Walker

Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013. He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.

Against Heterosexuality

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The March 2014 issue of First Things features the (free) article “Against Heterosexuality.” In it, author Michael Hannon explains, “Sexual orientation is a conceptual scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. It is a history that began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that will likely end much sooner than most people think. Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations.” Heterosexuality thus became “this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal…On this novel account, same-sex sex acts were wrong not because they spurn the rational-animal purpose of sex—namely the family—but rather because the desire for these actions allegedly arises from a distasteful psychological disorder.”

Hannon provides the history of sexual orientation as a category, beginning in the 19th-century. As classical religious beliefs about sexuality became less dominant, “pseudoscience stepped in and replaced religion as the moral foundation for venereal norms…This perverted psychiatric identity, elevated to the status of a mutant “life form” in order to safeguard polite society against its disgusting depravities, swallowed up the entire character of the afflicted.” In other words, the invention of sexual orientation led to “homosexuals” being seen as a depraved species. “Heterosexual” was constructed to serve as the norm in the increasingly secular society.

While Hannon’s language may sometimes be inflammatory, the history and implications are both interesting and important:

First of all, within orientation essentialism, the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is a construct that is dishonest about its identity as a construct. These classifications masquerade as natural categories, applicable to all people in all times and places according to the typical objects of their sexual desires (albeit with perhaps a few more options on offer for the more politically correct categorizers). Claiming to be not simply an accidental nineteenth-century invention but a timeless truth about human sexual nature, this framework puts on airs, deceiving those who adopt its labels into believing that such distinctions are worth far more than they really are.

How much damage has this binary social construct caused?:

Young people, for instance, now regularly find themselves agonizing over their sexual identity, navel-gazing in an attempt to discern their place in this allegedly natural Venn diagram of orientations. Such obsessions generate far more heat than light, and focus already sexually excited adolescents on discerning extraneous dimensions of their own sexual makeup. This self-searching becomes even more needlessly distressing for those who discern in themselves a “homosexual orientation,” as they adopt an identity distinguished essentially by a set of sexual desires that cannot morally be fulfilled.

And what does this mean for those who identify as “heterosexuals”?:

And yet, when it comes to the gravest evil effected by the sexual-orientation binary, homosexuality is not the culprit. Heterosexuality is—not, of course, as though we can have one without the other. The most pernicious aspect of the orientation-identity system is that it tends to exempt heterosexuals from moral evaluation. If homosexuality binds us to sin, heterosexuality blinds us to sin.

Check it out and give it some thought. We could all possibly benefit from a fresh perspective.

Kirk Hammett Interview at Guitar Center

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On the heels of James Hetfield’s interview, Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett opened up at Guitar Center about his custom guitars and high school dreams. In a surprisingly emotional moment, he reveals that one of the most hardcore riffs of the song “Creeping Death” was written when he was 16-years-old. Check it out below. Hetfield and Hammett were early influences in my guitar playing, so I’m really pleased with these interviews.

Top All-Time Political Donors, 1989-2014

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Who are the top donors to political parties? And which political parties are the recipients? There is an eye-opening list of the top 156 donors between the years 1989 and 2014. For all the rhetoric about Republicans being the party of “big business” and “cronyism,” it is interesting to see that the majority of the top 20 donors gave heavily to Democrats. Or, as economist Mark Perry put it, “Combined the 18 labor unions donated more than $35 for every $1 donated by Koch Industries, $640 million vs. $18 million.”

Check it out.

In Defense of Creationists

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“But what of man’s relation to the Divine?” “Quiet, please, we’re arguing over how old dirt is”

So begins a thought-provoking article in The Week on the evolution vs. creation debate entitled “In Defense of Creationists.”[ref]I’d like to point to a similar, though more broadly-themed post by my friend Seth Payne entitled “In Defense of Believers.”[/ref] Being one who accepts evolution, rejects a young earth viewpoint, etc., I struggle sometimes in my church’s culture and Sunday School courses. The article’s author describes my outlook fairly well:
Genesis describes the created world and the Garden of Eden like a temple, and Adam’s duties therein are outlined in terms of worship and priestly service. Revelation describes the heavenly Jerusalem and the worship of all the saints, martyrs, and angels in the heavenly temple. It measures this city of God in cubits of gold brick and precious jewels. These liturgical blueprints informed and inspired the construction and worship within the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem and every Christian sanctuary worthy of the name across the planet.
And let me emphasize something important: What I just described is the “literal” interpretation of these Biblical texts. When I say Genesis and Revelation are a kind of divine architecture course, I’m taking the text on its own terms. It may be spitting into the storm of common idioms, but to be a literalist is to read poetry as poetry, history as history, and parable as parable.

