I didn't expect this

As an engineer, I admit that I am a rare bird in that I also greatly enjoy literature, and when teaching Sunday School last weekend, I used the picture of Sinbad the Sailor and his seven voyages as a picture of James 4:13-17, where the merchants in the church were cautioned against presuming upon the future and planning for great wealth.  I thought there were great parallels between the voyages of Sinbad and the risks noted by James.

While eventually I was able to explain what I was getting at, I was rather shocked that few, if any, in attendance were really familiar with the story of Sinbad--despite numerous movie and even cartoon adaptations of the story.  Somehow it seems that despite the great literature being available on "Gutenberg Project" and the great movies of the past being available on streaming video, our culture is becoming more and more insulated from the greater cultural and literary conversation.

I guess I should have expected it, though, as I got a rebuke about 20 years ago because many of the literary comments I made on conference calls with colleagues in Asia were not understood by....my American colleagues.  The Asians had been educated in English-inspired schools and got the references and jokes.

Perhaps Gaza, Ashkelon, Ekron, Adhdod, and Gath are actually in the United States.  Just sayin'.  

Now there's an epitaph

Ben Sasse has not yet died, and I hold out hope that the therapy that's already looking powerful bears fruit in his body, but this wish for America is just wonderful: 

I'd like a lot more dinner tables to turn off the devices, put them out of the room, pour a big glass of wine, break bread together, and wrestle with some really grand questions about what you're building for your family and your next generation.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Interesting change of definitions

Back when I was young, "single" simply meant, for the most part, that a person was not married.  Certainly people did live together outside of marriage--we called it "living in sin" of course--but it was not prevalent enough to warrant saying that those doing so were no longer single.  If one wanted to say that someone was not even dating anyone, one said one was "unattached".  "Dating" meant exactly that, "going steady" was the next step, and so on.

Now, with far greater prevalence of living together (and don't you dare call it "living in sin", or marriage as "making it legal" anymore?), "single" seems to mean "not involved in a relatively permanent or sexual relationship", and the current word for what used to be known as "single" is now "unmarried."

It's an interesting comment on sexual mores today, and it brings to mind the question of how we reach out to the apparently strong majority of young people who see living together as morally acceptable.  The historic ways of doing so are to point to STDs (hard to get them if you're with your first partner for life), the pain of broken relationships and risk of domestic violence, and the likelihood of having children without the protective elements provided by law.

But perhaps what's really going on is that most young people haven't had the protection of married parents throughout their growing up, and as they leave high school, they're told that (a) jobs available to most high school graduates won't pay the bills for a home and (b) getting to that point requires one to get a bachelor's or even master's/doctoral degree.  So what we've got, really, is a perfect storm where opportunities to live well while unmarried and unattached are rare, and at the same time, larger proportions of young people are in college until their late twenties.

Since sex drive doesn't take a break because one is in college, the result is obvious.  We're set up for family disarray.

More inspiration

 The lunch lady at my son's school made a tuna-jalapeno quiche for me.  I am so going to have to take Mrs. Bubba out for Italian--watch out for flying toilets around Rochester.  My son is cringing at the thought of being a graduate of Jerome Horwitz Elementary....

Side note: tuna-jalapeno quiche with sharp cheddar is seriously good.  Now why do I have a weight problem?