Leadingchurch.com

What The Right Used To Believe http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/10/what-the-right-used-to-believe/

Jesus Creed

5 Most Disturbing things

The Atlantic

Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children’s television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog’s offerings—the same proportion as during the interwar years.

The Atlantic

He was gay, and from New York, and shared her beliefs about spirituality—she describes herself as spiritual, but not religious. The two struck up a correspondence. She liked that he was dark-haired, since she is blonde, and figured they might make a good-looking kid, and they agreed on lots of things. Most importantly, they had similar ideas about parenting: They would be gentle and nurturing, with no yelling or spanking, and would not use baby talk, but would instead speak to the child as a “person already full of intelligence,” Pieke said.

“It felt like speaking to an old family member,” said Fabian Blue, the man she met on the site. He made a documentary about his efforts to find a co-parent, called The Baby Daddy Project with the clever tagline, “No Sex, No Marriage, Just the Baby Carriage.” Blue would set up his laptop with Pieke on Skype for dinner parties and special events, and the two would talk daily, sharing their hopes and fears for having a family, getting closer and closer to the conclusion that they might just want to make and raise a child together, though without any sort of romantic involvement.

“Three-parent families will be one of the next major legal issues for the LBGTQ community,” Adams said.

Adams and other lawyers recommend that families decide whether a sperm donor will be a co-parent or just a donor, and sit down with a lawyer to draw up an agreement. If they are planning on co-parenting, there are a few other things they should iron out too: Whether the family is going to share a bank account and retirement accounts, who will cover the financial costs of raising a child, whether the parents want to commit to living in the same city or not. What will happen if one of the parents meets a romantic partner? What if someone gets a career opportunity in another city? What is the division of responsibilities for child care and decision making? What will they do about vaccinations, and medical interventions, and schooling?

“Throughout history, the model that has worked for humankind was extended family—a village, a tribe,” Hope told me. “It’s only recently that we’ve started doing the nuclear family, with one mom and one dad, and it’s really a failed experiment.”

Gotta love how these articles align, not wanting kids is normal

The Altantic

Marginalia

The history of Protestantism since the 1970s has been hard on Liberalism. As Evangelicals increased, Liberals decreased. It has become difficult to write about American Liberalism without becoming either a critic or an apologist. Hollinger is neither.

He succeeds in transcending the internecine character of the debate by assessing Liberal Protestantism by its success in realizing its values in the broader culture, rather than by its demography or institutional strength. By this measure, he persuasively argues, Liberal Protestantism has been a success story. “The United States today, even with the prominence of politically conservative evangelical Protestants, looks much more like the country ecumenical leaders of the 1960s hoped it would become than the one their evangelical rivals sought to create.” A compelling truth, one that changes subtly but powerfully how we construe the “secularity” of contemporary America; in many ways, it is the fruit of one vision of Christianity.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/12/college_rape_campus_sexual_assault_is_a_serious_problem_but_the_efforts.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2014/12/conservative_case_for_gay_marriage_how_to_talk_to_your_antigay_religious.html

NY Times