On March 9, 2009, I found myself sitting in a modest concrete farmhouse, deep inside the labyrinthine network of rural farming villages that make up Lipu County, China. Warm, clear sunlight streamed in the house’s open back door, a rare break from the unending drizzle that seems to plague southern China in the spring. Pinned … Read more
The United Nations recently published its two-yearly update of world population projections. These suggest that Nigeria could rise to 725 million people by 2100. Western media are shrilly calling for Nigeria to put a check on her population growth. No way, sorry. We Nigerians are rejoicing. Africans love children. First for financial security. In the past … Read more
Time for a few Friday morning links: Could the 70 small metal books recently discovered in Jordan turn out to be the biggest find for Christian history since the Dead Sea Scrolls? An elderly Belgian couple opts for euthanasia together rather than face death separately. In the wake of Chernobyl, “there were many media reports … Read more
In his weekly blessing yesterday, Pope Benedict called for an end to the fighting in Libya: “My fear for the safety and well-being of the civilian population is growing, as is my apprehension over how the situation is developing with the use of arms,” the pope said. “To international agencies and to those with political … Read more
In a recent speech to the Royal Society of Arts in London, Sir David Attenborough said there’s a “strange silence” about overpopulation. Journalist Bonnie Erbe apparently believes Attenborough statements should be shouted from the rooftops, so she wrote an opinion piece for Scripps Howard News Service about it: Sir David said there needed to be … Read more
This story from last week about New Hampshire Republican lawmaker Martin Harty is despicable: Barrington Republican Martin Harty told Sharon Omand, a Strafford resident who manages a community mental health program, that “the world is too populated” and there are “too many defective people,” according to an e-mail account of the conversation by Omand. Asked … Read more
For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, … Read more
On April 12,1963 — Good Friday — Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of about 50 anti-segregation protesters into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It was a peaceful protest, but they were not naïve: They knew that their message would offend and cause problems. King was not surprised when they were all arrested. Eight white … Read more
The Japanese are in the mist of a serious population decline, with one estimate claiming the citizenry shrank by 75,000 in 2009, an increase of almost 150% from the year prior. As the Japan Times noted in a 2010 editorial: The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that Japan’s population will dip … Read more
In today’s Los Angeles Times, Skeptic editor Michael Shermer brings some sanity to coverage of both the shootings in Tuscon and the well-reported fish and bird deaths around the country: We live in a causal universe, so all effects do have causes, but before we turn to grand, overarching causal theories such as political rhetoric or … Read more
“Man is a political animal,” said Aristotle, meaning that man is that sort of living creature who thrives best in the context of a polis, a free and self-governing city state. St. Thomas Aquinas would take up this dictum of Aristotle’s and flesh out its implications for a Christian culture, but before we consider that, … Read more
Yesterday, I read a blog post about how rapidly the world is aging and what it means for the future. Stephany Anne Golberg in Smart Set writes: The number of people who are 60 and older is set to triple in the next 40 years. By 2050, there will be more people aged 65 and … Read more
In the current issue of the Catholic Herald, Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento writes that most modern couples accept contraception as the “default” position in marriage, only giving up the practice when it’s ‘time to have kids.’ This isn’t merely a drag on our population’s replacement rate, but has itself confused the definition of marriage. … Read more
Over at Slate, Dave Weigel has some words of caution for anyone looking to make too strong a connection between yesterday’s Discovery Channel hostage-taker, James Lee, and any particular political movement. In a post titled “This Crazy Man With A Gun Proves That Political Point I Was Making!,” he notes that these types of stories … Read more
Contrary to popular perception, the rates of illegal immigration have dropped sharply over the past decade. This is the just-released conclusion of a new PewResearchCenter study: The annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants to the United States was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 … Read more
In the coming decades, India is expected to surpass China as the most populous nation on earth. Worried local Indian governments are using soft sell tactics to reduce family size, according to this article in the New York Times. Previously charged with coercing women to sterilize themselves in some regions, government officials are using new … Read more
Europe is dying. The Washington Post, among others, reports that, within a hundred years, there will be the rare German in Germany or Italian in Italy. Some demographers believe it is too late to correct Europe’s plunge into extinction. “The fall in the population can no longer be stopped,” reported Walter Rademacher of the German … Read more
According to The Guardian, archeologists working in Norfolk, England, have discovered “78 pieces of razor-sharp flint shaped into primitive cutting and piercing tools” in an area of sediment previously believed to have been formed 840,000 or 950,000 years ago. This means the earliest humans were living in modern-day Britain at least 80,000 years earlier than … Read more
Today is Canada Day — and I’m in Canada waving around a maple leaf with a bunch of other Canucks (and a few Americans). Celebrations here are similar to Independence Day in the U.S. — flags, speeches, cook outs, fireworks, parades. Americans enjoy putting Canada down (when they think of Canada at all) because they … Read more
A nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center studied the changing demographics of motherhood in the United States, examining data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and the U.S. Census Bureau from 1990 to 2008. Mothers of newborns are now older, better educated, less likely to be white, and more likely to be … Read more