Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:05:04 -0800WeeblySat, 29 Oct 2011 17:42:19 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/10/virtue-of-kindness.html On a busy street corner in midtown Manhattan in September, two old friends have come together to mark an anniversary of sorts. “This is where we met,” says Maurice Mazyck, 37. “Wait, wasn’t it further up the block?” asks Laura Schroff, 60. They finally settle on a spot and hug. “Sometimes,” says Mazyck, “I wonder if I would be here at all if you hadn’t done what you did.”

It was there on Monday, Sept. 1, 1986, that Mazyck, then a skinny 11-year-old in grimy sweats and sneakers, stuck out his hand as Schroff walked by. Thirty-five at the time and a successful newspaper executive, Schroff lived just two blocks away from Mazyck in New York City, but their homes might as well have been on different planets—he lived in a welfare hotel, she in a luxury high-rise.

“Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change?” he asked, hoping to buy some food. Schroff didn’t answer and kept going.

Ellen Degeneres' Guide to Gift Giving

But then, just a few steps later, she stopped, turned, and came back. Instead of giving the boy money, she took him to lunch at McDonald’s. He got a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate shake that day—and the two of them wound up with an extraordinary friendship that has changed both their lives. “Of all the achievements in my life,” says Schroff, who spent three decades in advertising sales before retiring in 2009, “there is nothing that makes me prouder than to call Maurice my friend.”

In 1986, the hungry child Schroff encountered was already trapped in a cycle of poverty, drugs, and violence. His father, a gang member, left when Maurice was 6; his mother was a heroin and crack addict. He had never known an adult who held a full-time job, and he’d received only two presents in his young life: a toy truck and a joint. Still, Mazyck, who today owns a small construction firm, says, “I know my mother did the best she could.”

And then he met Schroff. At the end of their lunch, she gave him her card and told him to call if he was hungry. After three days with no word, Schroff went looking for him. “I felt like he’d entered my life for a reason,” she says. Mazyck was on the corner where they’d met. They agreed to meet the following Monday, and the Monday after that, and a ritual evolved.

At first she took him out to dinner, but soon she began cooking for him at her place. The simple things they did on their nights together—setting the table, doing laundry, or just sitting and talking—were the kinds of comforting activities on which most childhoods are built, but they were foreign to Mazyck. Tellingly, no one in his family ever wondered where he was. When Schroff offered to make him lunch for school, he asked that she put it in a brown paper bag. “When kids see you walk in with a paper bag,” he explained, “they know someone cares about you.”

Why We Gave Away Our Home

But the impact Schroff had on Mazyck is only half the story. “When people tell me how lucky Maurice was,” she says, “I tell them, ‘I was the lucky one.’” She, too, had a turbulent childhood. Her father had a drinking problem and often hit her mother and brother. Schroff vowed that when she had kids, they would always feel safe.

With Mazyck, Schroff could try to repair some of the damage in his life that she couldn’t go back and fix in her own. And in the process he helped her see what truly matters. Watching him experience things for the first time—she took him to his first baseball game, bought him his first bicycle, let him decorate his first-ever Christmas tree—opened her eyes to the joy and beauty around her. “Sometimes those blessings are right there in front of you, just as Maurice was in front of me on the street,” says Schroff. “Sometimes you just have to open your eyes and open your heart.”

Then, in 1997, Mazyck, 22, vanished from Schroff’s life. She tried to track him down, but he had moved to North Carolina to try to set up a business. “I had to go away and become a man on my own,” he says now. There, Mazyck faced the temptation to make easy money selling drugs, as so many men in his family had done, but he resisted. “Because of Laura, I made the right decisions.”

He finally called Schroff in 2000 after his mother died. “I told her, ‘You are my mother now.’” She bore him no grudge for his absence. “I’d never given up on Maurice,” she says.

When Schroff helped the boy she met on the street get a shot at a better future, she was extending that same opportunity to his kids. Today Mazyck is a proud husband and father, and he and his wife have seven children, ages 4 to 19. He and Schroff see each other at least once a month. When she visits his New York City apartment, his kids swarm over their “Aunt Laurie.” “I have my own family,” says Schroff, who has three siblings and five nieces and nephews, “but they are my family, too.”

Back in 1986, Schroff took Mazyck to her sister’s house in the suburbs. For the first time, he sat down for a meal with her family at a large dining-room table. “To me, it was magical. I told them when I grew up, I’d have a big table in my home,” he says. True to his word, he now owns a huge dinner table, where he and his big, noisy family—and his friend Laura—eat and talk and count their blessings.

Alex Tresniowski is the coauthor of An Invisible Thread, on sale Nov. 1. The book tells the story of Schroff’s and Mazyck’s unlikely 25-year-long friendship.
This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. ]]>Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:15:52 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/10/and-baby-makes-seven-billion-10202011-wsj.html And Baby Makes Seven Billion

By WILLIAM MCGURN

Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby. That's especially true when that baby is born to a mother somewhere in Africa or Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, some time this coming Monday, probably in India, the world will welcome its seven billionth person. Well, maybe welcome isn't exactly the right word.

At Columbia University's Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN "the consequences for humanity could be grim." Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared "the earth is full," suggesting that a growing population means "we are eating into our future." And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a "human swarm" that is "overbreeding" in a way that "prosperous, well-educated families" from the developed world do not.

The smarter ones acknowledge that Malthus's ominous warnings about a growing population outstripping the food supply were not borne out in his day. The track record for these scares in our own day is not much better. Perhaps the most famous was Paul Ehrlich's 1968 "The Population Bomb," which opened with these sunny sentences: "The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of "triage" that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when "The Population Bomb" appeared.

The record, alas, doesn't seem to matter. Like so many other articles on population, one in the New Yorker this month concedes that the predictions Malthus made "proved to be wrong." Like so many other articles too, it goes on to conclude that "the premise of [his] work—that there must be some limit to population growth—is hard to argue with."

