Blindingly Brilliant Thoughts (Not My Own)

Over at the Crunchy Con blog Frederica Mathewes-Green linked to her brilliant essay entitled "Let's Have More Teen Pregnancy".

Teen pregnancy is not the problem. Unwed teen pregnancy is the problem. It's childbearing outside marriage that causes all the trouble. Restore an environment that supports younger marriage, and you won't have to fight biology for a decade or more...

But don't young marriages tend to end in divorce? If we communicate to young people that we think they're inherently incompetent that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it was not always the case. In fact, in the days when people married younger, divorce was much rarer. During the last half of the 20th century, as brides' age rose from 20 to 25, the divorce rate doubled. The trend toward older, and presumptively more mature, couples didn't result in stronger marriages. Marital durability has more to do with the expectations and support of surrounding society than with the partners' age.

A pattern of late marriage may actually increase the rate of divorce. During that initial decade of physical adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they're still falling in love. They fall in love, and break up, and undergo terrible pain, but find that with time they get over it. They may do this many times. Gradually, they get used to it; they learn that they can give their hearts away, and take them back again; they learn to shield their hearts from access in the first place. They learn to approach a relationship with the goal of getting what they want, and keep their bags packed by the door. By the time they marry they may have had many opportunities to learn how to walk away from a promise. They've been training for divorce.

David Warren discusses the movie I mentioned a while back, Into Great Silence (h/t: NorthWesternWinds):

What most interested me, and the person who brought the film to my attention, was a single remark of the filmmaker, about what he had learned from making his documentary. He told the BBC, “When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears.”

At Pontifications, Al Kimel points to a discussion at Reformed Catholicism and excerpts a little of Perry Robinsons point about sola Scriptura vs. solo Scriptura:

The question isn’t whether the Reformers taught solO Scriptura, but whether their position reduces to it logically or not. If on Sola Scriptura every interpretive authority operates with human authority alone, then it seems as if sola does in fact reduce down to solO. What is a council but an aggregate of human views? Consequently, the authority of any interpreative body consists in the logic of their argument and nothing else and hence the need for “clear and necessary inferrence.” This is why an individual can always consult his own judgment because it carries in principle the same authority of any council.