As a 34-year-old woman who has never married, I was impressed by Christianity Today's current cover story, "The Case for Early Marriage." Mark Regnerus proposes that the biggest challenge facing single Christians lies not in the evolution of our sexual ideas, but rather in the evolution of our marital ideas. To which I say, amen and amen.

christianity, horizons of the possible, marriage, sex, singleness

Christy:

Still, the data from nearly every survey suggest that young Americans want to get married. Eventually. That makes sense. Our Creator clearly intended for male and female to be knit together in covenantal relationship. An increasing number of men and women, however, aren’t marrying. They want to. But it’s not happening. And yet in surveying this scene, many Christians continue to perceive a sexual crisis, not a marital one. We buy, read, and pass along books about battling our sexual urges, when in fact we are battling them far longer than we were meant to. How did we misdiagnose this?

The answer is pretty straightforward: While our sexual ideals have remained biblical and thus rooted in marriage, our ideas about marriage have changed significantly. For all the heated talk and contested referendums about defending marriage against attempts to legally redefine it, the church has already ceded plenty of intellectual ground in its marriage-mindedness. Christian practical ethics about marriage—not the ones expounded on in books, but the ones we actually exhibit—have become a nebulous hodgepodge of pragmatic norms and romantic imperatives, few of which resemble anything biblical.

Students apparently score better on a test of creative thinking if they're told the questions were written 2000 miles away. Evidently the increased psychological distance expands the horizons of the possible. I wonder how different that is from, say, a painter stepping back to survey her work from afar before diving back in with the brushes.

distance, horizons of the possible, psychology, time

Nate:

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance.  According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person’s perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

Fascinating example of infrastructure mandating (and at the same time limiting) the culture of a particular place, from the journal of the University of California's Transportation Center. Includes this quote from urban historian Lewis Mumford: "The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age where everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city."

california, cars, cities, transit

Nate:

Disney Hall’s six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to ?nance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn’t open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid off employees.

The county owns the land beneath Disney Hall, and its lease for the site specifies that Disney Hall must schedule at least 128 concerts each winter season. Why 128? That’s the minimum number of concerts that will generate the parking revenue necessary to pay the debt service on the garage. And in its ?rst year, Disney Hall scheduled exactly 128 concerts. The parking garage, ostensibly designed to serve the Philharmonic, now has the Philharmonic serving it; the minimum parking requirements have led to a minimum concert requirement.

Spot on from Dave Gibbons, a pastor in "The Safest City in America."

horizons of the possible, security, suburbs

Andy:

Irvine, California, was given the title, “Safest City in America” (over 100,000 people) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on June 1, 2009. I would like to submit that suburbs just like this may actually be the most dangerous places in America.

The suburban enclaves—with their middle-class citizens and well- manicured lawns, gates and guards protecting their Orwellian lifestyle and toys, Starbucks a few minutes from each busy intersection, and some of the best schools in the country—may actually be the most dangerous places to live. We may not have the high murder counts or robberies that urban centers have, but I wonder if the suburbs have become breeding grounds for the accessible and shallow thrills of drugs and alcohol abuse, extravagant parties and proms, and mere facades of happiness and the American dream. Just ask your local city drug dealer about his primary consumers: suburban teenagers and college students.

I’m not a researcher, but my gut impression from my travels and interactions with youth in the major cities of the world, as well as in suburbs and rural communities, is that they are all equally dangerous, just in different ways.

The dangers of the suburbs entail the lack of imagination (where do you find real art museums, innovative music venues, and creative opportunities to explore nature?); materialism; greed; isolation behind cookie-cutter neighborhoods and homogeneous clubs and churches; boredom: apathy; fascination with the relevant more than the real; a love affair with popularity more than loving the poor; and a thirst for excitement superficially satisfied in the Friday night party. All this takes precedence over a dangerous ride with God on the frontlines of his movement.

I had a similar experience to Tim Stafford's son Silas when I worked with students at Harvard: very few indeed had parents who had divorced. Some of this is almost certainly due to the selection effect of admission to Harvard (or Stanford): when you are competing with dozens of other applicants for a space in the freshman class, it sure helps not to have been battling emotional trauma along the way. My colleagues in campus ministry at equally expensive, but slightly less selective, schools dealt with much more divorce in the families of their students. But the broader trend Stafford reports has become indisputably important for our culture's understanding, and misunderstanding, of marriage and divorce.

divorce, education, family, marriage

Andy:

My son Silas related a startling experience at Stanford. His dorm of about 100 residents had a “get to know you” session. At one point they asked students to divide themselves according to a series of questions—how many played a musical instrument, how many had acted in a play, how many had three or more siblings, that sort of thing. One question was whether their parents were divorced. Almost everybody in the room—all but a handful—rushed to the side of “intact family.” Silas was amazed. He expected a very high divorce rate among the families of these liberal-minded students.

College graduates may think and talk very liberally, but they don’t act like all choices are equal. Most college educated people are quite careful and determined when it comes to marriage, as with most things in life.

These statistics help explain, by the way, why the intelligentsia don’t treat divorce like the plague it is. Intellectually they may know that divorce is a very common thing and a very bad thing. But in their daily experience, among their friends and colleagues, the problem is not severe. It involves significant failures and deep wounds, but only among less than one fifth of the families they know well. College-educated opinion leaders are like people who read about bad traffic, but who find that whenever they get on the freeway, traffic is light.

What happens when a creative field known for resisting commodification enters the world of reality television competition? Will the contemporary art world accept Bravo's show as a curator for the twenty-first century?

art, irony, pop culture

Christy:

Over the last few years reality-show casting calls have become almost as much of a cultural commonplace as the shows themselves — the familiar scenes of hundreds of anxious strangers converging on a street corner with their résumés, their headshots and their A games, hoping for some kind of immortality or at least a more interesting career.

But few such casting calls have looked like the one that began in the wee hours of Saturday morning in the West Village, where Jeff Lipsky, a 37-year-old painter and digital artist from Tyngsboro, Mass., unfolded his New England Patriots lawn chair and camped out for the night in front of the White Columns gallery, first in line to audition for a new reality show being created for Bravo. Produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, the show, which doesn’t have a title or a broadcast date, will try to do for the contemporary art world what the cable channel has done for the worlds of fine cuisine (“Top Chef”) and fashion (“Project Runway”): discover young, or maybe even middle-aged or old, unknowns with the talent to command the attention of both a television audience and a serious audience in the creative field to which they aspire.

The 13 finalists eventually chosen — from among hundreds who have already auditioned in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and now in New York — will compete for a gallery show, a cash prize and a sponsored national museum tour, though the producers have not revealed how much money is at stake or which museums or galleries will participate.