Jephthath’s Daughters Innocent Casualties in the War for Family “Equality” Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman, Editors CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015; 484 pages, $16.59 At the end of June, a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court announced that the Fourteenth Amendment requires every state to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. Following […]
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The Birth of the Pill – How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched A Revolution Jonathan Eig W.W. Norton and Company, 2014; 400 pages, $27.95 One winter night in 1950, Margaret Sanger and the scientist Gregory Goodwin (“Goody”) Pincus met in a Park Avenue apartment to discuss the taboo topic of birth control. For years, […]
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Generation Unbound – Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage Isabel V. Sawhill Brookings Institution Press, 2014; 212 pages, $32.00 For those concerned about family policy, the stark facts that Generation Unbound describes will be familiar. While teen parenting is down, for instance, “parenting by young unwed women has not declined. It has just moved […]
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Marriage Markets – How Inequality is Remaking the American Family June Carbone and Naomi Cahn Oxford University Press, 2014; 272 pages, $29.95 Across America, a new marker of social class is emerging. That marker differentiates the rich from the poor, the educated from the high-school dropouts. It separates those who drive Bentleys and vacation in […]
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Labor’s Love Lost – The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America Andrew J. Cherlin Russell Sage, 2014; 272 pages, $35.00 Andrew J. Cherlin, the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, has spent a career studying marriage and family in the United States. His work […]
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The End of Sex – How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy Donna Freitas Basic Books, 2013; 240 pages, $25.99 If you have read one piece decrying the hookup culture on college campuses, you may feel you have read them all. Hooking up degrades women, making them feel […]
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On the Meaning of Sex J. Budziszewski ISI Books, 2011; 145 pages, $27.95 Noah Webster was no intellectual slouch. Proficient in the languages of the ancient Near East as well as of modern Europe, he painstakingly compiled the etymology, orthography, and signification of 70,000 words for the great American Dictionary of the English Language published […]
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The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Kathryn Joyce Public Affairs, 2013; 352 pages, $26.99 Four years ago, Kathryn Joyce published Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a critical treatment of an evangelical Christian group wherein women married and obeyed their husbands, had lots of babies, and stayed home to take […]
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What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George Encounter Books, 2012; 168 pages, $15.99 In june, Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court that held a law that retained the definition of marriage as a husband and wife for federal […]
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How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization Mary Eberstadt Templeton Press, 2013; 272 pages, $24.95 This is perhaps the clearest and most informative work yet published on the sociology of American religion and also the best, a work that carries the subject to a level that all subsequent analysts need to […]
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