Do children need fathers? Fascinating research on that question is reported by Shirley S. Wang of The Wall Street Journal. Anna Katherina Braun, a German biologist, has been working with colleagues to understand the biological impact of single parenting.  Her research has focused on the degu, a small rodent that is a distant relation to the guinea pig.

America’s long war over abortion has classically been defined as a struggle between competing rights — depicted as the right of a woman to have an abortion versus the right of an unborn child to the protection of life. This long-familiar framing of the issue suggests, at the very least, that the rights of women and their unborn children are, or at least can be, presented as an irresolvable conflict.

The Christian church has experienced a massive wave of change over the last thirty years, and the emergence of women in some pulpits is perhaps the most visible sign of that change. Why would Southern Baptists resist this trend?

America’s parents are about to discover that the culture war is a lot closer than they thought. The ruling of the New Jersey Supreme Court ordering the Boy Scouts to accept homosexuals as members and troop leaders is an open assault upon one of the nation’s most cherished and respected organizations.

The theme of fathers and sons is one of the constants of literature, both ancient and modern. From Ivan Turgenev to Chuck Palahniuk, modern literature seems particularly obsessed with fathers and their sons — and sons without fathers.

The role of the father is increasingly problematic in the context of modern American culture. Fatherhood has been marginalized and the rule and authority of fathers have been depreciated, ridiculed, and continuously redefined. From the Berenstain Bears to The Simpsons, fathers are all too often the object of ridicule or the subject of the laugh line.

I appreciate the fact that many people have found my 2009 Summer Reading List to be helpful.  The list is just a start, of course, and it was intended from the beginning to be helpful also for Father’s Day.  Thus, it is long in history and military history — which is no coincidence given my own enjoyment of these reading fields. There will be more to come this summer.