The truth is that the main flaw in Malthus is precisely his premise. Malthusian fears about population follow from the Malthusian view that human beings are primarily mouths to be fed rather than minds to be unlocked. In this reasoning, when a pig is born in China, the national wealth is thought to go up, but when a Chinese baby is born the national wealth goes down.

Behind this divide between those who worry about limits put on human exchange and those who worry about limits to growth are two very different views of the human person. The former believe that so long as people are free to trade and use their talents, the more the merrier. The latter treat people as a great mass of more or less interchangeable cogs, hence the worries about "sustainability" and "carrying capacity" and the like.

This latter is a highly static view, one that grossly underestimates the power of an individual to improve life for millions. Perhaps the best example of that power is Norman Borlaug, whose scientific work introduced high-yield varieties of wheat and rice that helped farmers greatly increase their food production. In so doing, the "father of the Green Revolution" helped poor nations feed their people, and give the lie to all those predictions of hopelessness and starvation from Mr. Ehrlich and Co.

  The static view of the human person underestimates the dynamism of ordinary men and women going about their business in a free economy. The young people "occupying" Wall Street may decry capitalism, but societies open to risk and initiative and free exchange have always done better by the "99%" than those that do not. That is why a place like Hong Kong, with no natural resources, has prospered while many other countries rich in natural resources (some in Africa) have not.

Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," suggests that human progress is driven when people connect with one another and exchange ideas as well as goods. In our own day, he believes, this interaction has been accelerated by the revolution in technology that has made distance largely irrelevant. It's one reason he takes a generally benevolent view of population growth.

In a line bound to seem extravagant to the doom and gloom set, he offers his own prediction: "I would go further and say that the mixing of ideas made possible by the Internet makes the drying up of innovations almost impossible to achieve, even if we wanted to, and the improvement in living standards almost inevitable."

In short, it all comes down to your conception of the human person. Another way of putting it is this: Instead of looking for ways to reduce the number of people at the banquet of life, we would do better to look for ways to lay a better and more bounteous table.

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

]]>Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:13:50 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/10/reversing-the-decay-of-london-undone-wsj-08202011.html Reversing the Decay of London Undone Britain's chief rabbi on the moral disintegration since the 1960s and how to rebuild

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By JONATHAN SACKS It was the same city but it might have been a different planet. At the end of April, the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration. Less than four months later, the world was watching London again as hooded youths ran riot down high streets, smashing windows, looting shops, setting fire to cars, attacking passersby and throwing rocks at the police.

Panos Pictures A priest and an imam join with the local community to pray as they begin to clean up the damage in the London borough of Hackney. In the 1800s, in Britain and America, religious and community organizations 're-moralized' those countries.

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

Let us be clear. The numbers involved were relatively small. The lawkeepers vastly outnumbered the lawbreakers. People stepped in to rescue those attacked. Crowds appeared each morning to clear up the wreckage of the night before. Britain remains a decent, good and gracious society.

But the damage was real. Businesses were destroyed. People lost their homes. A 68-year-old man, attacked by a mob while trying to put out a fire, died. Three young men in Birmingham were killed in a hit-and-run attack. While it lasted, it was very frightening.

It took everyone by surprise. It should not have.

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in "The Closing of the American Mind": "I am the Lord Your God: Relax!"

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a Unicef report found that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women—91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data—is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain's major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

This was the bursting of a dam of potential trouble that has been building for years. The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average—and yes, there are exceptions—do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to land up in jail.

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world's resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the "obsessional neurosis" of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

There are large parts of Britain, Europe and even the United States where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you're worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is "Thou shalt not be found out."

Has this happened before, and is there a way back? The answer to both questions is in the affirmative. In the 1820s, in Britain and America, a similar phenomenon occurred. People were moving from villages to cities. Families were disrupted. Young people were separated from their parents and no longer under their control. Alcohol consumption rose dramatically. So did violence. In the 1820s it was unsafe to walk the streets of London because of pickpockets by day and "unruly ruffians" by night.

What happened over the next 30 years was a massive shift in public opinion. There was an unprecedented growth in charities, friendly societies, working men's institutes, temperance groups, church and synagogue associations, Sunday schools, YMCA buildings and moral campaigns of every shape and size, fighting slavery or child labor or inhuman working conditions. The common factor was their focus on the building of moral character, self-discipline, willpower and personal responsibility. It worked. Within a single generation, crime rates came down and social order was restored. What was achieved was nothing less than the re-moralization of society—much of it driven by religion.

It was this that the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw on his visit to America in 1831. It astonished him. Tocqueville was expecting to see, in the land that had enacted the constitutional separation of church and state, a secular society. To his amazement he found something completely different: a secular state, to be sure, but also a society in which religion was, he said, the first of its political (we would now say "civil") institutions. It did three things he saw as essential. It strengthened the family. It taught morality. And it encouraged active citizenship.

Nearly 200 years later, the Tocqueville of our time, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, made the same discovery. Mr. Putnam is famous for his diagnosis of the breakdown of social capital he called "bowling alone." More people were going bowling, but fewer were joining teams. It was a symbol of the loss of community in an age of rampant individualism. That was the bad news.

At the end of 2010, he published the good news. Social capital, he wrote in "American Grace," has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it then, Robert Putnam is saying it now. It needs religion: not as doctrine but as a shaper of behavior, a tutor in morality, an ongoing seminar in self-restraint and pursuit of the common good.

One of our great British exports to America, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, has a fascinating passage in his recent book "Civilization," in which he asks whether the West can maintain its primacy on the world stage or if it is a civilization in decline.

He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said: At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.

It was the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its restless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. The question is: Will we?

—Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth ]]>Sat, 09 Jul 2011 19:06:54 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/07/the-divorce-generation-7811-wsj.htmlEvery generation has its life-defining moments. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: "Where were you on D-Day?" For baby boomers, the questions are: "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" or "What were you doing when Nixon resigned?"

