The Wall Street Journal

One perceptive observer noted: “Religion that is merely a private affair has been, until our time, unknown in the annals of mankind-and for good reason. Such religion quickly diminishes into an indoor pleasure, a kind of hobby of one or more individuals, like reading a book or watching television. So it is not astonishing that the search for spirituality has become so fashionable. It is what individuals, liberated from religion, desperately seek as a substitute. “Spirituality is indeed an integral part of all religions-but a minor part, and it cannot be a substitute for the whole. Religion is not some kind of psychic exercise that occasionally offers a transcendental experience. It either shapes one’s life-all of one’s life-or it vanishes, leaving behind anxious, empty souls that no psychotherapy can reach. And for religion to shape one’s life, it needs to be public and communal; it needs to be connected to the dead and the unborn” (Irving Kristol, “The Welfare State’s Spiritual Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 1997, A14).

Gerard Baker, “A Man for All Seasons at 100,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 21, 2020, wsj.com.

People may be loyal to one another in nonmarital relationships, and children can be born and raised, sometimes quite successfully, in other than a married two-parent family environment. But on average and in the majority of cases, evidence of the social benefits of marriage and of the comparatively superior outcomes for children in families headed by a married man and woman is extensive. On the other hand, the social and economic costs of what one commentator calls “the global flight from the family” weigh increasingly on society. Nicholas Eberstadt catalogs the worldwide declines in marriage and childbearing and the trends regarding fatherless homes and divorce and observes: “The deleterious impact on the hardly inconsequential numbers of children disadvantaged by the flight from the family is already plain enough. So too the damaging role of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing in exacerbating income disparities and wealth gaps-for society as a whole, but especially for children. Yes, children are resilient and all that. But the flight from family most assuredly comes at the expense of the vulnerable young. That same flight also has unforgiving implications for the vulnerable old” (“The Global Flight from the Family,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 21, 2015, wsj.com/articles/nicholas-eberstadt-the-global-flight-from-the-family-1424476179).

William Saroyan, in Henry Allen, “Raging against Aging,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 2011-Jan. 1, 2012, C9.

One mother in a Wall Street Journal editorial observed: “With the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don’t know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. … Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don’t know one of them who doesn’t have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I’ve ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she’d ‘experimented’ more” (Jennifer Moses, “Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 19, 2011, C3).

From the ancient Greeks to our own day, these words-happiness and contentment-have been parsed, dissected, and grappled with not only as to their meaning but also the guidance they give to our lives. See David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (2011). See also a review of Mr. Malouf’s book, in R. Jay Magill Jr., “How to Live Well,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26-27, 2013, C6.

Peggy Noonan, “The Dark Night Rises,” Wall Street Journal, July 28-29, 2012, A17.

See, for example, Naomi Schaefer Riley, “What the Mormons Know about Welfare,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 18, 2012, A11.

Jonathan Sacks, “Reversing the Decay of London Undone,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 20, 2011, online.wsj.com; emphasis added. Note: Lord Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.

In an article titled “Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?” (Wall Street Journal, Mar. 19-20, 2011, C3), a thoughtful Jewish mother advocates for dress standards and modesty and acknowledges the example of Mormon women.

Editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal once observed: “Sin isn’t something that many people, including most churches, have spent much time talking about or worrying about through the years of the [sexual] revolution. But we will say this for sin: it at least offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled, guilt wasn’t the only thing that fell away; we also lost the guidewire of personal responsibility. … “The United States has a drug problem and a high-school-sex problem and a welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem. None of this will go away until more people in positions of responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in frankly moral terms, that some of the things that people do nowadays are wrong” (“The Joy of What?” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 1991, A14).

See Brad Schiller, “The Inequality Myth,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 10, 2008, A15.

Report of the Ramsey Colloquium, Wall Street Journal, 24 Feb. 1994, A-18.

See “The Basics Debate,” Wall Street Journal, 18 Nov. 1993, sec. A, p. 18.