A collection of essays by Michael Sheehan, whose work and interpretation on medieval property, marriage, family, sexuality, and law has insprired scholars for 40 years.

Presents a robust defence of the essential place of stable marital families in modern liberal societies.

How has Pope Francis’s groundbreaking document on marriage and family, Amoris Laetitia, been implemented in Africa? In Asia? In Latin America? In this volume, scholars from across these regions reflect on their experiences, correcting the overly western focus of most reactions to AL. The contributions look at local issues like polygamy in Africa, as well as more global issues in a local context, like feminism in Indonesia and synodality in Colombia. The reader will find that concerns about marriage and family can be similar throughout the world or specific to different contexts. As a whole, the book contributes to a more diverse and revisited catholic understanding of marriage and family.

Now revised and updated throughout, Diana Garland's core text for ministers and others in the helping professions provides a comprehensive look at the Christian purpose of family and the complex world our families inhabit.

A truly interdisciplinary approach, this text incorporates biological, psychological and sociological perspectives to the study of the family.

The theme uniting the essays reprinted here is the attitude of the medieval Church, and in particular the papacy, towards the Jewish population of Western Europe. The studies in the first part of this volume focus on those issues, while those in the second part explore aspects of Jewish society and family life, shaped by the circumstances in which they found themselves.

There is no papal document that has generated as much interest, controversy, and debate in recent times as Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. This document, which came out of two very divisive synods of Catholic bishops and leaders in Rome in 2014 and 2015, will probably be the most discussed document ever produced by a pope in modern Catholicism on marriage and family life. This volume has gathered seminal commentaries on Amoris Laetitia by African Catholic theologians, social scientists, and pastoral workers. They offer African theological and pastoral responses to the principles and practices proposed by Pope Francis and the Synod on the family on such contested issues as same-sex relations, divorce and remarriage, and reception and denial of Holy Communion in the church, among other divisive issues. These important essays and commentaries show the strengths and weaknesses of this papal commentary and point out the missing link in the global conversation on marriage, family, and same-sex relations. Their argument for the inclusion of African perspectives and moral traditions in the search for a third way in finding an inclusive and integrated pastoral art of accompaniment is very compelling. The authors here also call for the inclusion of Africa’s own unique challenges—like polygamy, childless marriages, and the impact of migration, civil conflict, diseases, ecological and population crises, and the rights of African women—in the global discussion on marriage and family life. They also challenge uncritical clichés in world Christianity that Africa’s opposition to same-sex marriages (or Western propaganda about population or birth control and contraception) are conservative, while showing diverse African conversations on these topics in the search for abundant life on this beautiful continent.