Word: birthed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to complain about a bipartisan consensus in favor of goodness. Certainly its premises are too grave to dismiss. Rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth are indeed appalling, as are the related rates of child abuse and neglect. Songs celebrating rape and murder are not the hallmark of a healthy culture. Still, it's fair to ask whether something as ideologically jumbled as the new politics of virtue can ultimately prove coherent. Can liberals and conservatives so easily embrace the same ideas without surrendering bedrock beliefs? Or, in fact, might a real moral recovery entail some bitter medicine...
...such brakes have no place in liberal dogma. The classically liberal take on human nature is that there is no such thing: we are blank slates, innocent at birth; it is only society--capitalism, in the standard indictment--that corrupts us. Thus, Lerner claims, people get divorced because they have "internalized the ethos of the marketplace, and view the other person primarily in terms of what one can get out of the exchange...
...sense of commitment, or lucky to have been blessed with a temperament conducive to marriage, or lucky to have found a well-matched mate. Such humble detachment is a hallmark of liberalism; a good liberal can look at anyone--serial killer or serial monogamist--and see how circumstances of birth and upbringing loaded the dice. A guiding insight of modern liberalism is "There but for the grace...
DIVIDED AT BIRTH...
...past five years, Beckwith and Fisher have been concentrating on sacred rites of passage that mark major life changes: birth, puberty, courtship, healing and death. This fieldwork will continue for one more year; the photographers are currently in the field filming the Swazi reed dance in Swaziland, Ndebele marriages in South Africa and Tuareg seasonal ceremonies in the Sahara. Says Beckwith: "These ceremonies are some of the most powerful events in these tribes. They promote healing and provide a powerful new sense of identity. Some of the rituals we've photographed no longer exist. And many of those that...