Anglican bishop and biblical scholar N.T. Wright explains this rather well below.

Noting the tearing down of liturgy following the Protestant Reformation, the The Week author explains that the texts were then “reduced to a replacement science textbook and a ripped-from-the-headlines Michael Bay–style blockbuster.” Yet, despite this recognition, the author provides a charitable view of creationists’ peculiar interpretation of scripture:

They have gotten lost in the woods while trying to protect the big truths of Christianity: that God created the world, that we are dependent on him, that we owe him everything, and that he loves us even though we are sinful. In the world most of us inhabit, day to day, the world of lovers, wriggling kids, disease, war, and death, the sureness of God’s love is relevant in a way that the details of early hominid fossils never will be, glorious as they are. Have some perspective, people. In protecting that big truth of creation — that we are all made in God’s image and all endowed with supreme dignity — fundamentalists zealously guard things that follow logically from that.

As the article’s subtitle reads, “Sure, they’re misreading Genesis. But for all the right reasons.”

 

19th-Century Missionaries: Evil Colonialists or Heroes of Democracy?

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The cover story of the 2014 Jan/Feb issue of Christianity Today traces the work of political scientist Robert Woodberry and his earth-shattering article “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” While a graduate student, Woodberry took interest in a surprising link between democracy and Protestantism. While various case studies seemed to support the link, it wasn’t until Woodberry “created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations. He and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods. They hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide.” The results were shocking. “It was like an atomic bomb,” said Woodberry. “The impact of missions on global democracy was huge. I kept adding variables to the model—factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years—and they all got wiped out. It was amazing. I knew, then, I was on to something really important.” Woodberry’s discovery revealed a surprising truth: “Missionaries weren’t just part of the picture. They were central to it.” But not every kind of missionary: “The positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to “conversionary Protestants.” Protestant clergy financed by the state, as well as Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked. Independence from state control made a big difference.” It turns out that “Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.” And “so far, over a dozen studies have confirmed Woodberry’s findings. The growing body of research is beginning to change the way scholars, aid workers, and economists think about democracy and development.”

The piece is definitely worth the read.

Single Motherhood in the NYT

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Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has an excellent article in The New York Times on single motherhood and the outcomes of children. Hymowitz is no amateur to the subject and she cites an impressive amount of research. For me, one of her most interesting links was a study that “found a connection between the size of a welfare state and rates of both nonmarital births and divorce. Even if you believe that enlarging the infrastructure of support for single-parent families shows compassion for today’s children, it’s not at all obvious that it shows much concern for tomorrow’s.”

The 2013 study looked at OECD member countries and the effect expansive welfare states had on family outcomes. The findings indicate that the welfare state increases the amount of marriages. However, it also increases the divorce rate and the amount of out-of-wedlock births.[ref]The quality of these welfare-sponsored marriages may be lacking: “First, a more pronounced welfare state may facilitate divorce by providing or subsidizing goods and services to divorced spouses that would be otherwise only available within marriage (e.g., risk sharing). Put differently, in the case of divorce, the indirect e ffect may dominate the direct effect. Second, marginal marriages–those which would have not been formed without the marriage-promoting component of the welfare state–may have a lower match quality, which increases marital instability. Third, the welfare state may alter assortative mating patterns such that less stable marriages are formed…In principle, it is possible that the increased incidence of divorce drives some of the positive e ffect on the marriage rate (i.e., divorces increase the supply of potential partners in the marriage market)” (pg. 12, fnt. 20).[/ref] “Hence, while the welfare state supports the formation of families, it crowds-out the traditional organization of the family by increasing the divorce rate and the number of children born out of wedlock” (pg. 3). The welfare state’s relation with out-of-wedlock births “is consistent with the view that the welfare state creates incentives by providing higher support for single mothers (direct e ffect, as for instance in the case of AFDC), and with the idea that the welfare state acts as a substitute for a stable union (indirect e ffect)” (pg. 13).

