c. 1999 Religion News Service
Report: Many view long-term marriage as fairy tale
(RNS) Most young people still cherish the idea of a big wedding and a happily-ever-after marriage, but many now feel it may be only a fairy tale, according to a Rutgers University report on marriage that was released Thursday.
Fewer Americans are marrying, those who do get married are not as happy, and nearly half of married Americans decide to call it quits, concluded the report, “The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America,” by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers.
The project, headed by David Popenoe, a Rutgers sociologist, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a family scholar, is dedicated to preserving and promoting one of the world’s oldest institutions. The report reviewed marriage statistics and studies from the past four decades.
The studies show married people are healthier, happier and provide the best environment for raising children, the authors maintain. But marriage no longer serves as a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. This is because the gap has widened significantly between the time young people become sexually active and when they get married.
The term “premarital sex” itself is becoming outdated, the report said, because increasingly sex is not connected to marriage. More young people live together outside marriage, and out-of-wedlock births are at historic highs.
“As a measure of social health, it’s very disturbing,” Popenoe said of young people’s attitudes toward marriage, living together and having children without a spouse. “But it’s not surprising they’ve grown increasingly pessimistic about their own chances. They’re aware of the very high divorce rate, many of them have come from broken homes, and you run into kids who today haven’t even seen a good marriage.”
The report cited 1995 statistics from the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, which annually interviews high school seniors nationwide. It found that even though, among high school seniors, 83 percent of the girls and 72 percent of the boys said having a good marriage and family life is important, only 64 percent of girls and 59 percent of boys felt it was very likely they would stay married to the same person for life.
Only 30 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys agreed that people who are legally married are happier than those who stay single or live with someone.
The report did note that some trends, such as the rising ages of first-time brides and grooms, seem to be good for the future of marriage. The higher median age of brides and grooms, now 25 and 27, is responsible for the slight decline in the highest-ever divorce rate of 50 percent during the late ’80s, Popenoe said.
United Nations population conference reaches agreement
(RNS) Over the objections of the Vatican, Nicaragua and Argentina, a United Nations conference on stabilizing the world population, has adopted a proposal that public health systems”train and equip health-service providers and … take other measures to assure that … abortion is safe and accessible”in countries where abortion is legal.
The proposal was one of the most contentious elements at a three-day meeting called to implement the 1994 Cairo Agreement on population and development. The meeting frequently saw the Vatican and a number of countries with large Muslim and Roman Catholic populations pitted against Western nations and a host of nongovernmental organizations participating as official observers.
Agreement on the document, which covers a broad range of issues such as general health care for women, increased education and reproductive choice, came late Thursday (July 1) after Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, gaveled to a close a protracted debate on abortion and told the Vatican and objecting nations to add their reservations to the document.”We can all be proud of what we have achieved,”said Nafis Sadik, director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.”Every girl, every boy, every man and every woman must have their basic rights to education, to health and have options and choices.” In the debate over abortion, the Vatican and several other countries objected to including the word”accessible”in the proposal.
The Vatican is one of two nonmember observer states and as such can take a full part in all United Nations conferences, addressing them at will although it has no vote. The other nonmember observer state is Switzerland.
The contentious debate was dramatized on Thursday when 126 women’s groups, saying they were frustrated by the Vatican’s efforts to thwart the adoption of an agreement, issued an open letter to the church charging its policies allow thousands of women to die each year because the they lack access to family planning and abortion services.”What is objectionable is the Vatican’s refusal to accept that the conference’s purpose is to review implementation of the Cairo plan and suggest ways of improving it, not reopening the agreement,”said Ingar Bruegemann, director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Pope urges the young to be”the saints of the new millennium” (RNS) Summoning young people from around the world to Rome in August 2000 for a special Holy Year celebration, Pope John Paul II is challenging them to become”the saints of the new millennium.””Young people of every continent, do not be afraid to be the saints of the new millennium,”the 79-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff said in a”Message to the Youth of the World on the Occasion of the 15th World Youth Day.” The celebrations of World Youth Day will last for almost a week, from Aug. 15 to 20. The pope has made the day an annual event since the special Holy Year of the Redemption he called in 1984.”The Lord wants you to be intrepid apostles of his gospel and builders of a new humanity,”John Paul said in the message.
The pope called on young people to”to strive to contribute to the building of a new world, founded on the power of love and forgiveness, on the struggle against injustice and all physical, moral and spiritual distress, on the orientation of politics, economy, culture and technology to the service of man and his integral development.” The theme of next year’s World Youth Day will be”The Word Became Flesh, and Dwelt Among Us”from the Gospel of John, he said.
It is the same theme as that of”Incarnationis Mysterium,”a statement John Paul issued last year to explain the spiritual significance of the Jubilee Holy Year 2000.
The pope said he hoped the book would give”motivation for tireless commitment to the building of a civilization of love”to”you boys and girls who will be adults in the next century.”
British Methodists choose Sikh convert as new president
(RNS) The Methodist Conference of Great Britain as chosen the Rev. Inderjit Bhogal, a Sikh convert, to be its president in the coming year.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1953, Bhogal came to Britain with his parents when he was 11, and in the absence of a Sikh temple in Dudley, West Midlands, where the family was living, found himself attracted to Methodism. Ordained in 1979, he is director of the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield and a minister in the Sheffield Inner City Ecumenical Mission.
The Methodist Conference, meeting in Southport, Lancashire, also voted to allow local churches to apply _ at their own discretion _ for National Lottery funding for any purpose. The Methodists have been among the sternest critics of the National Lottery, and their traditional opposition to gambling has meant that up till now applications for National Lottery funding were only allowed if work with the poor was threatened by lack of funds.
Britain’s National Lottery sets aside part of its income for charitable activities, including church-based programs.
But Methodists will have to wait until next year to discover whether alcoholic drinks will be allowed on Methodist premises. By the narrow margin of 167 votes to 150 the conference, the governing body of British Methodism, agreed to a resolution calling for the issue to be discussed throughout the church over the coming year before it is finally decided at next year’s conference.
In the 18th century Methodists often used to meet in public houses because they offered the only available meeting places, but the 19th century temperance movement led to a ban on alcohol on Methodist premises. Unfermented grape juice is used at Methodist communion services.
The conference also decided, in deference to national feelings in a now devolved Britain in which Scotland once again has its own Parliament and Wales a national assembly, to stop singing”God Save the Queen”at its opening ceremony.
Quote of the day: Terrence Deacon, evolutionary anthropologist
(RNS)”What might be called the modern `crisis of spirituality’ has arisen along with the growing recognition that most of the apparently spontaneous actions and patterns of things in the world around us _ the forces of nature, the actions of animals, and so on _ can be explained without assuming prior intentionality.” _ Terrence Deacon, evolutionary anthropologist who teaches at Boston University and Harvard Medical School, writing in the current issue of Science and Spirit.
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