Every generation has its defining moment. For Generation X, it could be: "When did your parents get divorced?" Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the memoir "In Spite of Everything," explains what she sees as its long-term effects on marriage and parenting.

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: "When did your parents get divorced?" Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

When my dad left in the spring of 1981 and moved five states away with his executive assistant and her four kids, the world as I had known it came to an end. In my 12-year-old eyes, my mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, was transformed into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. My brother, a sweet, goofy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark graphic novels and computer games.

I spent the rest of middle and high school getting into trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, spending a good part of my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Whenever I saw my father, which was rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts.

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

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"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Not ours. According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We're also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

Before we get married, we like to know what our daily relationship with a partner will be like. Are we good roommates? A 2007 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that, among those entering first marriages in the early 2000s, nearly 60% had previously cohabited with their future spouses. According to the U.S. government's 2002 National Survey of Fertility Growth, 34% of couples who move in together have announced publicly that marriage is in the future; 36% felt "almost certain" that they'd get hitched, while 46% said there was "a pretty good chance" or "a 50-50 chance."

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

People my parents' age say things like: "Of course you'd feel devastated by divorce, honey—it was a horrible, disorienting time for you as a child! Of course you wouldn't want it for yourself and your family, but sometimes it's better for everyone that parents part ways; everyone is happier."

Such sentiments bring to mind a set of statistics in "Generations" by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has stuck with me: In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children's sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. "Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward," the authors write, "but a majority of their children feel otherwise."

20th Century Fox Many Generation X parents are all too familiar with the brutal court fights of their parents, and today, 'friendly divorces' are increasingly common. Here, Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in 1989's 'The War of the Roses.'

But a majority of their children feel otherwise. There is something intolerable about that clause. I can't help feeling that every divorce, in its way, is a re-enactment of "Medea": the wailing, murderously bereft mother; the cold father protecting his pristine, new family; the children: dead.

When I had my first child at 32, I went into therapy for a while to sort through, among other things, just why the world—as open and wonderful as it had become with my child's presence—had also become more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. It wasn't until my daughter was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatricians and child-care books referred to "separation anxiety," they were referring to the baby's psyche, not to mine.

The thought of placing her in someone else's care sent waves of pure, white fear whipping up my spine. It occurred to me that perhaps my own origins had something to do with what a freak show I was. After hearing about my background for some time, my distinguished therapist made an announcement: "You," she said, "are a war orphan."

Orphans as parents—that's not a bad way to understand Generation X parents. Having grown up without stable homes, we pour everything that we have into giving our children just that, no matter how many sacrifices it involves. Indeed, Gen-X's quest for perfect nests drove us to take out more home equity loans and to spend more on remodeling, per capita, than any generation before it, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Marketing surveys reveal that Generation X mothers don't seek parenting advice from their own moms. Why would we take counsel from the very people who, in our view, flubbed it all up? Instead, says the research, we depend on the people who actually raised us, albeit wolf-pack style: our friends.

To allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst childhood fears. More horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on what we most love and want to protect: our children. It is like slashing open our own wounds and turning the knife on our babies. To consider it is unbearable.

My husband and I were as obvious as points on a graph in a Generation X marriage study. We were together for nearly eight years before we got married, and even though statistics show that divorce rates are 48% higher for those who have lived together previously, we paid no heed.

We also paid no heed to his Catholic parents, who comprised one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I'd ever met, when they warned us that we should wait until we were married to live together. As they put it, being pals and roommates is different from being husband and wife. How bizarrely old-fashioned and sexist! We didn't need anything so naïve or retro as "marriage." Please. We were best friends.

Sociologists, anthropologists and other cultural observers tell us that members of Generation X are more emotionally invested in our spouses than previous generations were. We are best friends; our marriages are genuine partnerships. Many studies have found that Generation X family men help around the house a good deal more than their forefathers. We depend on each other and work together.

Adultery is far more devastating for us than it was for our parents or grandparents. A 2003 study by the late psychologist Shirley Glass found that the mores of sexual infidelity are undergoing a profound change. The traditional standard for men—love is love and sex is sex—is dying out. Increasingly, men and women develop serious emotional attachments with their would-be lovers long before they commit adultery. As a result, she found, infidelity today is much more likely to lead to divorce.

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Everett Collection In 'Kramer vs. Kkramer' (1979) young Billy is caught in a custody battle.

Call us helicopter parents, call us neurotically attached, but those of us who survived the wreckage of split families were determined never to inflict such wounds on our children. We knew better. We were doing everything differently, and the fundamental premise was simple: "Kids come first" meant that we would not divorce.

But marriages do dissolve, even among those determined never to let it happen. After nine years, my husband and I had become wretched, passive-aggressive roommates. I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. My husband had not been able to "find time" to read the book I had written. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn't slept in the same room for at least two years, a side effect of the nighttime musical bed routine that parents of so many young children play in semiconsciousness for years on end.

Yet I never considered divorce. It never even entered my mind. I was grateful that my babies had a perfect father, for our family meals, for the stability of our home, for neighborhood play dates.

But then, one evening, I found myself where I vowed I'd never be: miserable, in tears, telling my husband that we were like siblings who couldn't stand each other rather than a couple, and listening as my husband said he felt as though we had never really been a couple and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier. "I'm done," he said. It was as if a cosmic force had been unleashed; the awful finality of it roared in like an enormous black cloud blotting out the sky, over every inch of the world. It was done.

That was four years ago. Even now, I still wonder every day if there was something that I—we—could have done differently. Like many of my cohort, the circumstances of my upbringing led me to believe that I had made exactly the right choices by doing everything differently from my parents.

I had married the kindest, most stable person I'd ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

I don't know what makes a good marriage. I am inclined to think that Mark Twain was right when he wrote in an 1894 journal: "No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century." But I did know something about divorce, and I wanted—and my former husband wanted—to do it as "well" as possible.

