sean buttonholes somebody relevant to the decades-old mystery, he repeats some variation on this dialog:

“Your uncle bore some dark, threatening secrets.”
“Can you tell me about him and his secrets, please?”
“It doesn’t matter, and it’s not my place to tell.”

It got to where I couldn’t decide who I wanted to slap more, Sean or his various interlocutors. On the one hand, Sean’s frustrating passivity made me want to grab his lapels and shout at him to grow a pair. On the other hand, everyone around him wants to burden Sean knows something about him, to the point where it strains credibility. Dick Nixon wanted to hang Uncle Mike out to dry, and Sean never heard that story? From anybody? Ever? Please.

The bog standard foreshadowing becomes so tedious that the book descends into parody territory. Sean reads the entire journal in one sitting, yet releases it to us in dribs and drabs, so not only does everyone know more than Sean, but Sean knows more than us. The story intercuts between the past and present so furiously that you can hear the soap operatic organ music at scene changes. No character steps outside safe movie stereotypes at any point.

Fox offsets this shortcoming, at least somewhat, with his Mamet-like language. Because this novel alternates between two first person narrators, it would be easy for a writer unused to differing voices to write both parallel narratives in largely the same voice. Instead, Uncle Mike speaks like a hard-bitten cop from the Cool Disco age, while Sean really does sound like a confused Clinton-era slacker. And both speak like they’re talking, not typing.

Unfortunately, this virtue underscores my problem with the rest of the book. Fox creates a story that caroms through its paces with the clip of a TV miniseries. Characters who supposedly loom large in the protagonists’ lives exist only in glimpses brief enough to fit in a single take of film. Life-altering exchanges take only one or two pages. This is TV pace, not novel pace. The characters speak so well because Fox is writing TV dialog.

With its concise scenes and eager clip, I bet this would make good television. It easily mixes gothic suspense, police procedure, family drama, and even comedy. The language is so natural and easy that it would require very little adaptation. And, though it’s too long to compress into a single feature film, the TV miniseries format would let the camera explore Fox’s subtle, mordant world view.

But this book, as a book, is either a joke notable for masterful deadpan, or the reductio ad absurdum of its genre. Because of the author’s background in TV drama, I think he means it seriously. But that can’t be, because it’s so banal. Okay, then, joke it must be. Wokka wokka.

Pro-Life, Pro-Family, and Pro-Adpotion: The Rosatis' Pro-Active Plan

Kelly Rosati, a pro-life leader and ranking executive with Focus on the Family, has taken on a new role, advocating for possibly the most overlooked corner of pro-life philosophy, adoption. After all, if we insist that children, once conceived, must be born, Christians must also make room for those children whose parents can’t care for them. In her debut memoir, Wait No More, she describes, with husband and co-author John, how she has lived out that mission.

After years of devoted but childless marriage, the Rosatis, then living in Hawaii for John’s Air Force assignment, took in a foster daughter. Though that first attempt at Christian obedience went sour (Kelly’s storytelling is poignant), it opened their hearts to reaching out for children in need. After all, Scripture calls believers to provide love and nurturance to orphans. When a toddler with severe early circumstances came her way, they made their home his home too.

That was only the first. The Rosatis ultimately adopted four children, and Kelly tells each story with incisive, intelligent panache. All come from troubled origins, including drugs, mental illness, and abuse. Some came to the Rosatis after months or years in the foster care system, while one came to them only days after birth. And while the large household is unified in its fervor to serve God, the Rosati family is perhaps the most beautifully multi-ethnic you’ve ever seen.

While this was going on, Kelly also rose through the ranks of Hawaii’s Christian pro-family movement. She quickly had the ears of governors, legislators, and lobbyists throughout the islands. For a blonde haole from Wisconsin to reach such heights in Hawaii, America’s least white state, is remarkable. But she climbed so high without stepping on any toes, respecting Hawaii’s unique culture the whole way.

Indeed, despite a brief sojourn in Wisconsin, the Rosatis’ adoption journey took place entirely in the Fiftieth State. Nowhere else in America, Kelly suggests, could a family so diverse meld together so seamlessly. Kelly and John describe their struggles as adoptive parents—some of which are appalling, considering the low circumstances where their children were born. And they admit that many of their struggles are not yet over.

But God’s grace gave this solid, loving couple a heart to parent those who have no parents of their own. Over ten years into their journey, their children have become strong Christians, solid ambassadors of Godly values, and models of how well adoption can turn out. The Rosatis have taken their mission into the larger world, and their organization, also called Wait No More, has facilitated new adoptions and blended families throughout America.

Kelly and John Rosati

The Rosatis don’t write for a general audience. Their repeated references to God, Scripture, and Christ don’t bother reaching out to the secular world. Instead, they write for Christians, particularly those in the pro-life camp, which is often narrowly focused on anti-abortion causes without worrying about life after birth. The Rosatis call their fellow travelers to open their hearts to the whole of Scripture, and open their homes to lives that have already begun.

