Saturday, March 5, 2011

One great book on marriage!


Here's an excerpt from Building a Christian Marriage: Eleven Essential Skills, by Kathleen Finley (Wipf & Stock):

Let’s begin with some assumptions that underlie the way
I think about marriage. I have many convictions about marriage, most of which I will share with you in the course
of this book, but these four assumptions flow through everything else I will say.
1. Marriage is much more a process than a state of being. It makes more sense to think about marrying your spouse than being married. In many ways a marriage license
is a learner’s permit to keep learning about one another. And the many elements of your married life are interconnected. Change in one area affects all the others. Sensitivity to these interconnections, as well as patience and continual attention to your marriage, yields great rewards.
2. Marriages need support. It’s not your spouse and you against the world. Married couples need support from others in order to be strong. This support can come from other couples, from your extended family, from your church and community, from mentors and counselors. You will need to look for that support; it won’t just happen.
3. Married people need skills — today more than ever. Married couples today face challenges that previous generations seldom had to cope with. These include the flux in gender roles, intense economic pressures, the need for extended periods of education, rapid social change, and expectations for marriage and relationships heavily influenced by a ubiquitous, secular mass media. We need a tool kit of skills to cope with all this, tools our parents and grandparents didn’t need as urgently.
4. A Christian approach to marriage can make all the difference. In my view, the Catholic Christian way of thinking about and living out marriage embodies powerful wisdom about married life. It also makes available the best source of strength — the grace of God.


To learn more about this book, or to order a copy, click here: Marriage