Catherine Pakaluk, mother of eight, social scientist, and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, will speak at a BYU Forum next month. Below are links to a couple interviews.

Public Discourse
“I did not go into this project thinking about her, but at some point analyzing my data—we should call the narratives ‘data’ or use the sociological term ‘hearing data’—various aspects of the story of the biblical Hannah jumped out at me. I saw that her basic attitudes about childbearing and the meaning of life looked like the women in my sample. The biblical Hannah became, for me, an archetype to help describe what I discovered in the stories. Though barren, Hannah prayed to be blessed with a child. We all know what came next: she received her son, Samuel. What we all don’t know these days, however, is that God sent her five more children after she brought her firstborn, Samuel, to live in the service of God. The women I met generally didn’t set about to have large families—rather, they valued children greatly, like the biblical Hannah, and saw children as blessings.”

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We were in a ward last Sunday where the lesson was ‘Taking Charge of Tech.’  They had taken the Church lesson for parents and converted it into a one-sheet handout front-and-back.  It was surprisingly good.  The Purpose, Plan, Pause mantra is sound.

My daughter was an FSY counselor this summer.  She said the ‘taking charge of tech’ discussions were normally her favorite.   Everyone was engaged and spiritual.  Her main lessons were ‘change has to come from you’ and ‘you can’t just say no to bad tech use, you have to say yes to something positive.’  We had a long family discussion in the car the next day (we were on a family trip) and it went really well.

(For humor purposes only)

I was thinking of the stereotypes, with some basis in reality, that Joseph Smith was a great visionary and Brigham Young was a great organizer, and thought of a virtue chart for them.  But who would the antonyms be?  Who are the bad visionary and the bad organizer to pair them with?

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There are worse things than stretching in an early morning parking lot of a small town motel, watching the last stars on the silvering horizon