Soulmates and Other Myths about the Family in America | Prof. Catherine Pakaluk

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Utah on 14 November 2019.

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk (PhD, 2010) is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought at the Tim and Steph Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. Formerly, she was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at Ave Maria University. Her primary areas of research include economics of education and religion, family studies and demography, Catholic social thought, and political economy. Dr. Pakaluk is the 2015 recipient of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award, a prize given for “significant contributions to the study of the relationship between religion and economic liberty.”

Pakaluk did her doctoral work at Harvard University under Caroline Hoxby, David Cutler, and 2016 Nobel-laureate Oliver Hart. She has co-authored widely cited articles in social science and epidemiological journals, including Demography, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Beyond her formal training in economics, Dr. Pakaluk studied Catholic social thought under the mentorship of F. Russell Hittinger, and various aspects of Thomistic thought with Steven A. Long. She is a widely-admired writer and sought-after speaker on matters of culture, gender, social science, the vocation of women, and the work of Edith Stein. She lives in Maryland with her husband Michael Pakaluk and their eight children.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So my task tonight, and the reason I'm here, is to run through a set of myths about the family,
0:07.0	it's kind of what I'm calling this. So my title really speaks for itself. My objective is to take you on a tour through sort of what I'm going to call five noteworthy findings in social sites of the family.
0:20.0	And I'm calling the myths because they bump up against,
0:22.6	each one of the ones that I'm going to talk about,
0:24.1	bumps up against some kinds of popular misconceptions
0:27.6	about the family in America.
0:30.6	And if you're watching closely, if you're listening closely along the way,
0:33.6	you may notice that although I've got five myths,
0:36.6	under the heading of some of the myths, there's more than one finding five, I've got five myths, under the heading of
0:38.3	some of the myths, there's more than one finding, so there's a lot of sort of, I've snuckled,
0:42.3	snucked a lot of things in here.
0:44.3	But what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose, I've chosen findings that start from what
0:47.1	we think of as like the micro level of the family, how do we think about marriage, and
0:52.2	then proceed up to the macro level? So how does family formation as we're observing it in the patterns and trends today?
0:58.0	How does that interact with the sort of overall picture of, I mean what we might use a very formidable term, like political economy,
1:04.0	but instead I'm just going to say sort of like the health of society, right?
1:07.0	So how do we go from family to society?
1:10.0	So there is a philosopher, and actually I'm going to try really hard to get a little Thomas Aquinas up here
1:15.6	because of the systemis but I can't do much.
1:17.6	There's not a lot of social science and say Thomas.
1:20.6	I think I've got one brief.
1:22.6	But kind of before we jump into that, there's a philosopher by the name of Wittgenstein, who once remarked that if you just sort of have a big pile of stuff on the ground,
	...

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