The worst day of Sugar Bear’s 55 years was one of the days — there have been many of them — when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where people whose sentences have ended and are being released see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.

Generational recidivism is not unusual in Sugar Bear’s world of fatherlessness. His son, who was convicted of selling drugs, is still incarcerated because he has not been a model prisoner. He is an apple that did not fall far from the tree. ...

Although he has never been married, he has five children. He has been shot only once. He says he “did juvenile time” but managed, largely because he was an athlete, to graduate from high school. After that, he was incarcerated five times, for sentences ranging from six months to 11 years. He says he was implicated in “a 187” — murder of a corrections officer — but was exonerated. Then his life’s gyrations intersected with some benevolent institutions.

In 1965, immediately after the Watts riots that announced to a largely oblivious nation the volatility of some pockets of social regression, a UCLA undergraduate, Keith Phillips, moved into this devastated section of the city of angels. Now 65, Phillips is the reason why World Impact, his creation, is a presence in 13 of America’s most troubled cities, such as Newark and East St. Louis. Its focus is on fatherlessness and the social pathologies that flow from it.

This is the preoccupation of Ken Canfield, 58, a Kansas State Ph.D. who, until five years ago, headed the National Center for Fathering in Kansas City. He then moved here to help Pepperdine University develop a Center for the Family, and he now labors with World Impact living among the city’s most troubled people. Canfield acquainted Sugar Bear with Psalm 68, which speaks of God as “father of the fatherless” who “setteth the solitary in families.” For people like Sugar Bear, people with holes in their souls never filled by the love of fathers, Canfield says religion offers the “spiritualization of fatherhood”:

“If you don’t have the calm self-respect that a father gives, your passions go sideways. For a number of men, their passions become sexualized as they look for comfort and affirmation of their manhood.”

On a recent day, Sugar Bear, a burly, cheerful survivor, was wearing a windbreaker bearing the logo of the Union Rescue Mission. He works there, helping provide services to, among others, a small portion of L.A. County’s 50,000 homeless, 30 percent of whom are under 35.

Labels: Christianity, culture, Fathers, men, religion

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...The Christian answer to this is that no two people are compatible. Duke University Ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become "whole" and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage, namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered--living life incurvatus in se. As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love ... ?” That is why a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess. Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as a pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous work. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature?

Labels: Christianity, culture, Marriage

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Medieval Christians were obsessed with the Song of Songs. No book of the Bible received such intensely devoted attention in commentary and preaching. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six homilies on the Song and died just as he was getting started on chapter 3. The Song has a much-diminished place in the modern Christian imagination. The time is far past to reverse that trend, but it is worth reversing only if the Song is recovered as allegory.

Christians today often read the Song as lusty celebration of sex. Some try to wipe away the prudish poetry to peep at the sex acts of Solomon and his Shulammite. Such an approach simply projects contemporary obsessions into an ancient text. It assumes that we already know what real sex is. We have outgrown romance and now know that sex is no more than a clash of bodies and an exchange of fluids. There is no magic, no mystery, only friction, only technique. Reading the Song as disguised pornography reinforces and sacralizes the sexual confusions of our age.

Even as an erotic poem, the Song has much to teach. Robert Alter observes that in much of the world’s erotic literature, “the body in the act of love often seems to displace the rest of the world.” By contrast in the Song, “the world is constantly embraced in the very process of imagining the body. The natural landscape, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of the animal and floral realm, the profusion of goods afforded through trade, the inventive skill of the artisan, the grandeur of cities, are all joyfully affirmed as love is affirmed.” Solomon is no courtly lover who abandons the world and all to chase after his bride. When he turns from the world, he rediscovers his world in her. That insight alone is enough to justify the Song’s inclusion in the wisdom literature.

