Summer 1997

ARTICLE TOOLS

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The oracles of ancient Greece offered people insight by smelling the vapors rising from fissures in the earth or examining the entrails and bones of sacrificial animals. As re:generation's oracle, I search a vast matrix of numbers for patterns and signs to dispense some statistical divination about the way things "really" are.

This issue's Oracle presents some statistics from the General Social Survey illuminating singleness in America. The General Social Survey is a national data set collected by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. As Table I indicates, the percentage of people in their twenties and thirties who are single has increased over the last twenty years. Most apparent is that more women and men in both age categories are choosing to stay single now. A shortcoming of this survey is its failure to provide a category for those who claim singleness but "live" with another person. There may be many people "living in sin," as the phrase goes, but the numbers are not discernible from these data. As well, take notice of the increase in the percentage of those who are single by divorce. The trend among those in their thirties is significant and disturbing.

Although homosexuality currently receives top-billing as the chief threat to marriage, the institution finds itself endangered by heterosexuals who no longer choose to enter into marriage or who choose to break their marital commitment through divorce. Christians need to look no further than themselves to affix most of the blame for the trouble. Table 2 represents the views of single twenty- and thirtysomethings on premarital sex.

Through the ages Christian tradition supported by biblical grounding found no basis for sex outside of marriage. ...

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