“Mothers who work more hours per week, on average, during their children’s lives, are more likely to have overweight children,” write economists Patricia Anderson, Kristin Butcher, and Phillip Levine in the third-quarter issue of Economic Perspectives, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “It is not working per se that matters, but working a lot of hours per week. This suggests that it is time constraints that may make it harder for working mothers to oversee their children’s diet and exercise. Further, we find that this effect only holds for upper income families (the top quartile of the family income distribution). Although children in lower income families are more likely to have weight problems, it does not seem to hinge on how much their mothers work. We find that for upper income families, the increase in average hours worked by mothers between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s can explain between 12 percent and 35 percent of the increase in obesity among children in these families.”
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“How do you respond to those who say Islam is a religion of violence?” the editors of U.S. Catholic (August) ask Scott Alexander, director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union. His reply: “If you look at the history of any of the Abrahamic traditions, they are all horribly violent. Religious ideals and desires are constantly being invoked to support and justify the violence. This is true for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Some might say, ‘But we Christians no longer commit heinous acts of violence in the name of Christianity.’ What, then, was George Bush doing when he quoted Isaiah on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, casting the war in Iraq as messianic?”
