The twentieth-century’s tumultuous and disastrous legacy for matrimony continues into the twenty-first century: a skyrocketing divorce rate, shifting gender roles, changing legal definitions of what constitutes marriage, and a campaign for legally sanctioned same sex unions have exposed a fault line in American society that runs deeper than even those differences that are said to create the “battle of the sexes.” The fault line runs deep into the bedrock of society, forcing us to consider what underlying assumptions we choose to make the foundation for the most elementary family unit: husband and wife. The implications are profound. Families raise succeeding generations, modeling the behavior and values that will become the mores of the future. As the Church continues to recede as a presence that establishes the assumptions that define marriage, society is left to define these assumptions through legislation that amounts to little more than slipshod efforts to patch arbitrary answers over the emerging cracks.
Continue reading A Few Thoughts on Marriage: Love in the Western World and the Eastern Church
