Free Republic

A few new books are coming out as Fall releases and I fully expect headlines like the one above to be frequent as the authors head out on book tours. Case in point: former Secretary of State John Kerry. Both President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to Kerry’s admission of meeting with leaders of other countries and advising them to wait out Trump’s time in office. Needless to say, they rightfully called out Kerry for unprecedented behavior. So, Kerry has begun to personally attack President Trump in a schoolyard bully type of way.Though it may be...

On the Problem of Arrested Spiritual Development Msgr. Charles Pope • September 4, 2018 • Consider a five-year-old child who had not yet learned to walk or talk, who could only lie in his crib, who could not eat solid food. Most of us would consider this a great tragedy, a case of arrested development. Surely as he failed to pass expected milestones his parents would consult multiple doctors in an anxious search for the cause of the problem and its cure. No one would fail to see the problem or shrug it off.Now, let’s look at a case...

Before young American men get back to work, they should switch off the video console. Younger men’s working hours have declined more than those of older men over the last 15 years, according to a working paper by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester and distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based research group. The researchers analyzed how people spend their time when they are not working. Older men are more likely to be employed than those who are younger. Some 66 percent of men looking for jobs aged...

The Bible teaches that the Christian life is one of constant growth. When you were born again, you were born into God’s family. It is God’s purpose that you will grow into fill stature and become mature in Christ. It would be against the law of God and nature if you were to remain a baby and thus become a spiritual dwarf. In 2 Peter 3:18, the Bible says that we are to grow. It implies steady development, constant enlargement, increasing wisdom. For one to grow properly certain rules must be observed for good spiritual health. 1.Read your Bible daily....

While young Americans are being exposed to toxic levels of illiberal education, their Israeli peers are quietly slogging through their studies without the benefits of frat parties, safe zones or such illuminating courses as 'The Art of Walking' or 'The Joy of Garbage.' Many American campuses are warping liberal arts education so as to indoctrinate today's naïve students into becoming tomorrow's social justice warriors. And while approximately 60% of all freshmen college students in Israel major in the social sciences and humanities, college life here isn't widely perceived as an ideological training ground for a cultural revolution. Rather, Israelis tend...

Usually, denizens of that epicenter of arrested adolescence—academia—can’t notice that trend in society at large, or even in their own back yards, or campuses. Gary Cross is an exception to the rule. “For some time, we’ve been seeing a curious trend: Young adults are attempting to delay adulthood, while preteen children are hurrying—or being hurried—into the roles and attitudes of young adults,” Cross writes in The Chronicle Review. “It’s no accident that child psychologists have extended their definition of adolescence into the 20s or that primary-school kids are pushed into beauty pageants where they are dressed like Miss America.” “As...

From the generation that had produced college students who had taken over their schools during the Vietnam era comes a new line of old people: seniors who have made it a daily ritual to take over a Queens, New York McDonald’s. Yes, there is a group of older people who arrive at this McDonald’s as soon as the doors are unlocked, and then they sit, and sit – some stay until closing time. This is definitely a problem for McDonald’s management, since the purpose of a business is to make a profit. When a group of people create a human...

I’m waiting for the American Psychological Association to declare that Peter Pan Syndrome is not only nothing to be ashamed of, but something to celebrate. Why should those in what used to be called the young adult years bother to grow up, when our benevolent government is encouraging them to remain dependent well into their 20s? In this, the first leg of our glorious new non-workers’ paradise of Obamacare, there are dozens — probably hundreds — of ways that the new regime will make health care less effective, more expensive, less efficient, more dysfunctional, more confusing and more byzantine. But...

Every generation confronts its own obstacles. My parents eloped because they couldn't afford to get married, and they hid the nuptials from their families for a year. They finally bought a big bed and moved it into the house of my father's parents. They were grateful for a nice room, but Mom suffered the lack of independence, and she didn't like having to help my grandmother in the kitchen with the kosher meals. It was a hardscrabble time. My father clashed with his father, and soon my parents found a small apartment, and a male friend moved in to share...