Many of us do. The phrase "friendly divorce" may strike some as an oxymoron, but it is increasingly a trend and a real possibility. Relatively inexpensive and nonadversarial divorce mediation—rather than pricey, contentious litigation—is now more common than ever. Many of us are all too familiar with the brutal court fights of our parents, and we have no intention of putting our kids through it, too. According to a recent University of Virginia study, couples who decide to mediate their divorce are more likely than those who go to court to talk regularly about the children's needs and problems, to participate in school and special events, daily activities, holidays and vacations.

We may not make it in marriage, but we still want to make it as parents. In the '70s, only nine states permitted joint custody. Today, every state has adopted it. It was once typical for dads to recede from family life, or to drop out altogether, in the wake of a divorce. But dads are critical in helping kids to develop self-esteem and constructive habits of behavior. A 2009 study published in the journal Child Development found, for example, that teenagers with involved fathers are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities.

Joint custody also reduces family strife. According to a 2001 study, couples with such arrangements report less conflict with their former spouses than sole-custody parents—an important finding, since judges have worried, historically, that joint custody exposes children to ongoing parental fighting. Some divorced couples have even decided to continue living together in different parts of the home—or to "swap out" each week—in order to maintain some measure of stability for their kids.

I have yet to meet the divorced mother or father who feels like a good parent, who professes to being happier with how their children are now being raised. Many of us have ended up inflicting pain on our children, which we did everything to avoid.

But we have not had our parents' divorces either. We can only hope that in this, we have done it differently in the right way.

—Adapted from "In Spite of Everything: A Memoir" by Susan Gregory Thomas, to be published by Random House next week. Copyright © by Susan Gregory Thomas. ]]>Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:06:09 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/06/catholic-university-goes-back-to-single-sex-dorms-wsj-61311.html By JOHN GARVEY My wife and I have sent five children to college and our youngest just graduated. Like many parents, we encouraged them to study hard and spend time in a country where people don't speak English. Like all parents, we worried about the kind of people they would grow up to be.

We may have been a little unusual in thinking it was the college's responsibility to worry about that too. But I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the "Nicomachean Ethics" that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you "must have been brought up in good habits." The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.

"Virtue," Aristotle concludes, "makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means." If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.

I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it.

The effects are not all fun. Rates of depression reach 20% for young women who have had two or more sexual partners in the last year, almost double the rate for women who have had none. Sexually active young men do more poorly than abstainers in their academic work. And as we have always admonished our own children, sex on these terms is destructive of love and marriage.

Here is one simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it's countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.

The point about sex is no surprise. The point about drinking is. I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men. Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way. Young women are trying to keep up—and young men are encouraging them (maybe because it facilitates hooking up).

Next year all freshmen at The Catholic University of America will be assigned to single-sex residence halls. The year after, we will extend the change to the sophomore halls. It will take a few years to complete the transformation.

The change will probably cost more money. There are a few architectural adjustments. We won't be able to let the ratio of men and women we admit into the freshman class vary from year to year with the size and quality of the pools. But our students will be better off.

Mr. Garvey is president of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

]]>Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:39:11 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2011/04/education-and-religion-april-2011-washington-post-magazine.htmlEmbracing a classical education By Julia Duin, Sunday, April 10, 11:03 AM It’s 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton’s fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.

Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry’s immortal “Give me liberty or give me death” speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

“Beautifully done,” Clayton says at the conclusion. “We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation.” She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: “No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” Near that hangs a crucifix.

This is St. Jerome Classical School, the new name for what once was a traditional Roman Catholic elementary and middle school in Hyattsville. Starting last spring, St. Jerome’s began transforming itself from a debt-ridden, pre-K-8 institution into a showcase for one of the more intriguing trends in modern education. It is one of a handful of archdiocesan Roman Catholic schools in the country to have a classical curriculum.

“Classical” education aims to include instruction on the virtues and a love of truth, goodness and beauty in ordinary lesson plans. Students learn the arts, sciences and literature starting with classical Greek and Roman sources. Wisdom and input from ancient church fathers, Renaissance theologians and even Mozart — whose music is sometimes piped into the classrooms to help students concentrate better — is worked in.

On the hallway walls outside Clayton’s classroom are student posters on the theme “What is goodness?,” “rules for knights and ladies of the Round Table,” drawings of Egyptian pyramids, directions to “follow Jesus’ teachings” and “be respectful toward others,” and other exhortations to live a noble life.

“The classical vision is about introducing our students to the true, the good, the beautiful,” Principal Mary Pat Donoghue points out. “So what’s on our walls are classical works of art. You won’t see Snoopy here.”

Classical theory divides childhood development into three stages known as the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric. During the “grammar” years (kindergarten through fourth grade), children soak up knowledge. They memorize, absorb facts, learn the rules of phonics and spelling, recite poetry, and study plants, animals, basic math and other topics. Moral lessons are included.

Thus, in Mary Pat Pollock’s first-grade class, students recite an Aesop’s fable on how a cold north wind made a man cling to his coat but a warm sun persuaded him to remove it.

“What did the sun do?” Pollock asks.

“She was gentle,” first-grader Tommy Hill responds.

“And what did the north wind do that didn’t work?” Pollock asks. The children conclude that being gentle works, but being harsh is bad.

In the “logic” stage (roughly grades five through eight), children learn to analyze, question, discern and evaluate. Students learn to think through arguments, pay attention to cause and effect and begin to see how facts fit together. This is where the study of algebra and how to propose and support a thesis comes in.

The “rhetoric” stage (grades nine through 12) concentrates on acquiring wisdom and applying knowledge. Students learn to express themselves persuasively.

In Michael Murray’s fourth-grade class, students are moving into the logic stage using focused discussion. They have just read from Plato’s “The Republic” about how people behave when they think no one is watching.

Murray opens the discussion by asking who would like to be invisible. Hands shoot up.

“When you’re invisible, no one can catch you,” a girl says.

“But then you could steal things, and no one would know,” a boy responds.

