Couldn't Help Noticing

Divorce and depression

Try this quick quiz:

1. People who have recently gone through a marriage dissolution are
   1. more likely to become depressed than people who remain married;
   2. less likely to become depressed than people who remain married;
   3. equally likely to become depressed as people who remain married.
2. Men who have recently gone through a marriage dissolution are:
   1. more likely to become depressed than women who have recently gone through a marriage dissolution;
   2. less likely to become depressed than women who have recently gone through a marriage dissolution;
   3. equally likely to become depressed as women who have recently gone through a marriage dissolution.

If you answered ‘a’ to both questions, you have answered correctly—at least according to a new study conducted in Canada.

The longitudinal study shows that

among married people who did not report having had symptoms of depression in the year before their baseline interview, a new depressive episode was nearly four times as common (12%) if they were separated, divorced or single at the follow-up interview, compared with those who remained in a relationship (3%).

However, bear in mind that “marriage” was loosely defined to mean married or de facto. I think it would have been interesting to see if the impact of a broken marriage was more damaging than the impact of a break-up of a de facto relationship.

These results are not completely explained by some of the consequences of divorce/break-up (like “change in adjusted household income, change in social support, change in number of children in household, change in work status”), even though those consequences doubtless have some bearing on resulting depression.

Perhaps relationships actually matter to men and women more than some people seem to think. Perhaps God is right that the ideal is life-long marriage.

Against Religion

They say that everyone has a book inside them, and fortunately, in most cases, it stays there.

Some of us have more than one. I seem to have half a library lurking around in their somewhere.

My adrenal gland, for example, wants to write a sporting autobiography called Seeing Red and White: the Misery, Anxiety and Very Occasional Relief of a Swans, Arsenal and St George Tragic.

My fingers have always wanted to write a novel about a gifted young guitarist whose out-of-this-world talent is never recognized and who languishes in musical obscurity in a Christian publishing office, his only creative outlet being the church band on Sunday mornings. (On a String and a Prayer is the working title.)

But it's my spleen that is positively bursting with books. There's The Grumpy Dad's Guide to Correcting Your Children's Grammar. There's a bad-tempered memoir about living with teenager daughters trying to get on with their mothers called Two Cats in a Bag.

And then there's the Against series: Against Mercedes Owners. Against Liberal Anglican Bishops. Against Telemarketers. Against The OC. Against Email. Against Michael Moore. Against Mysticism. Against Materialism. Against Hollywood. Against the Loony Left. Against the Self-Righteous Right. Against the Simpering Centre.

I've got a million of them.

But having recently sampled the militantly atheistic rantings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and co., the book my spleen is most keen to vent at the moment is Against Religion. Our atheistic accusers are right at least about this: religion gets far too much respect these days, and we are far too slow to label superstition and idiocy for what it is.

Several chapter headings suggest themselves immediately:

• Do vs. Done—the anxious busyness of religion;
• Dumb and dumber—the idol and its worshipper;
• Strangling the last priest with the entrails of the last guru; and
• It's not a leap of faith—I can see where I'm going.

Perhaps the best chapter of all would be the one which gave full voice to the anti-religious critique of Jesus—his relentless shredding of the religious authorities of his day, who had turned a real relationship with the true and living God into a jumbled paraphernalia of duties and petty observances, all of it masking the stinking reality of their own hypocrisy.

Now there's a book worth writing. Shame that it won't write itself, now that I've thought up the chapter titles. Maybe that's why so many books remain inside their authors ...

TRAIN-ing for Men

I've just noticed an upcoming conference for men in Sydney that's worth all our Sydney readers knowing about. (Apologies to all of you who are thousands of miles from Sydney!)

The TRAIN Evangelical Men's Conference is being run again this year, and it's not too far away on the long-weekend in June (Monday 11 June). Held centrally in Sydney with free parking, the conference features Bible teaching from Phillip Jensen on Genesis 1-11—a part of God's word which is foundational to a strong biblical understanding.

(Read more details.)

Dale Ralph Davis on Joshua VII (Ouch!)

Dale Ralph Davis told us about his preacher friend who titled his sermon on Joshua 5 ‘Ouch’. In Joshua 5, all the men of Israel are circumcised. Their fathers had been circumcised, of course, but, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, everyone of them had died in the wilderness of Sinai. You can have the outward sign of God's grace yet still fall under his judgement.

But why circumcise all your fighting men now at the point where they have just crossed into as yet unsettled enemy territory? They will be disabled for days and vulnerable to attack?

Surely, suggests Ralph, this is because the conquest of the land is not something for human boasting; it's God himself leading his people into battle. An army of recently circumcised men leading a charge into battle? Madness.

This is almost as insane as trying to preach to the world that God became a man and died on a cross in order to forgive us and lead us to worship him as king.

Dale Ralph Davis on Joshua VI

Joshua 3:15 is a beautiful example of taking your time on the pudding (see Dale Ralph Davis on Joshua part V).

Here we read:

... and as soon as those bearing the ark had come as far as the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the brink of the water (now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest) ... (Josh 3:15)

This little verse is the moment—the moment where, after one generation of wandering in the wilderness, Israel finally reaches the Promised Land. It is, in its own way, as exciting a moment as when a human foot in a space boot first kicked moondust. Yet here, of all places, the narrator stops to give us a weather report.

Well, Ralph noted, the writer is eating his pudding slowly. He is savouring the moment. This is a moment well and truly worth taking in slow motion.

In addition, as those who know their geography and history are aware, the idea of the river Jordan overflowing its banks meant, quite possibly, that water had spread so far as to make the other side a full mile away. So the miracle of verses 16-17 is not simply a freak accident of nature but a most amazing testimony to the supreme sovereign hand of God in bringing his people into the land:

... the waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a heap very far away, at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, and those flowing down toward the Sea of the Arabah, the Salt Sea, were completely cut off. And the people passed over opposite Jericho. Now the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firmly on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, and all Israel was passing over on dry ground until all the nation finished passing over the Jordan. (Josh 3:16-17)

The writer of Joshua is taking his time in order to reveal the power of Yahweh.