Making Life Work

By: Ronald L. Dart

   For over a generation, now, schools, parents and social institutions have been fighting a battle with teen pregnancy. They have tried sex education, and that didn’t work. Pregnancies went up. They tried free condom distribution. Pregnancy went up again. They have tried secret abortions, but that only works after pregnancy. Now some are trying abstinence programs.

    But even if they could have abstinence programs in all the schools, they would only be able to affect the problem at the margins. Some kids are taking chastity vows, and even wearing chastity rings, which Jay Leno thought was really funny.

By: Ronald L. Dart

“Let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. For I hate divorce,
says the Lord the God of Israel.”

    Divorce is painful. If you have been through a divorce, you need no one to tell you that. Not only do the children get hurt, there are the grandparents, the family, the friends. And who can tell of the pain, of the anger that comes in the middle of the night to the two people who once loved each other above all others?

By: Lenny Cacchio

    If Jesus held a press conference, what question would you ask him?  The disciples asked him lots of questions you and I might ask.  When will be the time of your coming?  Why do you speak in parables?  Who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?   The Pharisees also took the opportunity to ask him questions, but the questions they asked tell us more about the Pharisees than Jesus.  Here’s a curious question they asked in Matthew 19. Tell us, they asked.  When is it permissible for us to divorce our wives?  Moses commanded us to write a bill of divorce if our wives displease us.  What do you say?  

    Considerable debate surrounded that question among the Pharisees.  One school, the school of Hillel, based upon a generous...

By: Gerald Saul

    An article recently came across my desk with an eye-catching title—Look Who’s Happily Unmarried by Rory Evans[1]. The opening sentence reads, “Get your grandma her fan and smelling salts: More and more couples are living in sin.”

    The article goes on to state that just over half of the households in America are now led by unmarried people—50.3% to be exact. Also presented is a quote from the executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project who says that “these numbers suggest that couples living together can’t be scandalous…It’s hard to scandalize when you’re the majority.”

    Does this mean what I think it means? Are half of America’s couples really in long-term “unmarriage”?...

By: Allie Dart

 

    "What is the most serious threat confronting teenagers today? It’s promiscuity and pregnancy" according to Insights, March 2, 1998. How did this happen? Our society is constantly redefining morality and overlooking the standard whereby we should base our morals.

    But should society be the standard for basing our morality? A counter- culture movement hit our nation throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Students protested what they considered to be repressive of women’s sexual pleasure, which was to be kept within the walls of heterosexual marriage. Medical contraceptives were ushered in, taking away the fear of pregnancy for the free-love movement. This movement told us that premarital sex releases people...