But the poem itself invites us deeper. The verse that everyone recognizes as the Song’s theme (8:6) gives the poem a cosmic scope. Love’s strength is comparable to relentless forces of decay and destruction—death (Hebrew, mot) and Sheol. Love is no ordinary fire, but a flash from the very “flame of Yah.” “Mot” is the name of a Canaanite deity, so the conflict of Love and Death is a war of gods. The placement of this verse is a rhetorical tour de force. Near the end of a poem that might be read as nothing more than a love poem, the poet drops in the short form of the name of Israel’s God. It is not even a separate word, but a suffix to the word “flame.” With a subtle gesture, the poet encourages us to re-read the entire poem, now aware that love burns as divine fire.

When we do, we find Yah everywhere.

Labels: Christianity, Marriage, religion, sex

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The two brides were married in a traditional ceremony at United Church of Chapel Hill last weekend.

In spite of the fact that both had her own notions about wedding details like gowns, flowers, cakes, rings, vows and honeymoons and both, like most brides to be, had girly inclinations about their dream wedding, Jenny Shultz, 31, and Shannon Thomas, 46, made it to the altar unscathed, with their relationship intact and with all that wedding stuff worked out.

Many couples opt to write their vows these days, but Jenny and Shannon found that everything they came up with was somehow already covered in traditional words like "for richer, for poorer, for better for worse."

"I wrote, like a book, all the same things already said in the traditional vows," Shultz said. "Finally, we both just laughed because we realized that the traditional vows had been working for years. They were tried and true.

"It may sound funny to say we are both brides and we are claiming tradition and making it applicable to two women instead of using different stuff, but what we're doing is seeking the sanctity of marriage for us. Shannon and Jenny, two people coming together."

Labels: Christianity, culture, gay marriage, North Carolina, religion

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Evangelical abstinence campaigns have shifted their emphasis from "just say no" to sex before marriage to "just say yes"—within marriage, that is, says Christine Gardner. In Making Chastity Sexy (University of California Press), the Wheaton College communications professor examines the rhetoric of three evangelical abstinence organizations, comparing them with an abstinence campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is a common threat. Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Gardner about the larger ideas communicated to young people in the campaign.

What did you find upon examining the language of the U.S. abstinence movement?

This is a study of rhetoric in the classical sense—the study of the art of persuasion, focusing on three very specific church-related evangelical campaigns. These groups are using a savvy rhetorical strategy: They are using sex to sell abstinence. They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, "If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married." The argument then becomes a promise of marriage.

What are the limitations of this approach?

Such campaigns don't address the challenges of singleness. Also, what if you are gay? What if you do get married, but sex isn't all it's cracked up to be? There are many challenges with this kind of strategy, as savvy and persuasive as it is.

Evangelicals are quite good at interacting with secular culture. We have a long history of adapting secular forms for religious ends. The language of self-gratification in "sexy abstinence" is showing the ability of evangelicals to speak the language of the culture. But in doing so, are we actually transforming it?

You looked at how Africans view abstinence, saying they "saw their bodies as temples of the Lord and themselves as caretakers … a more deeply theological response."

I assumed that HIV/AIDS would be the big motivator for [African] young people to commit to abstinence. It is big, but I found this other undercurrent that was deeply theological. A leader of one of the programs told me that yes, they do talk about AIDS as a motivator for young people to commit to abstinence, but they noted that "you can get malaria and die, too." AIDS is not as much of a motivator as a Western researcher coming in would have assumed.

How do the American and African messages compare?

Americans have turned a prohibition into a more positive admonition. In this case, pleasing God is an end in itself. Pleasing God will have tangible benefits. In Kenya and Rwanda, it was more of a combination: "Avoid death. Avoid HIV/AIDS, and do it out of fear of God, because he wants you to do this."

Also, in the places I visited in Africa, the condom is viewed as a medical device, a tool for saving lives. It is not viewed as a tool for promiscuity, as evangelicals in this country largely view it. The same little piece of latex is described so radically differently by evangelicals in two different cultural contexts.

How does Western rhetoric translate to the African context?

