Books by Naomi Schaefer Riley
No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives
Kids in danger are treated instrumentally to promote the rehabilitation of their parents, the welfare of their communities, and the social justice of their race and tribe—all with the inevitable result that their most precious developmental years are lost in bureaucratic and judicial red tape. It is time to stop letting efforts to fix the child welfare system get derailed by activists who are concerned with race-matching, blood ties, and the abstract demands of social justice, and start asking the most important question: Where are the emotionally and financially stable, loving, and permanent homes where these kids can thrive? Read more>
Be the Parent, Please
Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat: Strategies for Solving the Real Parenting Problems
Toddlers on tablets. Pre-teens on Tumblr. Thanks to a variety of factors—from tech companies hungry for new audiences, to school administrations bent on making education digital, to a culture that promotes everyone as the star of their own reality shows—technology is irrevocably a part of childhood, and parents are struggling to keep up. What should be allowed? What should be denied? And, given the ubiquity of technology and its inherent usefulness, what do sensible boundaries even look like? Read more>
The New Trail of Tears
How Washington Is Destroying American Indians
Paperback with new material available November 2021
If you want to know why American Indians have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group, why suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, why native women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average and why gang violence affects American Indian youth more than any other group, do not look to history. There is no doubt that white settlers devastated Indian communities in the 19th, and early 20th centuries. But it is our policies today–denying Indians ownership of their land, refusing them access to the free market… Read more>
Got Religion?
How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back
A former Wall Street Journal editor, Riley (God on the Quad) has written a useful overview of the challenges facing religious congregations as they try to recruit a younger generation to old-timey institutions and traditions. But rather than dwell on the reasons for the religious decline, she provides readers with case studies of seven different faiths that have tried innovative programs to meet the needs of a post-college generation, sometimes identified as “emerging adults.” Read more>
‘Til Faith Do Us Part
How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America
In the last decade, 45% of all marriages in the U.S. were between people of different faiths. The rapidly growing number of mixed-faith families has become a source of hope, encouraging openness and tolerance among religious communities that historically have been insular and suspicious of other faiths. Yet as Naomi Schaefer Riley demonstrates in ‘Til Faith Do Us Part, what is good for society as a whole often proves difficult for individual families: interfaith couples, Riley shows, are less happy than others. Read more>
Acculturated
23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chic Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture
Contemporary popular culture, from books to film to television to music to the deepest corners of the internet, has provoked a great deal of criticism, some of it well deserved. Yet for many Americans, and particularly for younger Americans, popular culture is culture. It is the only kind of cultural experience they seek and the currency in which they trade. In Acculturated, twenty-three thinkers examine the rituals, the myths, the tropes, the peculiar habits, practices, and neuroses of our modern era. Read more>
The Faculty Lounges
And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For
Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley contends that tenure–the jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with a university position–is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. She explores how tenure–with the job security, mediocre salaries, and low levels of accountability it entails–may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching. Read more>
God on the Quad
How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America
In God on the Quad, Riley takes readers to the halls of Brigham Young, where surprisingly with-it young Mormons compete in a raucous marriage market and prepare for careers in public service. To the infamous Bob Jones, post interracial dating ban, where zealous fundamentalists are studying fine art and great literature to help them assimilate into the nation’s cultural centers. To Thomas Aquinas College, where graduates homeschool large families and hope to return the American Catholic Church to its former glory. To Yeshiva, Wheaton, Notre Dame, and more than a dozen other schools, big and small, rich and poor, new and old, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Mormon, and even Buddhist, all training grounds for the new Missionary Generation. Read more>
New Threats to Freedom
In the twentieth century, free people faced a number of mortal threats, ranging from despotism, fascism, and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. While the struggle against some of these overt dangers continues, some insidious new threats seem to have slipped past our intellectual defenses. These new threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms, often unchallenged and, in some cases, widely accepted as beneficial. In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled an all-star line up of innovative thinkers to challenge these insidious new threats. Read more>