A husband stood by his wife after her affair with a middle school kid https://t.co/PFojR41y7T pic.twitter.com/xe5rP3p8P3
— New York Post (@nypost) March 20, 2017
The teenage years can be mystifying for parents. Sensible children turn scatter-brained or start having wild mood swings. Formerly level-headed adolescents ride in cars with dangerous drivers or take other foolish risks.Keep reading.
A flood of new research offers explanations for some of these mysteries. Brain imaging adds another kind of data that can help test hypotheses and corroborate teens’ own accounts of their behavior and emotions. Dozens of recent multiyear studies have traced adolescent development through time, rather than comparing sets of adolescents at a single point.
The new longitudinal research is changing scientists’ views on the role parents play in helping children navigate a volatile decade. Once seen as a time for parents to step back, adolescence is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to stay tuned in and emotionally connected. The research makes it possible to identify four important phases in the development of intellectual, social and emotional skills that most teens will experience at certain ages. Here is a guide to the latest findings...
The most important words ever written are the Ten Commandments. These words changed the world when they were first presented at Mt. Sinai to Israelites, and they are changing it now. They are the foundation stones of Western Civilization.More.
Given their staggering importance, you would think that all societies, and certainly our educational and religious institutions, would be intent on studying them closely. Sadly, this is not the case. Our schools ignore them and our churches and synagogues take them for granted. But here's a simple test: Who among us can even name all of the Ten Commandments? And even among those who can name them, how many can explain them in a way that makes sense to the modern eye and ear?
If you are a person of faith, this book will strengthen it; if you are agnostic it will force you to rethink your doubts; if you're atheist, it will test your convictions...
There had been hope among some Catholics that the pontiff might overhaul its position on gay marriage, but the large document that ends with the hand-written signature of “Franciscus” — the pope’s Latin name — made it clear that would not happen. It said there are “absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar … to God’s plan for marriage and family.”
The document also made repeated references to Christian marriage as a “union between a man and a woman.”
A 4-year-old Aurora girl was kicked out of a preschool last month when her parents raised questions about books read in her class, including ones that told the stories about same-sex couples and worms unsure about their gender.Sickening.
Her mother, R.B. Sinclair, sees it as sex education and wanted to opt her daughter out of those discussions.
Instead, school officials from Montview Community Preschool & Kindergarten in Aurora — run as a private, parent cooperative — explained the stories were part of the school's anti-bias curriculum, and because the discussions are embedded through the day, they told her that opting out was not possible.
#Easter resists commercialism because its story makes a radical claim, says @JamesMartinSJ https://t.co/CvDs06BmnJ pic.twitter.com/CoOSguNtwX
— WSJ Life & Culture (@WSJLife) March 26, 2016
.@JamesMartinSJ eloquent on Easter @WSJ https://t.co/wLD7zJ59sN pic.twitter.com/ZhsLbXLb1L
— Nick Ripatrazone (@nickripatrazone) March 26, 2016
Pope Francis Sunday traveled to one of Mexico’s most dangerous and impoverished cities to tell the faithful that they must not negotiate with “the devil” and that embracing God will protect against the divided, conflictive societies that imperil the world.More.
He also paid recognition to Christians slain for their faith, “martyrs,” from centuries ago and from today—an allusion to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Africa, one of Francis’ great preoccupations.
More than a million people are believed to have attended the pope’s Mass, inside the venue and outdoors, in this scruffy suburb of the Mexican capital, braving cold temperatures in the morning to fan out over a wide area of the city, across block after block, to receive the first pope from the Americas.
“You cannot dialogue with the devil,” the pope said in his homily, departing, as he often does, from his prepared text. “He will always win.”
Instead, the pope said, people should embrace the spirit of fraternity to avoid forces that “try to separate us, making a divided and fractious family, a divided and fractious society. A society of the few for the few.”
