Early Marriage Stressors
From USAToday: Good advice? Don’t let stress sabotage your relationship, says Thomas Bradbury, co-founder of the UCLA Relationship Institute. His advice: 1. Get stress on your radar. Learn to recognize...
View ArticleDivorce Advice
By Russell Moore: Dear Dr. Moore, My wife and I are at an impasse. There’s been no abandonment, no sexual immorality, and no abuse. We just don’t get along. We shouldn’t have married. We should have...
View ArticleDivorce-Proofing a Marriage
Here’s a news item by Kathy Benjamin on stats and divorce, and each has a short explanation at the site: 1. Quit Smoking 2. Take Up Optometry 3. Share Chores 4. Live in a Blue State 5. Hang Out With...
View ArticleAn Inexpressible Treasure
To talk about marriage requires wisdom. Wisdom is learning to live in God’s world in God’s way, and God’s way is the gospel. Marriage then is learning about how the relationship of a man and woman...
View ArticleWhat Makes Marriage Optimal?
Let’s begin with a question: What is the element or dimension or ingredient that makes marriage work? Some marriages sustain themselves a long while, some of them through the whole of a couple’s life,...
View ArticleMarriage as Covenant
Marriage is like an A-frame house. The two grow closer together to form one life on the basis of a solemn covenant made with one another, a covenant that sustains the two during stress and that forms...
View ArticleBeyond the Clouds
I joke with my friends from Seattle that I have heard there are mountains in the area but yet to see them, but truth be told: I have seen the mountains and Mt Ranier. Tim and Kathy Keller, in their...
View ArticleCracks in the Bridge
From a distance the bridge looks healthy, even attractive. Up close, and under the eyes of a careful observer, the bridge has cracks. If the cracks are attended to in the right way at the right time,...
View ArticleYes, Call it what it is: Patriarchy
For a long time I have said a number of times that I don’t like either “complementarian” or “egalitarian,” since the former is not really what is meant and the latter is too tied into modernity. I only...
View ArticleThat Word
Kathy Keller defines “submission” so much it no longer means submission. Which is just the point. Jesus did too. (But I have to say that when that word submission is defined this way one has to wonder...
View ArticleThe Goodness of Singleness
Tim and Kathy Keller buck a trend that I have heard in the last decade, and that trend is that if you are single at 27 or 28 or 29, you are out of God’s will. Their contention is that since the...
View ArticleBirth Control
Albert Mohler, President of Southern Seminary, opens up a big bag of issues in his post on birth control and the evangelical. What are the issues here? Is this a moral problem for evangelicals? Do you...
View ArticleSafe Sex: Is there such a thing?
Michael Hidalgo says No. (Follow his twitter feed here: @michaelhidalgo) Here is his post: We have to stop talking about “Safe Sex,” and instead talk about the beauty of risky sex. No, this is not some...
View ArticleWhat Would You Say?
A letter from a writer, appropriately edited to bury identification: The question is open for you: What would you advise? I have debated with myself for some while in regard to whether or not to send...
View ArticleFour Relationship Defeaters
From Barking Up the Wrong Tree: How can he tell who will split up? There are a number of indicators but at the core of Gottman’s research are “ The Four Horsemen.” These are the four things that...
View ArticleComplementarianism and Darwinism
The facts are clear: Charles Darwin sketched animal behavior, and one good example is that of how male and female pheasants interacted, in the mode of Victorian theories of the relation of the sexes....
View ArticleWhat is Love?
Sonja Lyubomirsky’s principal statements about love follow: She distinguishes “new” love from “companionate” love… What is love? How does she define love? American and European researchers tracked...
View ArticleWhat Men Want
From USAToday: And according to a broad national survey of almost 5,500 unattached adults 21 and older, those qualities, attitudes and expectations illustrate cultural shifts in how singles approach...
View ArticleRelationships Have Changed
This old piece from Esquire magazine from 1949 shows how much has changed. This can go in several directions for conversation, but what this illustrates at least is that perceptions of the...
View ArticleMarriage Tension: Chores
From WENDY KLEIN, CAROLINA IZQUIERDO, & THOMAS N. BRADBURY: Insightful. Couples are composed of individuals who coordinate their behaviors in relation to one another. In working families—where both...
View ArticleThe Brownson Challenge
At the heart of the traditional view of same-sex relations is “gender complementarity.” That is, men and women are designed by God physically and constitutionally to complement one another. Often...
View ArticleThe Marriage Issue
David Frum may well have it nailed: The marriage issue, Frum is arguing, needs to be fought at the level of getting people married and getting people to stay married. So should the Christian leadership...
View ArticleCan We Read One Another’s Minds? Andrew Root Says Yes
We all know the experience of the irresistible nature of yawning — when someone we loves yawns we yawn right back. Somewhere I read that those with good skills of empathy yawn when others in a room...
View ArticleWhat is Love?
Stephen Post: Love manifests itself in different ways, all of which are necessary and useful. If love is the hub of a wheel, its spokes point outwards according to the needs of the beloved. There are...
View ArticleAnn’s Encouraging Words
From Ann Voskamp: There’s a world that wants to force women into smothering plastic molds and whisper that she wants to be a shape and not free. There’s a relentless refrain that wants to cage women...