Definitely worth checking out.

 

Origins Debate

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I’ve mentioned debates over evolution before, largely based on one of Nathaniel’s T&S posts.[ref]For an interesting analysis of Mormon acceptance of evolution, see Benjamin Knoll’s post at By Common Consent.[/ref] One of Nathaniel’s criticisms of typical polls (specifically the one by Pew Research) is the questions’ wording. Sociologist Jonathan Hill has recognized this as well and introduces in a recent piece in Christianity Today a new nationally representative survey called The National Study of Religion and Human Origins (NSRHO). The new poll asked about the following three propositions:

  1. Humans did not evolve from other species.
  2. God was involved in the creation of humans.
  3. Humans were created within the last 10,000 years.

Hill explains that only “14 percent affirmed each of these beliefs, and only 10 percent were certain of their beliefs. Furthermore, only 8 percent claimed it was important to them to have the right beliefs about human origins…Nine percent believed humans evolved and that God played no part in the process, six percent held these beliefs with certainty, and less than four percent said their beliefs were important to them personally.”

“If only eight percent of respondents,” he continues, “are classified as convinced creationists whose beliefs are dear to them, and if only four percent are classified as atheistic evolutionists whose beliefs are dear to them, then perhaps Americans are not as deeply divided over human origins as polls have indicated. In fact, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle, holding their beliefs with varying levels of certainty.”

Check out the entire piece.

Rivalry and Marriage

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Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan

Not that kind of rivalry, but the kind spoken of in economics. GMU economist Bryan Caplan has a fascinating blog post in which he examines how rivalrous a married couple’s consumption bundle typically is with some aid from equivalence scales. Caplan takes an imaginary couple with the high earner making $60,000 and the low earner making $40,000 annually. Using four distinct empirical strategies,[ref](1) “Expert Statistical” measures for statistical purposes only (i.e. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OECD), (2) “Expert Program” focuses on defining social benefits (i.e. Swiss “base amount,” U.S. poverty line), (3) “Consumption” measures consumer spending constrained by disposable income,(4) “Subjective” is associated with particular income levels for families of given characteristics and their self-evaluation.[/ref] he finds that “the low-earning spouse makes out like a bandit.  The surprise: The high-earning spouse gains as well – for all four ways to estimate real-world rivalry…[I]f one partner outearns the other by 50%, share-and-share-alike marriage raises the high-earner’s effective consumption by about 30%, and the low-earner’s effective consumption by about 100%.  To quote Keanu, “Woh.””[ref]Caplan asks, “Is there any reason to prefer one method to the others?  Yes.  People have ample first-hand experience with household management, so the subjective approach is probably better than deferring to government statisticians’ opinions.  And looking at actual consumption behavior is probably better than asking people what they think.”[/ref]

He concludes,

These calculations deliberately ignore all the evidence that marriage makes family income go up via the large male marriage premium minus the small female marriage penalty.  So the true effect of marriage on economic well-being is probably even more massive than mere arithmetic suggests.  Why then are economists – not to mention poverty activists – so apathetic?

See the full post for the calculations.

 

 

Meaningful Work

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Adam Grant
Adam Grant

Wharton’s Adam Grant has an excellent piece at The Huffington Post reviewing research that seeks to uncover what makes a job meaningful to employees. “After more than 40 years of research, we know that people struggle to find meaning when they lack autonomy, variety, challenge, performance feedback, and the chance to work on a whole product or service from start to finish,” writes Grant. “As important as these factors are, though, there’s another that matters more…A comprehensive analysis of data from more than 11,000 employees across industries: the single strongest predictor of meaningfulness was the belief that the job had a positive impact on others.”

A lot of interesting research in this one. Managers take note.

James Hetfield Interview at Guitar Center

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Metallica frontman James Hetfield sat down in Guitar Center to give a fairly intimate interview on his musical beginnings and experience with Metallica. What makes it even better is the brief riffing in between. Check it out below.