It offers an understanding of self and empowers young people, especially women, to respect their bodies. This is, of course, fabulous and indeed, very biblical. But the language of individualism and self-gratification can seep in and pose a problem.

Labels: abstinence, Africa, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex education, STDs

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"Confessions of a 29-year old virgin."

That’s the title of the emotionally revealing blog of four Fraser Valley virgins who are looking for some good men for marriage and “holy” sex.

The Abbotsford women’s online “virgin diaries” have suddenly made them media stars. Their quest for guys led to a video about them appearing Wednesday on the popular show of Ellen DeGeneres, who proceeded to get in some virgin jokes.

The virginal British Columbians, all of whom are 29 or 30 and evangelical Christians, were also to be videotaped Wednesday night for an upcoming appearance on HLN’s Dr. Drew Show.

And this Sunday evening three of the four young B.C. women will be starring on a pilot program called The Virgin Diaries on the TLC network. The program includes video of the young women dating eligible men, all of whom also happen to be virgins.

The extroverted B.C. females, all members of a small church in Abbotsford called The River, began their blog four months ago because they were tired of being stereotyped as defective for being virgins (actually, one confesses to being a “born-again” virgin who wants to start over). They are fighting back against a sex-saturated culture, and looking for guys, in the name of spiritual “purity.” ...

The four young women’s crusade for virginity before marriage goes against the grain of North American culture, where a poll released this week by online polling system Soda-Head suggested 70 per cent of North Americans think cohabitation before marriage is a good thing.

Labels: Canada, Christianity, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, virginity

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Love, marriage, and sex the way God designed were topics discussed by pastor and bestselling author Tim Keller and his wife, Kathy, during a seminar hosted by a marriage advocacy campaign and streamed live over the Internet Tuesday.

Let’s Strengthen Marriage, a national campaign also gave the Kellers a chance to discuss their new book, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment With the Wisdom of God. The book was released on Tuesday as well.

Keller and his wife, who have been married 37 years, stressed the importance of establishing and maintaining a friendship throughout all phases of a relationship, including when dating as singles.

The determining factor when deciding whether to marry someone should be whether both people in the relationship want to help each other become what God has planned for them individually and together, said the couple. ...

“You want the person doing the same for you, in which case you are not really looking for a person primarily that gives you great sexual chemistry, or romantic chemistry for you,” he said. “You are looking for a person who understands you, that can be your best friend, and your best counselor, and is going on a journey with you to help you become all that God wants you to be.” ...

Contrary to a popular belief that marriage restricts a person’s freedom, the Kellers said they believe marriage allows one to become what God really wants him or her to become and therefore is unrestricted by self-will.

“A lot of people are afraid that a vow limits your freedom. That’s not true. You are really more free by making a vow and sticking with it than in a sense being the victim of your own desires, and impulses, and feelings,” Keller stated. “The marriage vow makes it possible for you to be intimate because you can be yourself. You know the other person isn’t going to walk, promising not to walk when things get tough.”

Labels: Christianity, culture, Marriage, religion

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The final road to the altar for the four couples celebrating a group wedding in Long Beach on Sunday was a bit unconventional.

Most of the newlyweds, like high school sweethearts Angel Lewis and Christopher Woodbridge, had lived together for years and were raising families.

But the couple's plans to marry kept getting stalled, partly because saving money has been a struggle while raising five children. And last year, wedding bands they had purchased were stolen from their home.

So it was a godsend for them when the pastor at Parkcrest Christian Church, Mike Goldsworthy, announced during his sermon two weeks ago that the church would throw a free wedding and reception for any unmarried couples in the congregation who were living together.

"If your only barrier is the cost of a wedding, we will remove that," he said. ...

Sunday's church-financed weddings were a first for Parkcrest, Goldsworthy said. His offer was partly motivated by couples' reluctance to marry because of the costs involved. But he added he also wants members of his congregation to adhere to the Bible.

