Pope Francis may soon release his greatly anticipated response to a key bishops’ meeting on family issues that took place last fall. At that meeting, bishops discussed the church’s response to a host of issues, including some that are very controversial. The bishops were especially divided over whether the church should change its rules against communion for divorced Catholics who have remarried. Many American Catholics have been pushing for that change and others. More →

March 11, 2016

The Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of the permanent nature of marriage “is really meant to be a countercultural position,” says Professor Susan Ross of Loyola University Chicago’s theology department. “The Church’s challenge is to find a way to hold marriage as this sacred bond, while recognizing the very human situation in which it falls apart.” More →

September 25, 2015

“The American post-Enlightenment contractual idea of marriage—that is, marriage is what we decide it is—is an incredibly powerful idea that haunts the minds of American Catholics…The under-65 crowd is much more into contractual understandings of marriage than covenantal understandings of … More →

September 25, 2015

“The fear people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent,” says one interfaith family mediator. More →

August 27, 2010

“The church has to open itself to hear the wisdom of its laity” says Rev. Patrick Lee, who leads two Catholic parishes in Chicago. More →

May 7, 2010

Part four of a four-part series on faith and family: a growing number of families are not the traditional married mother and father with children — single mothers, cohabiting men and women, gay couples, and the divorced have become more common. How are churches and other religious groups responding to these families? More →

November 18, 2005

Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Darrell Armstrong of Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, New Jersey. More →

November 11, 2005

Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Eugene Rivers in Boston, Massachusetts. More →

November 11, 2005

Part two of a four-part series on faith and family: three quarters of all Americans say they believe it’s likely their children will grow up to be of the same religious faith as their parents, but more than half say they worry about that. More →

November 4, 2005

Part one of a four-part series on faith and family: a poll commissioned by RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY shows that Americans both idealize the traditional family, and at the same time are more and more accepting of families that are nontraditional. More →

October 28, 2005