This video from Dave Ramsey on car payments is helpful because it makes you reconsider forking over cash on car payments.

It is unhelpful in the sense that it takes all the “best/worst” stats into account. Many people won’t be able to give $475 per month for a car loan. And the interest rate is not guaranteed at 12%.

But with all that in mind I think he is right to say that the goal is to only have payments on a house (and maybe school loans if you have to).

Mary Eberstadt has an article describing her optimistic view of the future of faith and family despite the current cultural climate (she also has a few books to check out: Adam and Eve After the Pill and How the West Really Lost God). She takes all the prevailing weapons against these institutions and turns them on their head.

She begins her article detailing the dismal current climate and adds that Christianity lives and breathes on the strength of marriage and family formation.

For 2,000 years, Christianity has weathered severe storms, surviving discrimination and outright persecution. Are we really and only now facing the Church’s terminal decline? Does the sexual revolution, alone among all cultural influences inimical to the Church throughout history, render the cross and all it stands for obsolete?

For over a hundred years, sociology has broadcast the death of God — prematurely, it turns out, because sociologists have ignored the part played in religious belief by that great institution with which religion’s fate appears inextricably entwined: the family.

History shows that, in case after case, one pillar is only as strong as the other. Religion, and specifically Christianity, waxes and wanes according to the strength of marriage and family formation.

One might think that this would lead her to be pessimistic given the most recent attacks on these institutions. But she says

A contrarian case can be made that things aren’t as grim as they seem — or, conversely, that they aren’t nearly as invigorating as they seem to their adversaries. The case for cautious optimism shares many facts with the case for pessimism. In fact, the case for optimism is more or less the case for pessimism turned on its head and examined from a different angle.

Reviewing wide swaths of human history, Sorokin spied a general rule: “The principal steps in the progress of mankind toward a spiritual religion and a noble code of ethics have been taken primarily under the impact of great catastrophes.” Calamity, as he saw it, is not only a possible inducement to religious revival but may even be its sine qua non.

She then ties these points to the economic crisis that began in 2008.

In the 1970s, sociologist David Popenoe predicted that one consequence of diminished Western affluence might be exactly the revival of the institution of the family. After all, he observed, families perform a function crucial to all societies, doing for free what would otherwise cost money to accomplish. “The importance of this family care-giving function,” he writes, “becomes clear when we consider what might happen if modern societies ever again fall into a serious economic depression.”

Could the post-welfare Western state end up imparting economic value to marriage, childbearing, and family ties, as the pre-industrial agricultural state did for many centuries?

Another inadvertent consequence of the economic crisis has been the return of many adult children to the homes of their parents. Though undertaken for financial reasons, might not the movement of the “boomerang generation” back to the nest also have the effect of reinforcing family bonds? Hard times, in short, have a way of driving people back to what’s most elemental.

In Family and Civilization (1947), Carle Zimmerman, another Harvard sociologist, demonstrated that throughout history the family has followed a pattern: It grows stronger after a period of decay has incurred mounting social costs. Zimmerman argued that family strength is cyclical and that the problems resulting from periods of weak and atomized families lead to counter-cycles of strong family formation.

Eberstadt goes onto point out five other hopeful signs, one of them being family reproduction.

There’s another reason not to write the obituary for Christianity and the traditional family quite yet: demography. As Phillip Longman and Eric Kaufmann have independently documented, and as Jonathan Last energetically explores in his riveting book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, believers have babies, and nonbelievers don’t. And among believers, the most religious have the most babies. Over time, as those who look at the numbers agree, this simple fact will tilt Western populations toward religious belief. Sociologist Rodney Stark argues that Christianity grew from a small sect to a world religion precisely because the Church’s prizing of marriage, its banning of infanticide and abortion, and its overall attentiveness to the family contributed to a demographic advantage for believers. All those conditions still obtain.

She closes with this word.

None of which is to say that Western believers today can count on seeing brighter days for either institution in their lifetimes. In the short run, to reverse John Maynard Keynes, we’re all dead. As for the long run, though, several signs point the way not just to hope but to likely revival. Therein lies a limited but real case for optimism about the twinned futures of family and faith.

Tomorrow night the NBC hit comedic show The Office will air its final episode.

Andy Greenwald has a reflection on what he calls “the most influential comedy of the last decade.” Since Steve Carell left, the show has not been the same, but that does not mean it wasn’t great in its prime.

Greenwald says:

It may not be pretty, but it’s somehow fitting that The Office should end this way: humbled, overlooked, and, increasingly, unloved. No one was paying much attention when the series debuted in 2005 and, in retrospect, it’s easy to see why. It was a prickly, initially slavish adaptation of a culty British comedy, shot in a jarring, shaky-camera style that appeared more suitable for Cops or a drunk uncle’s home movies than Must See TV. NBC thought so little of it that only six episodes were ordered and then promptly dumped in the midseason swamps of late March. The pilot featured a cast of relative unknowns ventriloquizing Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s cringe-inducing dialogue and, when subsequent episodes lost half the audience, the show’s prospects seemed thinner than Steve Carell’s pre–movie star hair. It was a fluke box office smash that kept it alive; it was a network-wide dearth of better options that eventually made it a hit.

