New
Why Our Children Don’t Want To Be Parents
Richard Scarry published his beloved Bunny Book in 1968. It’s one of my favorites to read to my 3-year-old son. I love the way the young son of my guest today, Nadya Williams, responded to that book: He wanted to grow up to be a dad, like his own dad. How sweet! How normal.
But how uncommon today.
Another, probably more influential, book was published in 1968. That was Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which created a panic about overpopulation amid limited natural resources. It took more than 50 years for many people to realize we’re in the middle of the opposite problem: an unprecedented global collapse of fertility.
Williams connects past and present with her new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic). Williams earned her PhD from Princeton and previously published Cultural Christians in the Early Church.
Williams sees how modern Western culture devalues children as too costly, too demanding. She sees a reversion today to ancient views. Williams writes that “without an understanding of the value of humans as made in God’s image, there is no reason to regard them as priceless.” That’s exactly what we see in the pre-Christian Roman Empire: a low value of humans, especially women and children.
Williams joined me on Gospelbound for a conversation that ranged from motherhood to military history writing, from Wendell Berry and how to make our little corner of the world just a bit brighter. We kicked off with an account of her family’s dramatic journey from the Soviet Union to Israel to the United States and how she came to Christian faith.