A British study has identified the age at which men finally grow up -- and it's 43. That's 11 years later than their female counterparts, according to research commissioned by Nickelodeon UK. Men demonstrate their immaturity by being amused at farts and burps and playing video games, among other things, said women who participated in the survey. Not being able to cook simple meals, re-telling the same old stories and jokes when out with the boys, and owning a skateboard or BMX were also high on the list. Nickelodeon UK released the results in support of its launch of a...

For the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men. Now, society has rightly celebrated the ascension of one sex. We said, "You go girl," and they went. We celebrate the ascension of women but what will we do about what appears to be the very real decline of the other sex?

  Going Directly From Adolescence to Senility David C. Stolinsky Sept. 15, 2011 I once remarked that I intended to go directly from adolescence to senility, bypassing adulthood entirely. Yes, it was a joke, but the underlying facts aren’t at all amusing. We seem to be trying to make my joke a reality. A few good people can help pull up a civilization, and a few bad ones can help pull it down. But in statistics, there is a phenomenon called “regression toward the mean.” A few outliers can pull the figures one way or the other, but over...

Democratic activists, angry that Washington residents pay taxes but have no voting representation in Congress, have set up a Facebook page to urge protesters to dump their trash outside Boehner's home if the government shuts down Friday night.

Well, at least he's consistent. Consistently nutty, that is: "In a free society we're supposed to know the truth," Paul said. "In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it." "This whole notion that Assange, who's an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren't they jumping to a wild conclusion?" he added. "This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?" That's the high school freshman's take...

A St. Louis pastor and respected church planter raised the alarm about a societal problem he calls “ban,” which are males that are not quite boys nor men in their maturity level. A ban is “somewhere in between” a boy and a man and can take the form of a 30-something male playing three hours of video games a day. “I personally believe that the reason we have a societal crisis with men is because we do not have strong churches that draw out trained, equipped, empowered, challenged men,” said Darrin Patrick, pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis...

You know something is changing in American mores when the supposed leader of the culture wars from the right, Sarah Palin, declares that smoking pot is “a minimal problem” and that “if somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in.”

Cultural observer Joseph Epstein pinpoints the transition from adulthood to adolescence as American culture's default "moral condition" in the decade following the 1951 publication of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In his 2004 essay, The Perpetual Adolescent, Epstein notes: "Salinger's novel exalts the purity of youth and locates the enemy... in those who committed the sin of growing older, [Holden Caulfield's] parents, his brother ... and just about everyone who has passed beyond adolescence and had the rather poor taste to remain alive." Adolescence as the new adulthood is a widespread but thankfully not a universal phenomenon....

If 2009 is remembered for anything in American cinema, it might be as the year grown-ups and Hollywood finally agreed to call it quits. This is the year when such slick, star-driven, adult-oriented movies as "State of Play," "Duplicity," "The International" and "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" underperformed at the box office. And when talking-toy movies like "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "G.I. Joe" raked in millions. Suddenly, movies for grown-ups are in the cross hairs. "I'm caught up all in it," Spike Lee said recently with a rueful laugh, noting that the sequel to his 2006...

Almost four decades ago, the 26th Amendment lowered the US voting age to 18.  At the time, most neurologists believed that the human brain was fully developed by about age 12, so allowing Americans to vote at 18 seemed like a safe move. But parents of teenagers knew that was nonsense, and new research is confirming those parental observations.  Since the voting age was lowered in 1971, scientific advancements such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allowed researchers to get detailed three-dimensional images of developing brains. Although human brains typically reach their adult size by age 12, they are far from...

On issues such as abortion, gay marriage and religion, college students shift noticeably to the left from the time they arrive on campus through their junior year, new research shows. The reason, according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, isn’t indoctrination by left-leaning faculty but rather the more powerful influence of fellow students. And at most colleges, left-leaning peer groups are more common than conservative ones. After college, students—particularly women—move somewhat back to the right politically. The research is the latest of several efforts by academics to lend analytical rigor to an emotional debate. Overall, college faculty lean left politically,...