We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.

We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.

Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.

Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.

The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.

While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.