Greenwald goes on to speak of what made The Office great.

When it was good, The Office was truly great. In contrast to the aspirational noisiness of other sitcoms, this was a show that celebrated the smallness of everyday life, the quiet indignities and tiny failures that mar our days and the shy smiles, raised eyebrows, and harmless pranks (well, mostly harmless) that give us the resilience to do it all again tomorrow. The Office thrived on the paper-thin edge between resignation and giving up, a task that would have been impossible had showrunner Greg Daniels not made the key decision to declare total independence from the English source material after the uneven first season.

There had been romantic sitcoms before The Office, and workplace sitcoms, too, of course. There had even been sitcoms starring Steve Carell.⁴ But no comedy before or since better captured the temporarily inflating rush of impractical desire, probably because no American comedy has ever been so unafraid of acknowledging desire’s black sheep cousin, regret. It’s what made Michael’s hapless quest for happiness feel heartfelt, not foolish, and imbued Dwight’s slow rise to power — and last week’s achievement of it — with the sort of recognizably human emotions the black-belted beet farmer would never cop to feeling.

And it’s what fueled the show’s essential story line for the best years of its life: the gradually romantic evolution of Jim and Pam from work spouses to actual spouses. Yes, the ham-fisted shenanigans of the final season made it plain that The Office had punted for years on the inevitable flip side to this fairy tale: Jim and Pam had gotten each other but they’d given up their hopes and dreams in the process. But I think it’s worth remembering just how bracing and essential those flirty looks and missed connections once felt, how understated and remarkable Jenna Fischer was in a role that so easily could have rankled with cuteness or veered into doormat. The end of Season 3 remains one of a handful of perfect television moments from my lifetime: Pam is doing a talking head to the camera assuming Jim, whom she’s lost to the wiles of Rashida Jones’s Karen, has gotten a corporate job in New York. Then Jim bursts into the room, a little flustered and a lot excited. He asks Pam out on a date. She accepts. He leaves. She turns back to us, asking “I’m sorry, what was the question?” And her skyscraping smile fills the screen in a way that standard sitcom laughter never could.

There are more than a couple ways to influence the pro-life movement. Sometimes it takes thinking outside the box. A recent story tells of how some kids with a van are influencing the pro-life movement.

On March 13, in Dallas, TX, an organization you’ve probably never heard of is going to revolutionize the pro-life movement.

It starts with a kid from Philly, a bus in New York, and an idea that brought him quite by accident to the city where Roe v. Wade started — the city where he hopes abortion will finally meet its match.

David Pomerantz, 23, does not look like a pro-lifer or a practicing Christian. He looks like a vegan hipster with emo hair. As a matter of fact, he sort of is a vegan hipster with emo hair. If you visit his loft apartment in an industrial section of downtown Dallas, he will offer you fermented tea with organic honey. You can lounge in a beanbag chair and talk about art while he surfs his Macbook and plays indie music and talks about Jesus.

The article goes on to describe how the ministry began.

He hails from Philadelphia, but he was attending Word of Life, a two-year Bible institute in New York, when he met Chris Slattery and Julie Beyel of EMC (Expectant Mother Care), a Manhattan pregnancy resource center. He was astonished to find that EMC had formulated a “new model” for approaching women outside abortion clinics.

EMC had a bus equipped with a sonogram machine. By approaching women outside the clinic with the offer of free help, with no mention of a pro-life ideology, they were able to see a staggering success rate. In fact, by their estimate, about 70% of women who got on the bus for a sonogram decided not to abort. In one day, they saw nine women decide on life for their children.

They did some simple math, and realized that if this success continued, 15 to 25 women a week, or about 800 a year, would choose life.

Excited by the possibilities inherent in this new approach, Dave contacted his friend and mentor Joe Baker, who flew in from Philly to see the results firsthand. Equally impressed, the two began to ferment the idea that would become Save the Storks.

Dave was already planning on attending Southwestern Theological Seminary in Dallas, so he headed down south. With Joe Baker developing the art and marketing, and the generous help of Dallas-based organization Get Involved for Life and other private donors to bring to life a sleeker, smaller, more mobile ultrasound vehicle, they were off and running.

Save the Storks was born. Or, if you prefer, flown in through the window.

Here is what the ministry looks like.

A woman is walking up to an abortion clinic. She is approached by Dave or Daryl or another member of Save the Storks.

“Hi, how are you? Would you like a free ultrasound?”

This is the approach. There is no dangling rosary, no graphic pamphlet, no doom-and-gloom. Just an offer of free help from a non-threatening, friendly, smiling young person.

And then there is the Stork bus.

The stork was chosen as the mascot because of its comforting, unoffensive, nostalgic connection to motherhood and pregnancy. We can all remember old cartoons where a smiling stork would fly in a window and lay a swaddled baby in a crib.

The Stork bus, however, is free of all Old Testament references. It is a bright, lovely blue on the outside, and the inside is clean and free of clutter, with a welcoming but no-nonsense clinical feel. There is a little couch for the mother to sit on and speak to a counselor, and a padded bench where she can lie comfortably.

It is an abortion clinic’s worst nightmare.