This event is cosponsored by the North Carolina Study Center and the UNC Newman Center
Today’s college students live in an exceedingly confusing time for navigating the realms of love, dating, and sex.
While shows like The Sex Lives of College Girls, albums live Taylor Swift’s Lover (a “love letter to love,” according to Swift), and the ubiquity of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge give the perception of an increasingly romanticized and sexualized late-teen/college experience, the data tells an entirely different story:
Fewer American high schoolers are having sex than ever before.
18-25 year-olds are the loneliest segment of the US population.
What should we make of this vast gap between our cultural perception of romance, and the on-the-ground reality?
What does the sociological data teach us about long-term happiness and fulfillment in dating and marriage?
And what does biblical truth and Christian wisdom have to say on these matters?
Join us on Thursday, October 12th for an evening with Dr. W. Bradford Wilcox as he helps us chart a way forward through this perplexing terrain!
5:15 - 6:00pm: Pre-event Hors D’oeuvres Reception
6:00 - 7:15pm: Lecture, Interview, and Audience Q+A with Dr. Wilcox
Speaker Bio: Dr. W. Bradford Wilcox is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
As an undergraduate, Wilcox was a Jefferson Scholar at the University of Virginia (’92) and later earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University, and the Brookings Institution.
Professor Wilcox’s research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family life in the United States and around the globe.
He is the author/coauthor of numerous books, including Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004) and Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences (2011). Wilcox has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, NBC's The Today Show, and on NPR. He also writes regularly for publications like The Wall Street Journal.