"A divorced Waffle House waitress goes online looking for love and finds this weirdo loner." https://t.co/p58yALi978 pic.twitter.com/GfeLvJBIAY
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 29, 2015Liberals tell us it is heartless and “mean-spirited” to suggest that public safety would be best served if mentally ill people with histories of dangerous behavior were locked up in psychiatric wards. Americans are told that it’s OK to let delusional and antisocial freaks roam around free in our society, because what could possibly go wrong?More at the Washington post, "Alleged Colorado gunman was adrift and alienated."
When one of these dangerous kooks who roam among us finally commits the kind of crazy violence, however, liberals quickly rush to tell us that his insane actions have some kind of political significance and that the proper response to this atrocity is — wait for it — more liberalism. Another crazy killer, therefore, vote Democrat!
Liberalism would be laughable, if it were not so deadly...
Young adults, beholden to causes like climate change, abortion, and gay-marriage, view Republicans as "anti-science" and bigoted. Young adults in turn relate Republicans’ political views with their faith, and thus, run from both.
While a growing number of Americans, particularly within the younger demographic, shun religion, they have embraced another one in its place – that of secular-progressivism. What is perhaps most ironic, is that this political philosophy, so imbued with moral relativism, is as much if not more "anti-science" than the Judeo-Christian faiths its adherents mock.
Of course true believers do not see it that way. Rather, they view their political ideology as the more enlightened way forward and evangelize it with the vim and vigor. What results, however, is a populace that is less tolerant and increasingly devoid of a moral compass with which to guide it through life...
Every February, local Republican parties celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, complete with costumed re-enactors reciting the Gettysburg Address. It is one of the charming rituals of American politics, half playful, half earnest and all homemade.RTWT.
Better than dressing up like Lincoln is thinking seriously about his ideas. Much of Lincoln’s career was consumed by issues that—thanks largely to him—are long gone: We will never again argue about slavery in Kansas. But his principles are forever relevant: his love of freedom; his belief in work as the means of self-fulfillment; his devotion to America’s founders and their great documents. The Republican Party, which he helped found and which backed him loyally through the Civil War, is the natural repository of his legacy.
Lincoln’s greatest achievement, along with preserving the Union, was extinguishing American slavery. He won the presidency in 1860 on a pledge to stop slavery from expanding into new territories; in January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves of rebels; the 13th Amendment, approved by Congress in January 1865 with his support, abolished slavery nationwide. As a result of his efforts four million bondmen and -women were freed.
But Lincoln believed in freedom as a universal right, “applicable,” as he put it in 1859, “to all men and all times.” Lincoln thought liberty and tyranny were locked in an age-old struggle. He repeatedly linked slavery to older forms of despotism. “A king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation,” he said in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, was animated by “the same tyrannical principle” as “one race of men . . . enslaving another race.” But Lincoln’s comparison applies equally to the modern metastasized state.
Lincoln understood the necessary limits of democratic government: The people could become their own oppressors if they endorsed tyranny. If a “man governs himself that is self-government,” he said in 1854, “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”
Lincoln’s faith in freedom was bound up with his views on work. Lincoln rose from frontier subsistence farming to the professional middle class by his own efforts. As a teenager he resented his father, Thomas Lincoln, for hiring him out as an unpaid laborer, as if he were a horse or a plow. As a young adult he tried a variety of jobs to support himself, from blacksmithing to surveying, until he finally taught himself the law. Lawyers could make good money in early-19th-century America, but it was never easy. Twice a year Lincoln traveled Illinois’ 8th judicial circuit (approximately the size of Connecticut) to earn fees from criminal cases and small claims. He also argued for railroads, the big businesses of the day....
Lincoln claimed to be preserving the Founders’ handiwork. Their principles were his; his solutions fulfilled their aims. In the Gettysburg Address, he called, not for a birth of new freedom, but “a new birth of freedom”—the Founders’ freedom, cleansed by removing the stain of slavery. For Lincoln the road to America’s future always began in its past...
There are many kinds of courage in the world, of which a mother’s courage is a very specific and demanding variety. Rape is a special kind of cruelty in that it transforms the life-giving act into an act of torture. To suffer the crime and yet cherish the life is an act of transcendence, a perfection of generosity rarely if ever equaled by the merely human.
