The current issue of Touchstone Magazine was handed to us by one of our hosts this morning. I have only gotten to page seventeen and have enough to think about until we return from vacation to find our own copy in the pile of collected mail.
Two articles caught my eye: Anthony Esolen on the value of extended family, and Mary Walsh on companies that corrupt children.
From Esolen:
They are those strange people called cousins, strange and familiar at once, whose blood - nay, whose noses - exert a powerful claim on your duty and who, in their numbers and their crazy variety and their blissful being-themselves, place you within a community whether you like it or not and remind you that you are not the most important person in the world.
I am very close to an elderly cousin, and I have a cousin in another state whom I wish I could see more often, but we mostly find ourselves as the first generation in the long-term work of close extended family relationships. Will our children's children be close? No guarantees, but I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.
From Walsh:
Children have always imitated adults through their play. "Children" here includes teenagers, and "play" includes the clothes they choose to wear to express themselves. That is why their play is really not merely play, and their clothes not merely clothes, but a learning process. If we think of play as a learning and modeling process, the culture gives us something to be concerned about.
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