“Do we act different in a public setting than a private one?” the teacher asks.

“Yeah,” the kids respond.

Central to St. Jerome’s revised curriculum is Latin. “It’s a language based on a lot of logic, and it builds the skill of using logic,” says Latin teacher Elizabeth Turcan. “You don’t have that as much with more common modern languages.’’

Turcan was one of eight teachers brought in this year to jump-start St. Jerome’s renaissance. Another was Merrill Roberts, a doctoral candidate in physics and a former public school teacher now teaching nature studies to the upper grades. He uses the Socratic method when he can.

“We’re trying to teach students the need to know the truth of something and the importance of the question,” he says.

“I don’t think the structure of public school lends itself to questions,” he adds. “The structure is set up to say, ‘This is what you need to know, and here’s the facts.’ ”

Research comparing classical education with other teaching methods is hard to come by. But according to the Moscow, Idaho-based Association of Classical and Christian Schools, classically educated students had higher SAT scores in reading and writing in 2010 than students in public, independent and other private schools. They tied with independent school students, scoring the highest in math.

A year ago, St. Jerome’s was $117,469 in debt and, as one parent joked, “held together by bake sales and duct tape.” Enrollment had dropped from 530 students in 2001-2002 to 297 eight years later.

Something had to be done fast. During a consultation organized by the Archdiocese of Washington, parents and parishioners urged school officials to consider the classical model. Then-archdiocesan superintendent Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill supported the idea, even though it was a novelty for parochial Catholic schools, which tend to be structured like public schools with an overlay of religious instruction.

Donoghue formed a curriculum committee of parishioners that included parents, homeschoolers and former Peace Corps volunteers, and they began drawing on educational materials from across the country.

The organizers knew of only one other Catholic parochial school — St. Theresa’s in Sugar Land, Tex. — that was trying this method. About 230 other classical schools in the country were mostly run by evangelical Protestants.

“We defined what we meant by ‘classical’ in very Catholic terms,” says Michael Hanby, a committee member and a professor at the John Paul II Institute at Catholic University. “It was not just a method but an incorporation into the whole treasure of Christian wisdom, which includes that of Christian cultures. Our students would get a coherent understanding of history, literature, art, philosophy — the traditions to what Catholics in the West are heirs.”

Parishioners and parents raised $190,000 to retire the debt. After hundreds of hours of work, the committee produced a lengthy educational plan that included curricula for each grade and subject, lists of suggested books, and criteria that each detail of the school’s life would have to satisfy. Examples: Is it beautiful? Are we doing this because it’s inherently good or as a means to an end? If the latter, what end? Does it encourage reverence for the mystery of God and the splendor of His creation? Does it encourage the student to desire truth, to understand virtues and to cultivate these within him (or her) self?

The plan was for students in successive grades to work their way through the history of civilization, beginning with ancient Egypt in kindergarten,ancient Greece for grade one, the Roman Empire in grade two, the Middle Ages in grade three and so on. Religion, art, Latin, nature studies, math, music and physical education also are worked in. Although some of the influences from more than 2,000 years back are pagan, that doesn’t faze music teacher Michelle Orhan, who teaches third-graders about the nine Muses who are daughters of ancient Zeus.

“I want them to have a well-rounded vision of what music is and where it comes from,” Orhan says after a session of explaining the origins of Calliope, Terpsichore and Urania. “We also discuss the disadvantages of polytheism, a discussion you can’t have in public school today. In anything having to do with Greek mythology, you have to talk about the gods.”

Already other dioceses are taking a serious look at what’s happening at St. Jerome’s to see whether their aging Catholic schools can turn into classical academies. Or, like St. Theresa’s, they can begin their classical school from the ground up.

About 20 miles southwest of Houston, St. Theresa’s school building was dedicated in August 2009. Romanesque arches cover outside walkways. In the atrium, the lower level is Doric columns with images of the seven virtues in the frieze, the upper level is Ionic pilasters. Noted ecclesiastical architect Duncan G. Stroik — also an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame — was commissioned to design the school.

“It’s hard to change the status quo in Catholic education,” says St. Theresa’s Principal Jonathan Beeson, a Yale Divinity School graduate and former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism. “If you’re not versed in the history of ideas, you cannot be self-critical.”

Teachers from across the country are now applying to work at the pre-K through second-grade school, which is planning to add one grade each year. Latin starts in first grade. Second-graders learn Greek history. Everyone memorizes poetry.

“There’s not a single one of the 92 kids here who’s not eager to recite a poem,” Beeson says. “Kids need content in their brains, and they’re wired to absorb facts. You can’t reflect on something if it’s not in your brain.”

Beeson sees a day when the classical method will become widely accepted by Catholics.

In Washington, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl backs St. Jerome’s, according to Bert L’Homme, the new archdiocesan school superintendent.

“The classical curriculum existed in the Catholic universities of Paris, Padua and Oxford,” he says. “It’s rooted in the church. The combination of Catholic and classical education is very enticing to some parents.”



Julia Duin, whose most recent book is “Days of Fire and Glory,” is a religion writer living in Maryland whose daughter briefly attended St. Jerome’s. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

]]>Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:16:41 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2010/12/one-issue-in-same-gender-marriage-debate.htmlOn gay marriage, stop playing the hate card
By Matthew J. Franck
Sunday, December 19, 2010; B01

Matthew J. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.

In the debates over gay marriage, "hate" is the ultimate conversation-stopper.

Some stories from recent months: A religion instructor at a midwestern state university explains in an e-mail to students the rational basis for Catholic teaching on homosexuality. He is denounced by a student for "hate speech" and is dismissed from his position. (He is later reinstated - for now.) At another midwestern state university, a department chairman demurs from a student organizer's request that his department promote an upcoming "LGBTQ" film festival on campus; he is denounced to his university's chancellor, who indicates that his e-mail to the student warrants inquiry by a "Hate and Bias Incident Response Team."