"We believe that God's plan for a couple is not to be living together, but marriage," he said.

Labels: California, Christianity, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, economics, Marriage, religion, weddings

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...Jenell Paris, a cultural anthropologist teaching at Messiah College, has posed these questions and provided her own answer in her recent book, The End of Sexual Identity. Her book makes the historical argument that the very concept of a homosexual versus heterosexual identity is a relatively modern invention. ...


Was it also the 19th century when these labels gained currency in the broader culture?

Those didn't really influence the general public until the 1930s, when those words became a more common part of American discourse. So in thinking about even my own family, just to take an example, we could say that my grandfather who came of age in the 1910s probably didn't have a sexual identity. He was a fundamentalist minister, but he was a man, he was a Christian, and his sexuality got wrapped around those concepts, not his identity understood in terms of his sexuality.

My parents remember getting a sexual identity in the 1960s. So these ideas came a little late for them but they both can talk about realizing, "Oh, I am heterosexual; there is such a thing and I am going to claim one of those labels for myself." I, growing up in the ‘80s, always had a sexual identity. So we can see across the 20th century there has been a deeper and deeper entrenchment of that concept in American self-understandings.

And these changes correspond to how different generations have understood the role and meaning of sex in human life?

Right. If anything, sex was considered a more communal element of life. It had to do with reproduction, with family, with extended family, and with church and community. Sexual identity categories radically individualized the meaning of sex in the human experience. So the meaning of sex is now located primarily within the individual and her private, innermost feelings.

As an anthropologist, why do you think these changes occurred?

I think there are many different social factors around increasing individualism, even urbanization and other factors that don't seem directly related to sex. Urbanization made it possible for people to move far away from their families and have relationships or sexual experiences that their kin would never even know about. So people were gaining more freedom to cultivate sexual experiences that were more individualized, and I think this influenced the scientific community to categorize sexuality in ways that were more individual and less religious and less communal.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, homosexuality, religion, sex

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The culture war over gay rights has entered the impersonal world of e-commerce.

A handful of advocates, armed with nothing more than their keyboards, have put many of the country’s largest retailers, including Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and Wal-Mart, on the spot over their indirect and, until recently, unnoticed roles in funneling money to Christian groups that are vocal in opposing homosexuality.

The advocates are demanding that the retailers end their association with an Internet marketer that gets a commission from the retailers for each online customer it gives them. It is a routine arrangement on hundreds of e-commerce sites, but with a twist here: a share of the commission that retailers pay is donated to a Christian charity of the buyer’s choice, from a list that includes prominent conservative evangelical groups like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

The marketer and the Christian groups are fighting back, saying that the hundred or so companies that have dropped the marketer were misled and that the charities are being slandered for their religious beliefs.

The national battle was ignited in July by Stuart Wilber, a 73-year-old gay man in Seattle. He was astonished, he said, when he learned that people who bought Microsoft products through a Christian-oriented Internet marketer known as Charity Giveback Group, or CGBG, could channel a donation to evangelical organizations that call homosexual behavior a threat to the moral and social fabric.

Labels: Christianity, culture, homosexuality, religion

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Till Alzheimer's do us part?

Televangelist Pat Robertson ignited yet another firestorm this week when he suggested on his program that divorce is an acceptable solution for a husband debating whether to stay with a wife who has Alzheimer's disease because the disease is like "a kind of death."

Robertson made the comments in response to a caller who said his friend had started seeing another woman after his wife began suffering from Alzheimer's. But Robertson also suggested consulting an ethicist for a second opinion.

So we did.

The Rev. David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and author of the book "Getting Marriage Right," said Robertson's remarks spotlight the void in conservative Christian thinking about divorce. Jesus made it clear that adultery is the only reason to leave a marriage, Gushee said. ...

Because marriage vows apply "in sickness and in health," Gushee said a more pastoral response would be to connect that spouse with caretakers and other resources to help him carry those vows to the end.

