background on Family

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of Go...

It’s been said home is the place where they have to let you in. While it’s a reach to say I’m friends with each of my family members, our relationships thrive because we share a mutual, understood res...

A recent book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times , says that private family life is no longer, as historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch named it, “a haven in a heartless wo...

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

In the world of ecology, the tallest trees in a forest form a canopy that is called the overstory. It provides shade for the understory—all the vegetation that grows beneath the uppermost layer of fol...

I’m convinced some company today could make a killing if it had the guts to market dysfunctional greeting cards. Most birthday or holiday cards gush with flowery sentiments such as, “To the greatest f...

We become who we are in the environment of home. We are shaped by our families. Home is formative. Sociologist Cody C. Delistraty explored the most recent scientific literature for Atlantic Monthly an...

…I started reading The Kindness of God by Catholic theologian and philosopher Janet Soskice. In her examination of the etymology of the word kindness, Soskice helped me see it for the first time as a ...

Lifelong family friends own more than a thousand acres of land deep in Southern Mississippi, which they refer to as “the estate.” There isn’t a holiday get-together that passes without the family meet...

The anthropologist Desmond Morris has written: ‘Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals.’ That statement is correct as far as it goes. We are c...

In her excellent little book ( Mythical Me ), Richella Parham describes how her meditation on the Trinity helped her escape the comparison and competition trap: The relationship among the Father, So...

Everything significant starts with relationship. At the end of the day, your faith, your family, your work, and your leadership are all based on who you relate to and how you relate. Your life is moti...

Kevin Vanhoozer draws on 1 Corinthians 4 to argue powerfully for reading and teaching the Bible as drama. As Paul talks about his apostolic ministry, he says this: “For, I think, God has exhibite...

Andy Stanley has said, “The Church is a family expecting guests.” Is your family ready? Have you prepared for the arrival of guests and all that is to follow? Let’s say I’ve invited you into my home f...

In the old American South (and in many places in the American North) a European American who invited an African American as a guest to an expensive restaurant in a white section of town would subject ...

Joseph exhibited the true spirit of adoption. It is a vivid picture both of God’s adoption of us as His children in Christ, but also the call every believer has in welcoming into our homes and communi...

When modern psychiatric and psychological researchers began studying addictions, they realized that most of the time, the addict does not live in a vacuum. Instead, he lives in a system of relationshi...

A friend of mine once remarked that how we care for the land often mirrors how we care for those dependent on it, especially women and children. Is our attitude one of entitlement and privilege? Do we...

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church … Our membe...

This is how adoption works—like a sacrament, that visible sign of an inner grace. It’s a thin place where we see that we are different and yet not entirely foreign to one another. We are relatives not...

An empty-nester friend of mine was recently reflecting on the long days at home with a growing family. “You just gotta keep slinging chow,” she said with a laugh. I laughed too . . . but not quite as ...

We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...

We ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

There have been times in my life when I’ve wondered if I have failed to accomplish what God intended for me in my professional life. I have worried that I have not lived up to my potential. I judge my...

Throughout Scripture, God uses the picture of adoption to describe his relationship with his people. This picture became all the more poignant for my wife, Heather, and me when we chose to adopt our f...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

A Catholic priest recently told a gathering of friends about a time when he arrived in Israel late on a Friday afternoon, just as everything was about to shut down for the Sabbath. Public transportati...

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church … Our membe...