Re: Book Critique Family To Family
Cre Wallace
That reformation resulted from encountering Christian peers through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Duke University. These guys not only knew their Bibles, they demonstrated for me the radical call of truly Christian discipleship.
The experience left me feeling ticked off at the church. All it had taught me, I thought, was facts and Bible trivia. So began a decade long journey in the parachurch. I was discipled in the Reformed faith by guys a few years older than me, and I discipled men a couple years behind me, first as a student and then as a parachurch staff worker.
Somewhere along the way, I came back to the local church. My wife and I led a small group of other young professionals and graduate students. I taught and encouraged local church membership. And I eventually helped lead our Grad & Career Class.
In each of these chapters, Baucham displays both an intimate knowledge of American church-going families and a firm grasp of the biblical vision for faithful parenting. He also has the heart of a coach, who knows how to alternate between setting challenging goals and giving the necessary pep talks when discouragement sets in. The book is peppered with memorable lines and compelling stories from his own family and others. These will simply give you a taste:
In fact, it comes naturally to most churches these days, since the church growth movement has taught us to view the congregation as consumers of spiritual products and the church as a market-driven delivery system designed to meet their needs. But I digress.
As Southern Baptist pastors, Baucham and I agree that with the coming of Christ and the new covenant in his blood, all of that has changed. The promises given to ethnic Israel are now fulfilled in the True Israel, Christ. Those promises are now shared, not with those who claim physical descent from Abraham, but with those who demonstrate spiritual descent from Abraham through faith in Jesus Christ. Christians are not born into Christian families. They are born again. It is through union with Christ that we participate in the promises of the gospel.
This is not to say that biological families no longer matter. They do. Our marriages are to picture the gospel (Eph. 5:22-33). Our families are to display the gospel and be a training ground in the truth (Eph 6:1-4). And if Old Covenant fathers were responsible to teach and train their children in spiritual truth, then New Covenant fathers are all the more responsible.
Bottom line: you should read this book. Baucham has done a real service to the church by calling us back from a wrong-headed trust in programs and professionals to a biblical responsibility to raise our children in the fear and nurture of the Lord.
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We are three guys\u2014all dads and pastors\u2014who work in ministry with kids, students, and their families. This blog is our joint venture. It\u2019s your chance to listen in on what our conversations are like when we hang out together at a pub or local coffee shop. The focus of the blog is family discipleship. We will write here about parenting, family ministry, and leadership. If you are a mom, dad, or teacher in youth or children\u2019s ministry, pull up a chair. This blog is for you.
While conservatives are preoccupied with the family as a force for moral good, they are not as attentive to the ways in which the family harms people. As Lewis pointed out, feminist writer Madeline Lane-McKinley predicted early in 2020 that the pandemic would expose the dark underbelly of family and home life:
Rather than think of the collapse of the traditional family as a sign of moral degeneration of the citizenry, though, we ought to think of it as the inevitable fate of an institution that was never natural or stable to begin with.
Also consider that in Islam, the second most practiced faith in the world, there exists a temporary marriage of varying lengths called a mutʿah. While it is not practiced uniformly and has been likened by some within the faith to a form of prostitution because it involves the payment of money to the woman, the fact that this arrangement could be considered legitimate reveals how arbitrary (and culturally determined) our sexual mores can be. Just as we can observe a range of sexual and social behaviors among humans, sanctioned (or not) by religion or culture, it turns out that the U.S family as we know it also arose from specific historical conditions.
The nuclear family as promoted by the state has been imposed upon non-white and immigrant populations since colonial times. Consider the case of Native Americans. As Stephanie Coontz explains in The Way We Never Were, colonialists
Discoveries of mass graves at sites of these boarding schools reveal just one aspect of the larger genocide of Native people (survivors also recall rampant sexual abuse by Catholic officials at these religious schools).
The camp included a day school for children as well as direct action training. (And to be clear, family abolition is not about idealizing makeshift camp structures of survival or about making our living conditions less comfortable than we might imagine. The camps illustrate the how and the why of family abolition, not the end goals for the material circumstances of our lives.)
Transitioning from isolated units to communal living environments will be challenging; humans are complex and conflict-prone. A post-nuclear family society does not portend freedom from conflict or bad behavior; people could still harm each other. But it does mean people have the opportunity to change their surroundings if their relationships are not working out and would have more support instead of isolation within an abusive environment. The goal is also freedom from the economic constraints under capitalism that make conflict and violence a routine part of human interactions, whether within families or on the streets or in our jobs.
Humans are social creatures, and we evolved to cooperate with others for our survival. We face an epidemic of loneliness and deaths of despair in our society. As people who make it to old age live longer, we will need more care, not less. We need more community and more support, not less.
As Robin D. G. Kelley explains in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, freedom and love are revolutionary ideas, and we need both to imagine a better world. To imagine a society free from the oppression of the family, we need to imagine an expansion of love, not a contraction of it. An inclusivity of love for everyone, not the stifling exclusivity imposed by the family.
A wonderful spring issue touching on important issues such as child liberation, whether humans really love animals, why Puerto Rico's political status remains a problem, what Islamic finance can teach us, and how 'terrorism' has become a shape-shifting word. Welcome to the Manos-Fair, and enjoy Luxury British Pants, among other delightful amusements!
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In my textbook I use three definitions: the legal family, the personal family, and the family as an institutional arena. This is the personal family, which is people one considers family, on the assumption or understanding they feel the same way.
Over more than one chapter, there is an extended case study of Nicole and her erstwhile guardians Joyce and Don, who she fell in with when her poorer family of origin broke up, essentially. Fascinating story.
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As the intergenerational transmission of family violence is associated with numerous negative outcomes, interventions are needed to interrupt this cycle. Our aim is to review the family violence intervention literature and to assess whether and how interventions interrupt the intergenerational transmission of family violence. Papers about interventions were identified through database searches (PubMed, JSTOR, CINAHL, PsycINFO), supplemented by review of references and relevant review papers. Eligibility criteria included: empirical studies detailing interventions to interrupt or prevent child abuse/maltreatment and/or intimate partner violence, published between January 2000 and August 2020, and written in English. Of the 14 papers included in this narrative review, only 3 explicitly stated that they aimed to break the cycle of family violence; 12 papers came from high-income countries, and 10 focused on individuals, with half focusing on mothers. We identify effective intervention approaches, including long-term one-on-one coaching and home visits to improve parenting. Results demonstrate a dose-response relationship, suggesting the lasting value of increased intervention frequency and duration. We highlight gaps in the literature, including the need for interventions in low-income countries, and those geared toward fathers and neighborhoods/communities. We also examine the many methodological challenges of this work, such as possible biases related to the use of retrospective data, lack of objective outcome measures, and absence of long-term follow-up. Our recommendations for future research include incorporating trauma-informed frameworks, developing standardized definitions and measures to facilitate the comparison of intervention results, and designing more interventions specifically for fathers/husbands and for the prevention of intimate partner violence.
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