On the west coast, a state law school moves to marginalize a Christian student group that requires its members to pledge they will conform to orthodox Christian doctrines on sexual morality. In the history of the school, no student group has ever been denied campus recognition. But this one is, and the U.S. Supreme Court lets the school get away with it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a once-respected civil rights organization, publishes a "report" identifying a dozen or so "anti-gay hate groups," some for no apparent reason other than their vocal opposition to same-sex marriage. Other marriage advocacy groups are put on a watch list.

On a left-wing Web site, a petition drive succeeds in pressuring Apple to drop an "app" from its iTunes store for the Manhattan Declaration, an ecumenical Christian statement whose nearly half-million signers are united in defense of the right to life, the tradition of conjugal marriage between man and woman, and the principles of religious liberty. The offense? The app is a "hate fest." Fewer than 8,000 people petition for the app to go; more than five times as many petition Apple for its reinstatement, so far to no avail.

Finally, on "$#*! My Dad Says," a CBS sitcom watched by more than 10 million weekly viewers, an entire half-hour episode is devoted to a depiction of the disapproval of homosexuality as bigotry, a form of unreasoning intolerance that clings to the past with a coarse and mean-spirited judgmentalism. And this on a show whose title character is famously irascible and politically incorrect, but who in this instance turns out to be fashionably cuddly and up-to-date.

What's going on here? Clearly a determined effort is afoot, in cultural bastions controlled by the left, to anathematize traditional views of sexual morality, particularly opposition to same-sex marriage, as the expression of "hate" that cannot be tolerated in a decent civil society. The argument over same-sex marriage must be brought to an end, and the debate considered settled. Defenders of traditional marriage must be likened to racists, as purveyors of irrational fear and loathing. Opposition to same-sex marriage must be treated just like support for now long-gone anti-miscegenation laws.

This strategy is the counsel of desperation. In 30 states, the people have protected traditional marriage by constitutional amendment: In no state where the question has been put directly to voters has same-sex marriage been adopted by democratic majorities. But the advocates of a revolution in the law of marriage see an opportunity in Perry v. Schwarzenegger , currently pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. In his district court ruling in the case in August, Judge Vaughn Walker held that California's Proposition 8 enacted, "without reason, a private moral view" about the nature of marriage that cannot properly be embodied in public policy. Prop 8's opponents are hoping for similar reasoning from the appeals court and, ultimately, from the Supreme Court.

The SPLC's report on "hate groups" gives the game away. It notes that no group is listed merely for "viewing homosexuality as unbiblical." But when describing standard expressions of Christian teaching, that we must love the sinner while hating the sin, the SPLC treats them as "kinder, gentler language" that only covers up unreasoning hatred for gay people. Christians are free to hold their "biblical" views, you see, but we know that opposition to gay marriage cannot have any basis in reason. Although protected by the Constitution, these religious views must be sequestered from the public square, where reason, as distinguished from faith, must prevail.

Marginalize, privatize, anathematize: These are the successive goals of gay-marriage advocates when it comes to their opponents.

First, ignore the arguments of traditional marriage's defenders, that marriage has always existed in order to bring men and women together so that children will have mothers and fathers, and that same-sex marriage is not an expansion but a dismantling of the institution. Instead, assert that no rational arguments along these lines even exist and so no refutation is necessary, and insinuate that those who merely want to defend marriage are "anti-gay thugs" or "theocrats" or "Taliban," as some critics have said.

Second, drive the wedge between faith and reason, chasing traditional religious arguments on marriage and morality underground, as private forms of irrationality.

Finally, decree the victory of the new public morality - here the judges have their role in the liberal strategy - and read the opponents of the new dispensation out of polite society, as the crazed bigots of our day.

American democracy doesn't need civility enforcers, nor must it become a public square with signs reading "no labels allowed." Robust debate is necessarily passionate debate, especially on a question like marriage. But the charge of "hate" is not a contribution to argument; it's the recourse of people who would rather not have an argument at all.

That is no way to conduct public business on momentous questions in a free democracy. "Hate" cannot be permitted to be the conversation stopper in the same-sex marriage debate. The American people, a tolerant bunch who have acted to protect marriage in three-fifths of the states, just aren't buying it. And they still won't buy it even if the judges do.

]]>Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:49:56 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2010/11/dating-with-purity.htmlWedding of Gareth Warren and Lindsay Marsh
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 14, 2010; E10




Gareth Warren didn't know what to think in the summer of 2008 when the grandmother of his godson handed him a book titled "The Best Sex of My Life."

Then he read the subtitle: "A Guide to Purity."

"She just said, 'I want to give this to you,' " says Warren, who wasn't exactly focused on sexual purification at that point.

In his dating life, the 26-year-old assistant vice president at GE Capital had always gravitated toward models and cheerleaders. His relationships were usually fun, but ultimately unfulfilling.

"It'd feel great when you're out with people, but when you come to a certain point after you had sex, it's like the conversation ended because you don't have a friendship," he says. "There's no substance to it. It's surface."

Over the next few months he occasionally picked up the book, reading a chapter at a time. Author Lindsay Marsh describes her Shaker Heights, Ohio, upbringing in a home where virginity was valued but not explicitly discussed. During high school her sexual interactions with a boyfriend were quickly escalating when she found out he was sleeping with another girl. Dejected, she turned to her faith for solace. In the years that followed, Marsh's virginity became increasingly important to her, eventually inspiring her to write the book and launch an organization, Worth the Wait Revolution, which encourages others to reserve sex for marriage.

The book "guided me in the right direction," says Warren, who stopped listening to music with hyper-sexualized lyrics and cut ties with a woman whose values didn't match up with what he now believed.

In early February 2009, days after attending a church ceremony with his godson's family, the woman who gave him the book asked if he'd be interested in being set up with a young lady who'd been seated in the row behind them. Her name was Lindsay Marsh.

"I was like, 'Wow,' " he says. "Because I read the book, I feel like I know who she is, and I know all about her."

