Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy Mark Regnerus Oxford University Press, 2017; 280 pages, $29.95 Marriage has been on a steep, decades-long decline in the United States. Some have worried about this decline; others have simply attributed it to inevitable changes. Marriage is outdated, they say, soon to be replaced by cohabitation […]
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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson Penguin Random House, 2019; 304 pages, $14.76 The most dangerous lies are half-truths. Empty Planet was written by journalists Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. As journalists, these men write engagingly about the state of the global population and its future. They get […]
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The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and Why the Church Was Right All Along Jennifer Roback Morse TAN Books, 2018; 420 pages, $27.95 How did the world go crazy, so quickly? How did America transform seemingly overnight from a country with an impressively strong marriage and family culture and a robust fertility […]
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From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage Darel E. Paul Baylor University Press, 2018; 256 pages, $39.95 Late last year, Romanian voters considered a constitutional amendment to confirm the nation’s definition of marriage as the union of a husband and wife (voter turnout did not meet the required threshold for the […]
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Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism: Toward a New Economy by Michael Hickey Hamilton Books, 2017; 166 pages, $19.99 Of Labour and Liberty: Distributism in Victoria, 1891-1966 by Race Mathews University of Notre Dame Press, 2018; 422 pages, $50.00 An Economics of Justice & Charity: Catholic Social Teaching, Its Development and Contemporary Relevance by Thomas Storck […]
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The Political Theory of the American Founding Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom Thomas G. West Cambridge University Press, 2017; 428 pages, £26.99 I begin with praise for Professor West’s treatment of family questions in his book, The Political Theory of the American Founding. As he notes, there is a curious […]
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The ‘Conscience of Europe?’ Navigating Shifting Tides at the European Court of Human Rights Robert Clarke, Ed. Kairos Publishing, 2017; 240 pages, £17.97 (As Dr. Portaru is one of the authors whose work is contained in this volume, this essay is meant as a presentation of the book, rather than a formal review.) The European […]
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Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences Michaela Kreyenfeld and Dirk Konietzka, eds. SpringerOpen, 2017; 370 pages, open access eBook In his brilliant 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley anticipated a future in which the word mother has become an “obscenity,” “a pornographic impropriety.” If Huxley were alive today, he would find compelling […]
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How Population Change Will Transform Our World Sarah Harper Oxford University Press, 2016; 160 pages, $24.95 Throughout the last 40-plus years of the no-fault divorce revolution, observers have noticed a phenomenon aptly labeled “divorce happy talk.” This is an attempt by adults to overcome the initial distress we might feel about the spike in divorces, […]
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The Turning: Why the State of the Family Matters, and What the World Can Do About It Richard and Linda Eyre Familius, 2014; 339 pages, $18.95 Sociologists, political scientists, ethical philosophers, demographers, psychologists, public-policy experts—these are the credentialed authorities loudly proffering their services as guides to a world confused about family life in the twenty-first […]
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