A fool spurns his father’s discipline, but whoever heeds correction shows prudence.
Proverbs 15:15

Chapter 26: Proverbs
What Life Is All About
Adventuring Through The Bible
A Comprehensive Guide to the Entire Bible

ANCIENT FAITH

Family

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The Efficiency Invasion: How Industrialism Destroyed the Traditional Family
Howard King
The first problem with the family that had to be solved was that it represented a rival to the industrial economic system. It was a "produce and consume" system, as opposed to our familiar "earn and buy" system. As long as families could produce most of their necessities, they would need little money to buy things — and would have little incentive to become the cheap labor that
the factories required. They would also never be a large market for cheap, standardized, mass-produced goods while they could make better, personalized goods for themselves.

The Family
The family ideal Chesterton was defending cannot be equated with the industrialized consumer family, where the family members leave the home each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue careers, education, recreation, and so on. Chesterton's ideal was the productive home with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. Unlike the industrial home, life in a productive household is not amenable to scheduling and anything but predictable.

The Orthodox Christian Conference on the Family
The first problem with the "family values" enterprise of [James Dobson and] the American ultra right is that it deflects one from examining the real roots of the problem, and in many ways contributes to the problem. It also tends toward a fortress mentality of the [industrial consumerized] nuclear family. ... Based on the definition of family as tradition-bearer, we can say that there is a wide scope in the... Christian vision of what a family is. Indeed, the most familiar definition of "family" would be mother, father and children. But... a family can be any group of people that embrace and pass a common story of who they are, how they came to be, where they are going, and how they get there. Thus, for example, a monastic community is a family; this is why we speak of monks and nuns in familial terms, father ("abba"), mother ("amma"), brother and sister.

The Family Factors
Allan Carlson
Lessons from History About the Future of Marriage & Family in the United States

IN COMMUNION
Conversations by Email: Spring 2007
Tradition:
The “nuclear family” ...was the first stage in the collapse of the traditional family, which began with the Industrial Revolution. Extended family systems began to break down as people left villages and farms, and formed nuclear families in strange cities and around coal mines and factories. The next major stage was the Great Depression, when many fathers left their families to go in every direction searching for work. Following hard behind the Depression, World War II created a massive reservoir of single parent families.
Family decay:
[T]here are other factors, and they have been cooking for several... centuries. One of them is the desacralization of the body. At one time the body was considered the temple of supernatural powers (St. Paul said the body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, but pagans held comparable ideas). Another was the apotheosis of desire, largely under the influence of Freudian psychotherapy, i.e., the belief that we have a right to fulfill just about any wish we have. Yet another is the rise of capitalism and industrialism, resulting not only in the breakdown in men’s internal sense of self but in widespread narcissism in the culture.