Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith? represents a major effort to examine and understand the religious and spiritual lives of young adults who experienced parental divorce.
In addition to highlighting the most recent scholarly work on the subject, this report offers extended reflections from a mainline pastor who has ministered to many youth and families. It closes with recommendations for pastors, youth ministers and youth sponsors, parents, children of divorce (young and grown), church members, and marriage ministries.
A team of family scholars tackle the striking yet little-discussed decline in marriage among "Middle America"—the nearly 60 percent of Americans who have completed high school, but do not have a four-year college degree.
Noting that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, the authors argue that strengthening marriage is a vital pathway to opening social opportunity and reducing inequality.
Jonathan Rauch, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, leads a conversation with Elizabeth Marquardt, Amy L. Wax, and W. Bradford Wilcox on the new findings in Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition.
For most of the latter-half of the twentieth century, divorce posed the greatest threat to child well-being and the institution of marriage. Today, that is not the case. New research—made available for the first time in Why Marriage Matters—suggests that the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children's lives in today's families.
The absence of a set of compelling and commonly-agreed upon leading marriage indicators prevents us from focusing clearly on the health of marriage in America.
A large body of research suggest that the status of marriage influences well-being at least as much as the status of household finances. Yet, as a nation we carefully measure our leading economic indicators and seek to improve them, while rarely bothering to measure our leading marriage indicators. For the first time, this report presents five leading marriage indicators that accurately reveal the direction and overall health of marriage as a U.S. social institution.
Email briefs of our work in the media