View ArticleMarriage Pitfalls (by Jim Martin)
My good friend, Jim Martin, VP at Harding Graduate School, wrote this up the other day: Most of us need at least one of these; some of us more than one. 1. Beware of ignoring your wife’s spiritual...
View ArticleEmotional Modesty
From Holly Gerth, a conversation starter: A few weeks ago a friend of mine were chatting. Her husband is in a leadership role at a church and she shared how women often confide in him in ways that are...
View ArticleSandra Stanley on Marriage Words
Sandra Stanley’s wise words about words: While nothing was dramatically wrong in their relationship, they realized what had begun as humor and innocuous teasing had slowly become a bad habit. The bad...
View ArticleThis Pope is Different, a Valentine Message from Francis
Source Today, everything is changing rapidly and nothing lasts for long. This sort of mentality leads so many who are getting ready for marriage to say they will be together for as long as love lasts,”...
View ArticlePerceiving Commitment Levels of Co-habitation
From LiveScience: Marriage is linked with numerous health benefits that simply cohabiting doesn’t seem to provide. Now, research suggests the reason why — the brain links “just” living together with a...
View ArticleJesus, Paul and Grounds for Divorce
At the Ecclesia church planter’s gathering last week Bill Webb presented on the redemptive movement hermeneutic and then I “illustrated” Bill’s approach by looking at the divorce texts in the NT to...
View ArticleWhy Millennials are Not Marrying (Corrie Mitchell)
Source 1. We’re driven by our careers. 2. True love isn’t waiting. 3. Men are acting like boys. 4. We don’t know how to date. 5. Singleness is attractive.
View ArticleLove-ology
We need books on love, and we need books on marriage, and what we most need is both to soaked with how the Bible and Christian faith teach both — because we inhale and exhale modernity’s and...
View ArticleLoveology: A Review
This review is by a person who has thought about the topic and by a person to whom John Mark Comer has written his book, Loveology. The review is by former student, Kellie Carstensen, who led a student...
View ArticleFrom the Shepherd’s Nook: Jesus, Marriage, Divorce (John Frye)
Our Friday From the Shepherd’s Nook post is, as always, by John Frye. Jesus sits and teaches as the new Moses correcting the distorted teachings and practices of Torah related to marriage and divorce....
View ArticleAmerica, Church Divorce Rates
Source: In her book, The Good News About Marriage, Feldhahn lays out what she found during her eight years of investigating the complicated, complex divorce statistics. First, the divorce rate is way...
View ArticleCohabitation and Marriage: A New Study with Revealing Results
Scott Stanley: In a new paper, Bowling Green State University sociologist Karen Guzzo analyzes how the odds of cohabitation leading to either getting married or breaking up have changed over the years....
View ArticleWhen the Wife is Happy…
Source: When the wife is happy with a long-term partnership, the husband is happier, no matter how he feels about the marriage. For marital quality, it seems the wife’s happiness matters more than the...
View ArticleThinking Ahead
Now that we are Anglicans we have become much more aware of the church calendar and, inasmuch as the good Rector Jay Greener and Curate Amanda Holm Rosengren invite me to join in on the...
View ArticleHis Greatest Imprints (by Jonathan Storment)
Time for our readers to offer a big congrats to Jonathan and Leslie for the arrival of their 4th child! If you aren’t from Churches of Christ, then you probably haven’t heard of the Siburt family, but...
View ArticleWifely Submission: Two Views
The first view, from Johanna Harris Tyler: Potential abuse. The proponents of male headship have a tough job to convince the watching world that the hierarchy at the centre of their vision for marriage...
View ArticleThe Changing Face of Friendship
A good reading in the history of friendship makes manifest that friendship, probably most especially in the 20th Century, has changed dramatically. If one reads, for instance, the great two chapters on...
View ArticleFormalized Friendships
One of the marks of “friendship” in our world is that they are the “freest, the least constrained, the least fixed and determined, of all human loves.” This from Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship,...
View ArticleFriendship Possibilities
Let us agree (1) that friendship as a common art, friendships between males and friendships between females, has fallen into neglect and (2) that there are more than solid theological and biblical...
View ArticleWhat is Love? (Jonathan Storment)
What Is Love? Some of the most poetic words ever written about love didn’t come from a wedding or romantic story, they came from a heated church argument. I have done a lot of weddings in my life, and...
View ArticleShedding Complementarianism (by Elizabeth K. Casey)
By Elizabeth K. Casey: For the past two years, I have been blogging on a variety of issues–and one specific issue I’ve written a lot on is the complementarian versus egalitarian marriage debate. I...
View ArticlePenny for your Thoughts
Ana Swanson, on the mathematics of choosing your mate: Image So how do you find the best one? Basically, you have to gamble. And as with most casino games, there’s a strong element of chance, but you...
View Article9Marks of the Truly Complementarian
I have been asked of late why I have posted so much about complementarianism. Beside the routine reposting of material from Christians for Biblical Equality, which often brings up the discussion, it...
View ArticleMary and Me and Complementarianism (by Ruth Tucker)
Mary and Me On May 4, 2016, Mary Kassian published a review of my book, Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife. Her review was in many ways similar to reviews of others who hold fast to the...
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