Maggie brews tea; Bill sings folk songs to his own guitar accompaniment and complains about the decline of moral standards.
"There is a sense that a lot of what happened — not all of it, but a lot — had to do with lapses of theological orthodoxy and the decline of moral life that went with it," Father Markey said.
I'm not so sure that this incident, and many others, illustrates a decline of moral character as much as it demonstrates, in an age of hyper-infotainment, how we are bombarded with every detail of scandalous behavior.
His impassioned articles and speeches and interviews and tweets now centered on income inequality in the United States, climate change, the collapse of Greece, tax reforms, greed on Wall Street, the decline of moral standards, chaos in the euro zone, gun control, and the political vacuum in Washington.
Melanie Phillips cites the rise of individualism and the decline of societal morals as the root causes of everything.
The conflict between intelligent design and evolutionary biology is based on the misplaced fear that science and evolution have eroded our faith in God, resulting in the decline of our morals.
Certainly, the church's message that the decline of American morals is the cause of death, despair and disasters is not a message many Americans can stomach.
We watched, not knowing exactly what she was after, but she spoke the whole time, carrying on a sort of conversation with herself, a monologue about the declining state of morals in the nation, about a new, aimless generation, and its startling lack of respect for the rules of society as they'd been handed down since the time when we were a colony of the Spanish Empire.
