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Phyllis McCoy Horne's avatar

Love the balanced approach of left and right in your perspective.

Gene Botkin's avatar

Thank you for saying so.

A lot of people are put off by it. So I catch static from places I never expected because they’re not sure of where to place me.

BirdOfGoodOmen's avatar

You wrote about organizations like unions and churches. For Catholic men I think conceptually they have a good thing with the Knights of Columbus. I hear mixed self-reports of what being a member is like on the ground.

My pet interest in these areas of discussion comes down to how they relate to the issues of marriage and family-formation specifically. I need to do more digging but just in the past week learned that multiple denominations used to have nation-wide federated organizations that served as both a means of the constructed kinship you're writing about, and an on-ramp for the family-formation issue I'm concerned with.

I see huge weaknesses in how the Capital-C Church currently operate towards both, so I was shocked and appalled to learn that churches by and large had these systems that helped—and at a time when maintaining broad social networks and organizations should have been *more* difficult—and they just let them decay into nothingness. All around the mid-1900s from the look of it but I have to read more. I had some names. The Walther League (LCMS), Epworth League (Methodist), a few others. Our ancestors had these social tools and just let them fall apart.