"That would be a meaningful Christian witness to other people," Gushee said. "It's the kind of thing God blesses. There is a certain sublime beauty that can come out of those situations."

Labels: Christianity, culture, divorce, Marriage, religion

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This week on his television show Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said a man would be morally justified to divorce his wife with Alzheimer’s disease in order to marry another woman. The dementia-riddled wife is, Robertson said, “not there” anymore. This is more than an embarrassment. This is more than cruelty. This is a repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Few Christians take Robertson all that seriously anymore. Most roll their eyes, and shake their heads when he makes another outlandish comment (for instance, defending China’s brutal one-child abortion policy to identifying God’s judgment on specific actions in the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the Haiti earthquake). This is serious, though, because it points to an issue that is much bigger than Robertson.

Marriage, the Scripture tells us, is an icon of something deeper, more ancient, more mysterious. The marriage union is a sign, the Apostle Paul announces, of the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph. 5). The husband, then, is to love his wife “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). This love is defined not as the hormonal surge of romance but as a self-sacrificial crucifixion of self. The husband pictures Christ when he loves his wife by giving himself up for her.

At the arrest of Christ, his Bride, the church, forgot who she was, and denied who he was. He didn’t divorce her. He didn’t leave.

The Bride of Christ fled his side, and went back to their old ways of life. When Jesus came to them after the resurrection, the church was about the very thing they were doing when Jesus found them in the first place: out on the boats with their nets. Jesus didn’t leave. He stood by his words, stood by his Bride, even to the Place of the Skull, and beyond.

A woman or a man with Alzheimer’s can’t do anything for you. There’s no romance, no sex, no partnership, not even companionship. That’s just the point. Because marriage is a Christ/church icon, a man loves his wife as his own flesh. He cannot sever her off from him simply because she isn’t “useful” anymore.

Labels: aging, Christianity, culture, divorce, Marriage, religion

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The 15-year-old New Hampshire girl was pregnant, scared and humiliated when she was made to stand before her Baptist church congregation 14 years ago and apologize for her immorality. ...

Victim Tina Anderson, now 29, told The Associated Press she felt vindicated. She said she was never really believed that the sex was not consensual until a court found him guilty. The AP typically does not identify victims of sexual assault, but Anderson asked that her name be used.

Labels: Christianity, culture, religion, sexual assault

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Instead of watching the debate tonight, I had dinner with friends in Littleton. The restaurant had approximately 34 televisions going and all were tuned into the Denver Broncos preseason game. I love Colorado.

So I missed the little brouhaha over Byron York's question to Michele Bachmann, embedded above. When I think of the top, say, 1,000 questions I'd like to hear Fox News ask GOP presidential contenders, asking Michele Bachmann about her views on submissive wives wouldn't rank on my list. And you could tell the audience thought it an unconscionably rude or idiotic question.

What I find surprising, though, is how little the culture understands about what the New Testament teaches Christians about marriage. So as a wife in a Christian marriage, allow me to explain. Marriage is my most important vocation. It is the means by which God blesses me and my husband. Ephesians tells us that marriage is an image of Christ and the church. ...

The fact is that the husband's given role -- that of complete sacrifice for his wife -- is much more difficult than the wife's role of submission. But something tells me we won't be seeing anybody ask the Catholic or Evangelical male candidates whether they can be president while holding a Biblical view of marriage that requires this complete sacrifice for their spouse. On the one hand, that's a good thing. On the other, it shows just how much that vital role -- the one that sustains a Christian marriage -- has been neglected and forgotten.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, religion, women

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For the Bible’s authors, it was pretty clear how marriage works.

Men lead.

Women follow.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s run for the White House put this traditional Christian view of submission in the spotlight. Bachmann, like many conservative Christians, believes that wives should submit to their husbands. That’s led some to ask whether she’d have to obey her husband when it comes to public policy. ...