Marsh, an anesthesiologist who was then 32, knew very little about Warren, but she'd been attending the Spirit of Faith Christian Center since she was a freshman at George Washington University and she trusted the opinion of the woman playing cupid.

Marsh had noticed Warren sitting in front of her that Sunday and thought, Oooh, he's nice looking. It had been years since she dated anyone seriously; while she believed she was meant to have a husband, she was unwilling to waste time seeing men who didn't share her moral code.

"For me, any level of dating would've been dating with a purpose in mind," she says. "I knew I desired marriage. I knew I desired a family, and I knew I desired to do things the right way -- a proper way -- in that dating relationship. So if someone wasn't willing to accommodate those simple goals, then it just wasn't worth it."

That week, an e-mail from Warren came through Marsh's Worth the Wait Web site. The short message explained that he had a past but was changed by her book. "I just fell in love with the fact that he was so sincere and genuine," she says.

The next Saturday, Marsh decided to call Warren. "I know a guy like that thinks he's got a lot of game, so I'm gonna switch it up," she remembers thinking. "Plus, I'm just a little bit of a go-getter."

When he called her back, she proposed dinner that night with her sister and brother-in-law, two of the many protective people in Marsh's life who were quick to assess any guy she considered dating.

Once the four were seated around a TGIFriday's table at Arundel Mills Mall, the evening became "a Gareth talk session," Warren says. He unraveled his life story, replete with sins and shortcomings. "It's better to hear from the horse's mouth," he explains. Otherwise, "you leave people to kinda imagine or do their research or hear from other people."

Marsh was impressed by the honesty, and as they drove home, her brother-in-law said he felt like Warren was "somebody who knows your worth."

The next week, Marsh and Warren went out by themselves and began speaking every day by phone. Because Warren had read the book, Marsh says, "he knew exactly how I felt on every level of dating and waiting and why." That meant she didn't have to explain she hadn't kissed a man in nearly a decade and didn't plan on doing so until she was married because, she says, "now that I understood my worth and value, I don't give out any discounts."

Holding off, she says, "became as important to him as it was to me."

The relationship felt like a revelation to Warren. "Lindsay and I have gone far deeper than I have gone with any other woman," he says, despite the fact that they had never been physically intimate.

They were making the commute between Washington and Baltimore, where he lived, three or four times a week. By the end of March, she says, "we already knew. Like, 'Okay, we're for each other.' "

They spent the next nine months acclimating their families to the idea of the relationship and attending couples communications workshops at Spirit of Faith. On Christmas Eve, with their families gathered around, Warren, now 28, played a video he'd made for Marsh and asked her to marry him.

Throughout their engagement, Warren became Marsh's partner in Worth the Wait, speaking on panels and helping to tailor the message in an effort to reach more men. Together, she says, they hope to expand the organization to promote "purity in marriage" by discouraging adultery and the use of pornography.

Marsh, now 34, suspects that many people thought she would end up with a virgin or a pastor's son. "But I never wanted to marry a virgin," she says. "I wanted to marry somebody that would be a virgin in their heart toward me and toward God."

In fact, she thinks that marrying Warren will make people more receptive to their message of "restoration and renewal -- that regardless of your path, you can make the decision to wait today."

"Although he's not a virgin, it'll almost be like he is on our wedding night because we haven't had sex," she adds. "So, you know -- we're looking forward to it."

Marsh and Warren invited the whole congregation to watch them exchange vows at the Spirit of Faith church in Temple Hills on Oct. 30. Including ushers and hostesses, it was a nearly 40-person bridal party, who erupted in cheers as the two kissed for the first time after being presented as husband and wife.

Later, 280 friends and family members gathered for a reception at the National Golf Club at Tantallon in Fort Washington. Marsh and Warren entered the ballroom dancing to a song by the Black Eyed Peas. The couple's guests raised their hands while shouting out the refrain: "Tonight's gonna be a good night."

]]>Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:10:39 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2010/11/delaying-sex-leads-to-more-satisfying-relationships-washington-post-103110.htmlThe Literature: Delaying sex seems to lead to more satisfying relationship, study finds
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2010; E12




Sometimes a one-night stand lasts for more than a night -- a random hookup becomes a boyfriend, or a friend-with-benefits evolves into a girlfriend. But a new study suggests couples who start a relationship based on physical interaction may be less satisfied in the long run than those who delay sex.

"It's kind of a puzzle, because you think, 'Well, why would it matter,' right?" says University of Iowa sociologist Anthony Paik, who specializes in the study of sexual behavior.

To find out, Paik returned to data he helped gather for a major sex survey in the mid-1990s. The researchers had conducted exhaustive interviews with 642 people in relationships and found that 56 percent of them had waited until they were seriously dating, engaged or married before having sex with their partner. The others had their first sexual encounter with their partner while they were either casually dating, just friends or new acquaintances.

Participants were asked to rate their emotional and physical satisfaction with their relationship. On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being "very satisfied"), those who started out as nonromantic sexual partners gave an average rating of 3.8. Those who waited until the partnership was serious to have sex noted an average score of 4.2.

While those who had sex earlier were, on average, less happy in their relationships, Paik found that the problems weren't necessarily a result of the early sexual interaction. Instead, people who ended up together after what began as a casual fling seemed "predisposed to lower relationship quality," he says -- meaning they hadn't been after a commitment to begin with.

"It kind of makes sense, because a lot of people entering nonromantic relationships are not looking for relationships," he says. "But it's much easier, I think, to have a repeat hookup than to have a one-time thing and keep having different partners. And maybe they kind of get sucked into a relationship that way."

Similarly, a 2007 study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that nonromantic sexual relationships were more likely to lead to cohabitation than marriage.

There are exceptions, of course. "Some people do hook up, and it is kind of a sex-at-first-sight situation, and they have meaningful relationships," Paik says. "It's probably pretty rare, but [our] study suggests there's some of that going on."

