Abstinence gets some decent, if a little oddball, publicity in the Times magazine with this article about growing secular abstinence programs in unlikely places.

The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity. The founders of the Princeton club, the first to form in the Ivy League in 2005, wanted to offer an opposing view. Many were Catholic, but seeking credibility within the university at large, they decided not to present themselves as a religious organization and always to “shy away from arguments with religious premises,” says Kevin Joyce, a former president of the club. “Here at a university, we have to provide the intellectual basis” for abstinence, he told me. “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought.”

Much of the piece focuses on Janie Fredell at Harvard, who belongs to the True Love Revolution, a name about as awesome as True Love Waits. 

“People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender politics - and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital mutilation - to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life - men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

Her group’s arguments are powerful with the university audience, but if her propositions are founded on secular ideologies, they will ultimately fail.  Here’s to hoping there’s more to these groups than the cracked and weary discourse of the body, of oppression, of feminism.  If so, kudos.

WARNING: Frank discussions of sex.

Thursday morning I listened to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” as I drove to work. They were airing a segment on how a South Carolina town is managing in the face of manufacturing and textile plant closures. A reporter interviewed a soft-spoken man named Fred Salter, who once worked for Springs Industries, a major home furnishings supplier. The Springs Industries website says, in a section detailing its putative corporate values:

“We expect change, and we seek to anticipate and manage its impact by investing in new technologies and in our people.”

Salters says that the company bought t-shirts for its employees that said: We Support NAFTA. Perhaps that’s what it meant by “investing in our people,” because in 2006 it shifted its manufacturing to Brazil. I suppose none of us really expects anything companies say to have any connection to what their leaders actually believe.

To be clear, there’s little question, among the economically informed, that global trade is of tremendous benefit to the majority of the earth’s inhabitants, at least in the long run. But as Salters notes, while the company “spent a lot of time and money trying to convince us that change is good. . . it wasn’t necessarily good for employees who were going to be pushed out of jobs.” Conservatives often, I think, would have us forget those costs, while liberals would use them as an excuse for protectionism that ultimately consigns millions to poverty. Both neglect, in other words, the actual stories of actual human beings.

And so here is this actual human being, Fred Salter, who retrained to become a nurse’s assistant, because “they can’t send those jobs south.” I don’t know if Fred Salter is on the whole a good or bad person, and I suspect he is like most of us, some of each. But the subject turned to his mother, who is so stricken with Alzheimer’s that she’s even forgotten how to sneeze. Fred has foregone re-employment, for the time being, so he can care for her, so that she doesn’t have to go into a medical facility. “It doesn’t seem like you can find anything good in any of these layoffs,” he says, “but I’m laid off now, and I can help with my mom.”

It’s hard for a man to go on national radio and announce that he has no income, no job. Our jobs are often how we define ourselves. But here is Fred Salter, likely sinner, likely saint, defining himself not by his work, but by his relationship, as son to a mother who needs him.

Joblessness is one of my great fears, and caring for a debilitated loved one doesn’t lag far behind. But to Fred Salter, the loss of his job meant that he got the training that he now uses to take care of his dying mother. I don’t know if his example was the lesson NPR was hoping I’d take to heart, but it’s one I won’t soon forget.

Last National Kids’ Day, British kids said God was the most famous person in the world. This year the Queen and Harry Potter are more famous than God, and being happy is more important than being famous, healthy or rich.

Are you seeing your maternal or paternal set of grandparents this holiday season? A new study finds that maternal grandparents put a higher priority on face-to-face contact with their grandchildren. They are more willing to travel to make frequent visits. The study says evolutionary psychology is the cause.

Use your DNA to find your soulmate! Scientificmatch.com, an online dating service, uses DNA samples to predict physical chemistry – the key to better sex and healthier kids.

Senators, both Republican and Democrat, benefitted from farm subsidies. Read the list here.

Dana Parsons writes about a family suing a high school teacher for making anti-religious remarks the parents say made their son uncomfortable and unable to learn. According to a tape recording, the teacher said, “When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth.”

Bush has pushed health savings accounts for the poor, and now a program in Indiana will put them to the test. Someone making $20,000 a year could get health coverage for about $19 a week.

Vermonters top the list of parents who read to their kids. Some 67 percent say they read to their children daily, but Mississippi came in last at 38 percent.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a male deity made of meatballs and noodles, head of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and popularized on the Internet. But the American Academy of Religion says he’s more than that: He’s a “didactic device” and a “folk-humor hybrid body.”

John Leo writes about a conservative Princeton student who faked a conservative hate crime, writing himself threatening letters and faking his own beating.

Working at home is dangerous. There’s the refrigerator, magazines begging to be thrummed through, and suddenly the carpet cleaning can’t wait another day. These are the sirens of the stay-at-home laborer.

I will make a list: Read a book. Call Dave G. to set up interview. Make dinner. Stop checking email fifty times! My mother said to lock the door and pretend I’m in an office. I know I need to treat this like a real job (Colossians 3:23). But suppose there’s a friend in need; the good Samaritan was probably on his way to the office when he dropped everything. And Rev.Tim Keller extrapolates from the Trinity that if you’re too busy tasking to pursue rich relationships, you will eventually wash up against the rocks of reality because relationship (not quarks or strings) is the basic stuff of the universe.

How much time should I leave for exercise (1 Tim.4:8)? Is one chapter of Bible a day enough? Is personal pleasure allowed while Rome burns? (I always get to the middle of Book Two in Mel Bay’s Guitar Method and then get too busy.) Aimee asked for an apple pie, and I’ve been praying for creative ways to love her, so….

I will need to find the balance of work, relationship, exercise, Bible, newspaper, and smelling the flowers. And most of all, I need to learn that even on the days I get the balance wrong, He loves me still.

Here’s a symposium on dating, courtship and marriage from Touchstone magazine, with four short articles:

“That Could Be Arranged“ by S. M. Hutchens, where he considers courtship for his children.

“Not-So-Blind Date“ by Jocelyn Mathewes, where she sympathizes with Hutchens, but thinks it’s wrong to throw out more convetional “dating” altogether. 

“Three’s No Crowd“ by Kevin Offner, a college minister, who says it’s the local church’s responsibility to facilitate the crossing of the dating/courting/marriage chasm.

“Father Knows Maybe Not“ by James Hitchcock, who closes the symposium by saying that the Christian parent’s only real option is to raise up children of character who will then make up their own minds, because ”for parents to attempt actually to choose their children’s spouses is ultimately not defensible in Christian terms.”