Scripture doesn’t give husbands a right to be jerks, said the Rev. Jeremy Rose, pastor of the Axis Church in Nashville. And it doesn’t mean women have to do whatever their husbands say.

Instead, Rose said, men are supposed to love their wives and put their wives’ needs first when making decisions.

“If you quote that verse to your wife, you are not in a good place,” said Rose, 32.

If the Roses disagree, it’s Jeremy’s view that prevails, although he said he breaks the news as gently as possible.

He believes that men are in charge in the church and in their homes, a view known as complementarianism. It often appeals to younger men like Rose, teaching them to grow up and be better husbands and fathers.

And he’d be fine with a woman president. So would his wife, Jill Rose, 31. She thinks that most people don’t understand what the Christian idea of submission means.

“Men and women are created equally,” she said. “People have this stigma of the male chauvinist domineering over the wife, and that’s not what the biblical perspective is at all.”

Instead, Jill Rose said, the Bible passage about submission is about trust and respect, something that was missing in the early days of the Roses’ marriage. Jeremy Rose spent most of his time at work or out hunting, playing sports and hanging with his friends. His wife drove herself to the hospital to deliver their second child while he wrapped up a softball game.

“It was a very low point,” she said.

Things changed after Jeremy Rose took a class at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. The class focused on an often-overlooked part of the Ephesians passage. Women are to submit, according to the passage, while men are to love their wives in sacrificial ways.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, gender differences, Marriage, men, religion, women

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Labels: Christianity, culture, gay marriage, gender, gender differences, Marriage, religion

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This exchange between GOP debate host Byron York yesterday and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has stirred up some controversy:

YORK: In 2006, when you were running for Congress, you described a moment in your life when your husband said you should study for a degree in tax law. You said you hated the idea, and then you explained: “But the Lord said, be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husband.” As president, would you be submissive to your husband?

BACHMANN: What submission means to us, if that’s what your question is, it means respect. I respect my husband, he’s a wonderful, godly man and a great father. And he respects me as his wife. That’s how we operate our marriage. We respect each other, we love each other.

Bachmann supporters are feigning outrage that the question should have been asked. That indignation is unwarranted. She said it and should be asked about it.

Labels: Christianity, culture, Marriage, religion

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...Your Orphan Care Initiative is bearing fruit. . . . Probably 2½ years ago we started the Wait No More Campaign. It was really born out of my heart to do something with foster kids who are available for adoption. Just in Colorado we had 850 kids in foster care waiting to be adopted. In the last two years, we've knocked that down to 350. Five hundred kids have been adopted in the program. Before, the most that the state had ever adopted in a given year, I think, was about 80 children. ...


The ultrasound initiative is designed to help crisis pregnancy centers. . . . That started in 2006 or 2007. We've placed about 515 ultrasound machines. The great news about this is that technology is on our side. Ultrasound has allowed us to look at the development of the human being—and the culture is beginning to say, "Wait a minute, abortion feels immoral." We don't need to pound anybody over the head with it. Let's ride science and technology and allow people to come to that conclusion.

We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture. ...


Can't we just print more money? Seriously, do you recommend some non-financial ways for governments to help marriage? Make divorce more difficult. Have mandatory waiting periods. Have 90-day mandatory counseling for people so it's not just "we don't like each other any more." There are different things to do that do not involve taxing other families to pay for them.

Labels: abortion, adoption, children, Christianity, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Marriage, religion

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A soft-spoken electrical engineer named Edmond Rhim sat in a packed gymnasium with his wife, Hanna, gripping her tiny hand in his. It was the last of four five-hour-long sessions of Father School, and by the end of the night, 70 men — all of them Korean, and almost all of them Christian — would be declared more emotionally adjusted dads. They would even get a certificate, a group photo and a polo shirt to prove it. ...

