background on Family

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...

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...

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...

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...

…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 ...

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...