Yours is the Kin-dom
Texts: Mark 3:1-21,31-35
Speaker: Joel Miller
Back in March of 2020 David Brooks wrote a long essay for The Atlantic called “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” That title is only slightly misleading. Brooks isn’t against the nuclear family – a married couple and their kids. He acknowledges the benefits that have come with less rigid extended family structures. But he does lay out a pretty good case for why the isolated nuclear family unit is less than ideal. I won’t recap his whole argument, but do recommend reading the essay. Here are a few highlights:
The nuclear family peaked around 1960, when over three quarters “of all (US) children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.” Today’s reality looks much different, and 1960 was a massive shift from a century before when “roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids” - a much more historically normal arrangement across cultures. Brooks names...