Like many of the men in the room, Rhim never wanted to come to Father School. (Seven dropped out after the first day.) “I’m not a bad father,” he told me a week earlier. But realizing how difficult it was for him to relate to his wife and two teenage kids — and realizing, finally, how empty that left him — he paid the $120 course fee and agreed to show up.

Father School has been helping Korean men like Rhim become more emotionally aware since 1995, when it started at the Duranno Bible College in Seoul. The mission, drawn up at the height of the Asian financial crisis, was to end what the Father School guidebook calls “the growing national epidemic of abusive, ineffective and absentee fathers.”

“Traditionally, in the Korean family, the father is very authoritarian,” Joon Cho, a program volunteer, told me a few weeks before this session of Father School began. “They’re not emotionally linked with their children or their wife. They’re either workaholics, or they’re busy enjoying their own hobbies or social activities. Family always comes last.”

In 2000, Father School spread from Korea to the United States, and the program — part 12-step recovery, part Christian ministry — was tailored to meet the needs of Korean immigrant fathers dealing with Americanized kids who wondered why their fathers weren’t more like the touchy-feely dads they watched on TV. Since then, Father School has exploded. It now operates out of 57 American cities and has graduated nearly 200,000 men worldwide. ...

The syllabus also called for students to practice saying “I love you” and to ask their wives out on dates. One man drew laughs when he said that his wife was so flabbergasted by the invitation that she refused to go. At another session, they learned how to hug, albeit grudgingly. Only when the volunteers who run these sessions insisted did the men rise from their seats and offer a few stiff embraces.

Labels: Christianity, culture, Fathers, Marriage, parenting, religion, South Korea

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After a series of relationships and messy breakups, Leila, 22, is now happy to be living with Mike, her unofficial fiancé. They know they’ll marry each other, but they don’t have a date set, nor has there been an official proposal. Mike, 27, spent most of his 20s working at Starbucks and now works night shift as a supervisor at a homeless shelter because he wanted to find something more meaningful. He is an artist, and he looks the part: a full red beard, black button stud earrings on both ears and a beanie hat with a visor covering disheveled dirty-blond hair.

As a believer in Christ, Mike believes that marriage is “a spiritual covenant.” Yet he adds, “Marriage is the same thing as a soulmate…. Marriage to me is not a ceremony…. It’s a spiritual covenant between you and the other person. No one else. No one else involved. If no one’s there, I don’t care. If someone’s, like, ordained or not to officially marry you — I don’t care! I don’t give a s*** if you’re ordained. I’m married because I say I’m married, and [if] we say that we’re married, then we’re married.”

So do Mike and Leila consider themselves married? Well, actually, they do. Mike explains:

To me we are [married]. I don’t care that you didn’t get to come to a ceremony and have free food…. Right now, with my current relationship going, it’s just understood. We’re just like, ‘All right, you’re my soulmate — cool.’ Whatever. It’s like, did we have a ceremony yet with a bunch of people and raise some money to have a little thing? No. But if someone said ‘Who’s your soulmate?’ Who would she say? She would say me, and I would say her…. I don’t care about a big show. I don’t care about who knows what, who thinks what — or anything. And I mean I’m a believer; I’m a Christian. And my whole life it’s been ‘You don’t [mockingly mumbles unintelligible sounds]’ and all this stuff. And ‘You’re not married.’ It’s like ‘OK, well then tell me what marriage is. Why don’t we talk about what marriage is? ‘And then we’ll go from there.’”

It’s not surprising that young adults like Mike and Leila are skeptical of marriage as a public institution. Authenticity is a buzzword for us Millennials, and we’ve seen plenty of marriages where people say that they love each other and promise to love each other for a lifetime and then divorce and repeat those same vows multiple times to multiple people. That’s authentic? Sure seems phony to us. We want the real thing, and many people in our generation notice that the wedding, the ring, the wedding certificate often don’t bring the real thing. So, they conclude, marriage is not a public institution. It’s a private, spiritual union of soulmates.

Labels: Christianity, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, Marriage, religion

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