Posts tagged parents

My method for remembering which pages of Gilead contained not just great and thoughtful narrative but Culture Making-worthy quotes was this: I remembered a phrase from the Psalm of the particular page's number. So I thought, "you have searched me and you known me," and was thus able to find this quote again. I don't know what I would have done if I'd wanted to excerpt something that came after page 150 ...

re: community, discipline, iowa, least of nations, leviticus, literature, parents, traces of god

Nate:

What the reading yields is the idea of father and mother as the Universal Father and Mother, the Lord‘s dear Adam and His beloved Eve; that is, essential humankind as it came from His hand. There is a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky and stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.

I wonder how well these new parental nicknames will age? Also ... it's not clear from the article whether there's any racial diversity in their interview pool, or whether everyone's white. African American and many Latino/a cultures have long had a much more fluid sense of names, nicknames, diminutives, etc. so I doubt they'd be as surprised by this new "trend".

re: children, family, names, parents, primordial stories, scale

Nate:

The change in the way these children address their parents probably stems from baby boomers’ less authoritarian child-raising practices. Technology is a factor, too, given the offhand style that people use in instant messages and cellphone texts. The Internet has made people comfortable using names that are not their own - in particular, the frequent use of screen names online has made naming a bit more elastic, said Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska who is a former president of the American Name Society, a group that studies the cultural significance of names. Screen names, he said, “might have made people freer to think of the same person addressed by multiple names, and that’s what nicknaming is.”