Unfortunately, he adds, in those instances there's also a very real risk that "the person one thinks they're in love with or has sex with on the first night is often just interested in sex."

Paik, whose paper on the topic was published in the September issue of Social Science Research, says he was most surprised to find that couples who had sex while they were casually dating also reported lower relationship satisfaction. He attributes this to the mix of motives in the dating pool: "There are people primarily interested in sex and people primarily interested in long-term relationships, and they're kinda coming together in one place."

He thinks that confusion over long-term goals has helped give rise to a hookup culture, where, as he writes in the study, there is "a relatively clear set of expectations about what the objectives of these relationships are about, at least initially."

So for those looking for happily committed relationships, Paik has a strategy to suggest: "Delay sex. That way you kind of select out those individuals who are predisposed to not look for a long-term relationship."

That advice, he acknowledges, "is like what one's grandmother would probably say."

]]>Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:24:07 -0800http://www.communitylevee.org/1/post/2010/10/howard-university-stops-requiring-propriety.htmlHoward allows overnight guests in upperclassman dorm
By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 2010; 12:38 AM




Howard University is experimenting this fall with something that many universities did at least a generation ago, allowing undergraduates to stay overnight in each other's dorm rooms.

To study, of course.

On most of campus, friends and lovers alike still must depart each other's rooms at midnight on school nights, or 2 a.m. on weekends. But in a bow to the requests of student government leaders, Howard officials have agreed to relax such restrictions in one upperclassman dormitory.

In the week since Howard began allowing overnight guests in Howard Plaza Towers, West - a modern brick high-rise on the edge of the Northwest Washington campus - university officials have reported no increase in problems. Yet students have reacted to the pilot program not so much with cheers but with exasperation.

"It should have happened a long time ago. I'm surprised it didn't happen a long time ago," said Safiya DeFour, 20, a junior majoring in sports medicine who lives in the dorm.

Although the sexual revolution swept away or watered down sleepover rules at many schools, some institutions held firm. Chief among them were historically black colleges and religious institutions. Historically black schools have traditionally operated as something like extended families, with officials adopting more of a parental role on campus than common at most state universities or liberal arts colleges.

Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund, said historically black colleges are "very much influenced by the values, traditions and social codes of the black community - which tend to be more conservative." Parents especially want that sort of structure, but often students do, too.

"Not every student wants to live in a coed dormitory. Not every student wants 24-hour visitation," said Lomax, a past president of Dillard University in New Orleans.

But Howard's resistance to overnight guests spawned occasional efforts to outsmart it - and a persistent suspicion that late-night fire drills were thinly veiled attempts to ferret out those defying the rules. The policy irked some students, who said that if they were old enough to vote, marry and fight wars they were old enough to choose who slept in their dorm rooms.

With the change have come new rules: Roommates must sign an agreement consenting to host overnight guests. Guests must be current Howard students. Only one guest may stay over at a time. On school nights, guests must check into the dorm before midnight - and they must leave by noon the next day.

Undergraduates living in other dorms must continue to escort their guests out at the appointed hour or risk losing their visitation rights entirely.

"We're not elementary kids," said Ade Owolabi, 21, a junior who lives in the dorm but hasn't filled out the paperwork needed to have a late-night guest. "We should be able to have people come stay."

Howard Plaza Towers, West is one of the school's biggest dorms, with 840 upperclassmen in apartment-style rooms with full kitchens, private bathrooms and underground parking. It's close enough to academic buildings to allow last-minute dashes to class but removed enough to feel like off-campus housing. The neighboring dorm, Howard Plaza Towers, East, houses mainly graduate and honors students and has long allowed visitors at all hours.

College officials say that if students in Howard Plaza Towers, West handle the program responsibly, it might be expanded next semester to allow non-Howard visitors in the dorm, and the weeknight check-in time might be eliminated. There are no plans to extend the program to other dorms.

"We're looking at trying to be progressive and help these students grow into mature adults," said Marc D. Lee, the interim dean of residence life. "Everything has been going well so far. There haven't been any outrageous parties late into the night."

Other colleges are also taking steps to liberalize their dorm guest policies, sometimes to keep upperclassmen from moving off campus. Baylor University, a Christian college in Texas, has gradually added hours to the visitation clock in its dorms. Now, students can have guests of either gender visit between 1 and 10 p.m. on school nights and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Students in on-campus apartments have until 2 a.m. every night.

Last year, West Virginia University began allowing overnight guests of the opposite sex in one of its upperclassman dorms. At Virginia Tech, there are four categories of visiting rules, ranging from strict visiting hours to none, depending on where students live.

Catholic University has modified its visitor policy several times in the past five years. Students can have guests of the opposite sex in their rooms only until midnight on school nights and 2 a.m. on weekends. Last year, the school extended the weeknight curfew to 2 a.m. as long as students hang out in common areas - not bedrooms.

Even schools that allow visitors at all hours have some guidelines, and most require roommate approval. Georgetown University allows overnight guests but prohibits "cohabitation." George Washington University sets a limit of eight nights a month. Washington and Lee University allows roommates to come up with their own policy, as long as it includes "a provision for quiet hours" on school nights.

Some of the schools with visiting hours don't enforce them strictly. But Howard does.

If a student's guest has not checked out by curfew, housing staff members will search for him or her. Visitation rights are among the first that hall supervisors remove if a student gets into trouble.

Lee said the rules keep students safe on the urban campus. That's especially important for freshmen, who are living away from home for the first time.

"We take on that responsibility from parents to assist [their children] and help them through their first year," he said. "Our parents would not want their female freshman daughters in an environment where there is 24-hour visitation."

But as students enter their early 20s, they can handle more responsibility, said student government Vice President William Roberts, 24, a third-year law student. He and other student leaders spent months meeting with officials and researching policies at other schools. "We thought it was time for us to try it out and see if we could handle it," he said. "The main thing is allowing students the freedom to decide what they do with their time."

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