Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life

By Steven M. Tipton

Book Overview

Statistics on the American family are sobering. From 1975 to 2000, one-third of all children were born to single mothers, and one-half of all marriages ended in divorce. While children from broken homes are two to three times more likely to develop behavioral and learning difficulties, two-parent families are not immune to problems. The cost of raising children has increased dramatically, and married couples with children are now twice as likely as childless couples to file for bankruptcy. Clearly, the American family is in trouble. But how this trouble started, and what should be done about it, remain hotly contested.

In a multifaceted analysis of the current state of a complex institution, Family Transformed brings together outstanding scholars from the fields of anthropology, demography, ethics, history, law, philosophy, primatology, psychology, sociology, and theology. Demonstrating that the family is both distinctive in its own right and deeply interwoven with other institutions, the authors examine the roles of education, work, leisure, consumption, legal regulation, public administration, and biology in shaping the ways we court and marry, bear and raise children, and make and break family bonds.

International in approach, this wide-ranging volume situates current American debates over sex, marriage, and family within a global framework. Weighing mounting social science evidence that supports a continued need for the nuclear family while assessing the challenges posed by new advocacy for same-sex marriage, and delegalized coupling, the authors argue that only by reintegrating the family into a just moral order of the larger community and society can we genuinely strengthen it. This means not simply upholding traditional family values but truly grasping the family's growing diversity, sustaining its coherence, and protecting its fragility for our own sake and for the common good of society.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1589010663
• ISBN13: 9781589010666
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

CSLR Book Shows It Takes a Society to Raise a Family

Despite the dismally familiar statistics about divorce rates and broken homes, most Americans see family life as the "loving, playful, caring heart of what makes life worth living, and a society worth living in," says Emory sociologist Steve M. Tipton, who has joined with Emory legal historian John Witte, Jr. to co-edit a new book about the changing forms and norms of modern families. Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life, published through Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR), investigates the current state of modern families, the rapid pace at which families are changing and growing more diverse, and their place in the larger arena of public life. The book is one of several new volumes released in conjunction with the CSLR's research project, "Sex, Marriage and Family and the Religions of the Book." "We wanted to explore families as moral dramas, not just collections of statistics or snapshots," says Tipton. "Families are constantly shaped and reshaped by shifting texts and contexts, traditions and liturgies, laws and customs, within the societies and cultures of which they are parts and products. American families today have grown both more regulated and deregulated, marketized and therapeutized, secularized and sacralized anew." To widen the conversation around the family table and dig deeper into these paradoxes, this volume brings together scholars from the fields of anthropology, demography, ethics, history, law, philosophy, primatology, psychology, sociology and theology, who observe the family through the viewfinder of their diverse disciplines to reveal a bigger, more panoramic picture of its drama. Surprisingly, the news isn't all bad. For instance, while it's true that half of all marriages end in divorce, a third of all children are born to single mothers, a fourth of all pregnancies end in abortion, and one in six American children live in poverty, economist Robert Michael makes clear this is not the whole story. For the past 20 years or so, Michael says, about 4 million babies have been born annually, 49 out of every 50 U.S. couples now choose to stay married each year, and two of every three divorced women remarry. We marry later, have fewer children, and finish parenting earlier in life, note Claude Fischer and Michael Hout. Yet Americans still yearn for lifelong love and prefer the household of a married couple with children to living on their own. More Americans now spend more of their lives in marriage than several generations ago, given longer life spans and better health, pregnancy planning, and infertility treatment. Standards for a good marriage have risen and exits from bad marriages have widened in light of growing values of self-attainment and independence, especially for women, with marriage now more often delayed or broken by choice than blocked by poverty or dissolved by death. Children raised by single parents and families fragmented by divorce have multiplied