Notes
1. Martin Luther, Luther’s Commentary on the First Twenty-Two Psalms, trans. John Nicholas Lenker (Sunbury, PA: Lutherans in All Lands Co., 1903), 124.
2. Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 208.
3. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harvest, 1964), 132.
4. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 78–79.
5. Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Vintage, 2005), 5.
6. Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic, 2004), 207.
7. Les Daniels, DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 58.
8. Christopher Matthews, “Parenthood,” The New Republic, May 20, 1991, 15–16.
9. Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 110.
10. Ibid.
11. Rudyard Griffiths, ed., Are Men Obsolete? The Munk Debate on Gender (Toronto: Anansi, 2014), 9.
12. W. Robert Godfrey, “Headship and the Bible,” in Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics, eds. David Blankenhorn, Don Browning, and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 88.
13. Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now: On Being Jewish (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 84.
14. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 95.
15. John Shelton Reed, Minding the South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 170.
16. See, for instance, Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2005).
17. Pascal Bruckner, Has Marriage for Love Failed? (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
18. Charles Murray, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life (New York: Crown, 2014).
19. Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class Family in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 138–39.
20. Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 106–7.
21. Frederica Mathewes-Green, At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy (New York: Putnam, 1999), 92.
22. William Loader, Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes Toward Sexuality in Early Jewish and Christian Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 56–57.
23. Ibid., 13.
24. The best study of this theme in the Old and New Testaments is found in Raymond C. Ortlund Jr., God’s Unfaithful Wife: A Biblical Theology of Spiritual Adultery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002). The original title of this book—Whoredom—put the case far more directly right in the title but was therefore far more embarrassing to read in an airport or a train station.
25. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 142.
26. Christine J. Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
27. Mark Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
28. Ibid.
29. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35.
30. Tom Shachtman, Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish (New York: North Point, 2006).
31. Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (New York: Harper, 2017).
32. Esther Perel, “Why Happy People Cheat,” The Atlantic, October 2017, 46.
33. See, for instance, the virtually dead-on description in Elizabeth Landers and Vicky Mainzer, The Script: The 100 Percent Absolutely Predictable Things Men Do When They Cheat (New York: Hyperion, 2005).
34. Deborah Solomon, “The Professional Provocateur: Questions for Noam Chomsky,” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, 13.
35. Alan Wolfe, “The Culture War That Never Came,” in Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, eds. James Davidson Hunter and Alan Wolfe (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2006), 41–73.
36. Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak, “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates,” American Journal of Sociology 119.4 (January 2014): 1002–46.
37. For a contrast of evangelical perspectives on this question, see Mark Strauss, ed., Remarriage After Divorce in Today’s Church: Three Views (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006).
38. W. Bradford Wilcox, “Conservative Protestants and the Family: Resisting, Engaging, or Accommodating Modernity,” in A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagement, ed. Michael Cromartie (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 58.
39. Andrzej Franaszek, Milosz: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap, 2017), 456.
40. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994), 148.
41. This line is attributed to Kate Michelman, formerly of National Abortion Rights Action League. Elizabeth Achtemeier cites it in an address to the Presbyterians Pro-Life meeting at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), June 3, 1993.
42. Will D. Campbell, Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir (Oxford, MS: Jefferson Press, 2002), 136.
43. Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work (New York: Dutton, 2017), 97.
44. Russell Moore, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).
45. Flannery O’Connor, “Introduction to a Memoir of Mary Ann,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Library of America, 1988), 822.
46. As one OT theologian points out, the mother-father-child relationship was still fundamental in the context of the extended family. The extended family in Israel was not “a dormitory full of double-beds.” Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 355.
47. As ethicist Paul Ramsey argued years ago, the very mode of reproduction shows us that love, not the will to power, is at the heart of who we are. We reproduce in the ecstasy of a man and a woman not, in Ramsey’s words, in “a cool, deliberate act of man’s rational will.” Paul Ramsey, Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 37.
48. “Once we have produced the next generation, or passed the age when we might have done so, nature does not work very hard to keep us alive,” notes one bio-ethicist. “We can, it seems, work to secure our own future, or we can commit ourselves to our children and others of their generation.” Gilbert Meilaender, Should We Live Forever? The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 58.
49. One Jewish writer rightly observes: “Paganism often (always?) involved the readiness to sacrifice one’s own children for one’s own good.” Norman Podhoretz, The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (New York: The Free Press, 2002), 353.
50. Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 267.
51. Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (New York: Ecco, 2015).
52. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 55–56.
53. Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God (New York: Waterbrook, 2017), 240.
54. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994), 129.
55. Robert Bly, The Sibling Society (New York: Vintage, 1977, 1996), 230.
56. E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 14–15. The experiment cited is from Mark Alan Powell, “The Forgotten Famine: Personal Responsibility in Luke’s Parable of ‘the Prodigal Son,’” in Literary Encounters with the Reign of God, eds. Sharon H. Ringe and H. C. Paul Kim (New York: T&T Clark, 2004).
57. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: HarperCollins, 1950), 139.
58. John. R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 335–36.
59. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 120.
60. Christian Wiman, “Lord Is Not a Word,” in Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 124.
61. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 393.
62. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 174–75.
63. Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 355.
64. David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (New York: Riverhead, 2001), 118.
65. William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191.
66. Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 28.
67. Gilbert Meilaender, “I Want to Burden My Loved Ones,” First Things, October 1991, 12–14.
68. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 238.
69. Adam S. Miller, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), xii.
70. Ibid.
71. Martin Luther, “Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor, 1962), 503.
72. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), 24.