This fascinating book guides family therapists in recognizing the importance of their clients’spirituality or religion to therapy. Experienced therapists demonstrate how to incorporate patients’spiritual beliefs in successful family therapy. Religion and the Family explains how the spirituality of individuals and families can be used as a valuable resource for understanding and healing family problems. Therapists will learn to utilize a couple’s or family’s particular god-construct as a fundamental part of the treatment system.Through a balanced combination of theory and clinical data, this comprehensive book gives family therapy practitioners and graduate-level students insight into the role of spirituality in therapy. Beginning with a brief historical overview of the relationship between religion and therapy, the book emphasizes the three areas of theory, clinical applications, and research. Family therapists will find important topics applicable to their practice, such as a model for the use of religion in therapy, a model for taking a spiritual genogram, observations about interfaith marriages, and a theory of therapy as spirituality. Graduate-level students, therapists in training, and therapists needing an introduction to religion in therapy will find this a valuable guide for incorporating spiritual and religious factors into treatment systems.

The 1950s religious boom was organized around the male-breadwinner lifestyle in the burgeoning postwar suburbs. But since the 1950s, family life has been fundamentally reconfigured in the United States. How do religion and family fit together today? This book examines how religious congregations in America have responded to changes in family structure, and how families participate in local religious life. Based on a study of congregations and community residents in upstate New York, sociologist Penny Edgell argues that while some religious groups may be nostalgic for the Ozzie and Harriet days, others are changing, knowing that fewer and fewer families fit this traditional pattern. In order to keep members with nontraditional family arrangements within the congregation, these innovators have sought to emphasize individual freedom and personal spirituality and actively to welcome single adults and those from nontraditional families. Edgell shows that mothers and fathers seek involvement in congregations for different reasons. Men tend to think of congregations as social support structures, and to get involved as a means of participating in the lives of their children. Women, by contrast, are more often motivated by the quest for religious experience, and can adapt more readily to pluralist ideas about family structure. This, Edgell concludes, may explain the attraction of men to more conservative congregations, and women to nontraditional religious groups.

Religion is a fundamental cultural factor profoundly influential on human mental health and behavioural choices, and, in addition, family is the most proximal and intimate socialization agent contributive to youth development. Religion, Family, and Chinese Youth Development explores how religious involvement of Chinese parents affects their psychological health and family socialization, which leads to various aspects of the development of Chinese youths. Specifically, a structural relationship between religion, family socialization, and youth development was constructed theoretically and tested empirically in the Chinese context, which can portray the linked lives of religious involvement of Chinese parents, parental psychological health, family processes, parenting practices, the development of psychosocial maturity, and the internalizing and externalizing outcomes of Chinese youths. Undeniably, the findings of this book provide insightful social and policy implications for researchers and human service practitioners related to Chinese societies. By clearly depicting and empirically testing the connections between religion, family, and Chinese youth development, the book can be a reference for clergy, family practitioners, researchers, policy makers, management of NGOs, and graduate students of social sciences.

Van Die, a sympathetic and perceptive observer and a gifted and deft interpreter, describes the lives of the Colbys of Carrollcroft - members of Canada's emerging economic elite who were active in the local community, public life, and politics - drawing attention to the links connecting domestic religion and private life, business concerns, and social change in one family's life over three generations.

Groundbreaking theoretical and legal approaches to resolving conflicts between gender equality and cultural practices

The interaction between individual rights, which are often seen in secular terms, and religion is becoming an important and complex topic not only for academic study but for practical policy. This volume collects a range of writings from journals, edited collections and individual books which deal with different aspects of the interaction within the context of family life, and which appear with their original pagination. These studies have been selected because they throw a sharp light on central elements of the role of religion in determining the structure of the rights of family members in relation to one another, both from an historical and contemporary perspective. While many of the writings are focused on US and European systems, selected writings covering other systems illustrate the universal nature of the topic. The studies are accompanied by a reflective commentary from the editor which sets the writings in a broad context of social, constitutional and philosophical thought, with the aim of stimulating critical thought and discussion.

Contemporary women's movement and the future of the American family.