Tag: parenthood

The Duggar family in 2021, from their official Facebook page.

1,723 words

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023)
Directed by Olivia Crist & Julia Willoughby Nason

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. — Psalm 127:3-5 KJV (more…)

John Singleton Copley, “The Copley Family,” 1776

2,340 words

Part 2 here

Christopher Lasch famously described the family as a “haven in a heartless world.”[1] How is the world heartless, and how is the family a haven? For Lasch, the heartlessness of the world has everything to do with the increasing liberalization and economization of life. (more…)

2,318 words

Michael Brendan Dougherty
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home
New York: Sentinel Books, 2019

When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. One was that it was a wistful, sometimes bittersweet memoir about growing up without a father, because the father was off in Ireland, having never married Dougherty’s American mother; and also, the author had some romantic notions about Ireland, and wasn’t that special.  (more…)

1,209 words

Invaders from Mars is a sci-fi film said to encompass all of the paranoia of the 1950s. Director Cameron Menzies realizes this film as the horror of a child trapped in a nightmare. David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), wakened by horrific thunder, looks outside his window and sees a flying saucer land and submerge itself underground. (more…)

Phil Eiger Nemann, The G-Bomb, 2021.

1,705 words

I’d been vaguely and reluctantly aware of the term “gender reveal party” for years, and without bothering to look into it, I always presumed it was some wacky sort of shindig that trannies threw when they wanted to expose their shiny new $100,000 surgical cybernetic genitals to their friends, family, clergy, therapists, nieces, nephews, probation officers, and meth dealers. (more…)

Mark Baumer

1,534 words

So much of what passes for journalism these days is reductionist. What is worse is that there is an ideological underpinning that once would have been considered unacceptable in filing news stories. The tragic death of Ashli Babbitt and the way it’s been covered in the days following her being shot by a member of DC’s Capitol police illustrates the Left-leaning bent of today’s media establishment. Then, of course, there is the garbage excusing a black cop shooting a white woman because. . . he was scared and his superiors weren’t supportive. Bullshit! (more…)

8,088 words

O my brothers, I dedicate and direct you to a new nobility: you shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future — verily, not to a nobility that you might buy like shopkeepers and with shopkeepers’ gold: for whatever has its price has little value. (more…)