Importantly, they provide an intriguing antidote to certain attitudes which have circulated about conservative Christianity, particularly Focus on the Family. Following the lead of George Lakoff, many outside the conservative Christian camp have characterized those on the inside for their stern, moralistic outlook. Focus founder James Dobson advocates for stern parental discipline, including spanking. Lakoff has not bothered to probe any deeper.

By contrast, the Rosatis emphasize that stern discipline demonstrates, not dominance and authority, but love for those not yet capable of making their own best decisions. Christian parents, like the Rosatis, embody good moral direction for their children, setting guideposts until they become able to make choices on their own. And the kids’ stated eagerness for Kelly to keep up her advocacy says they’ve inherited the best of their parents’ moral compass.

Even their family structure flies in the face of outside caricatures. Kelly worked tirelessly, even as her husband made enough to feed the family, sometimes working from home when her kids needed her present. Now she has a nationwide advocacy campaign while her husband, retired from the Air Force, is a full-time dad. Thus they can embody conservative Christian values without rehashing outdated, repressive social models.

The Rosatis’ inspiring story should hopefully energize a long-neglected aspect of the pro-life debate. Their narrative should widen the narrative in American social discussion. God has been with them, and through them, God has given a gift to us.

Three Books for a Christian World

Having recently questioned iffy Christian reasoning, and cast aspersions on more new-fangled spirituality, maybe it’s time I explain what I support. Throwing bricks is easy; building foundations is hard. Three Christian books that recently crossed my desk give me that opportunity.

Megachurch pastor Kyle Idleman has grown weary of fair-weather Christians whose loyalty runs no deeper than that to their favorite team. In Not a Fan, Idleman describes a life lived in complete submission to God’s will and Christ’s mission. While many call themselves Christian because they were baptized and attend church, Idleman wants believers to examine their hearts and their Scriptures for how that means they ought to live.

Idleman takes as his text Luke 9:23—“Then [Jesus] said to them all: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.’” He intricately parses this scripture to find that we become truly Christian only when we die to those desires which aggrandize ourselves, but prove as fleeting as the wind. Only a life founded on God’s will can give us the meaning most of us constantly seek.

Little of what Idleman says is new; Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship addresses the same topics, but Idleman states them in language meant for lay readers. From an earthly viewpoint, Bonhoeffer and Idleman agree, Christianity makes little sense. What other philosophy calls its followers to die? Yet our short-term desires leave souls ultimately unfulfilled; only when we die to those desires can we take on the nourishing spiritual life.

Unfortunately, Idleman focuses a smidge too much on what faith calls us away from, less on what it calls us toward. But Mark Batterson stands ready to step into that gap.  In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day uses a nearly forgotten image, deep in 2 Samuel, to show how God gives us all a choice. We can step out boldly, confident that God has given us a life of constant opportunity; or we can huddle in man-made security and watch life pass by.

Notice how often, in Scripture, God’s opportunities look terrifying: a flood, a giant, a cross. But victory falls to those who seek God’s instructions and never let earthly fears part them from their goals. Not that God makes everything easy. Remember, Paul fled Ephesus fearing the crowd. But even that boldness helped found one cornerstone congregation of the early Church.

Like Idleman, Batterson doesn’t want Sunday morning pew warmers. Christianity, to him, gives believers courage to step beyond the known, secure, and comfortable, and change their world. Christ did not come to write sermons, but to fill us with boldness and steer us to act. If we would honor God, Batterson says we must first find God’s opportunities, and face up to them wrapped in Godly courage.

Batterson chooses a few wobbly terms to express his belief. Early on, he says that “God is in the résumé-building business,” and implies that God’s opportunities build us up. He corrects himself later, thankfully, before lukewarm believers can distort his meaning. Batterson’s spiritual heart is clearly in the right place; his tongue, unfortunately, makes some statements I wish he could take back.

If we submit ourselves to God and act boldly, our family will be the first to notice. Christian counselors John Trent and Gary Smalley noticed this, and derived the idea of The Blessing so parents can pass on the strength their children need in our complex, discouraging world. Our society tells parents not to get too close to their kids; but if we’ve died to the world, what do we care?

Trent and Smalley craft a step-by-step process, modeled on the blessings passed from father to son in the Hebrew Scripture, and from Jesus to His followers in the Gospels. Their process is simple yet sound, requiring nothing risky or dangerous, but demanding that parents commit to their children. On the surface, it seems simple, even obvious; but since modern society treasures autonomy and tells parents to keep their distance, it’s actually revolutionary.

Indeed, by limiting themselves to parents, Trent and Smalley sell themselves short. Modified to suit cultural standards, the Blessing could transform how teachers relate to students, bosses to workers, politicians to constituents, and neighbors to each other. By sharing strength and giving each other a vision to pursue, the Blessing could give us a stronger, more community-minded world.

And between these three writers, they build a world I want to inhabit. God willing.

Also in this review: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship