Family Ethics: Practices for Christians

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I started out to write a history of American Catholic thinking on marriage and family, but it slowly became clear to me that I really wanted to write a book on family ethics to answer questions that refused to go away. I changed course and began the work I think I have been meaning to write since I first began to study theology. Along the way, many people have helped me think through and prepare this book. Series editor Jim Keenan and Georgetown University Press director Richard Brown were incredibly supportive of my ideas from the beginning , and the many editors who have worked on the text have saved me from countless errors. Colleagues in professional organizations and journal boards generously provided feedback on papers and articles that turned into chapters as the book evolved. Even more important, people such as Flossie Bourg, David McCarthy, Bill Mattison, Jana Bennett, Tobias Winright, John Berkman, and David Cloutier have engaged me in many long conversations about discipleship and family life. I am also mindful of colleagues whose writing on marriage and family paved the way for my work: Michael Lawler, William Roberts, Margaret Farley, Patricia Beattie Jung, Barbara Andolsen, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Christine Firer Hinze. Without them there would be no Christian family ethics. At Saint Louis University I have had the support of several wonderful research assistants—Heidi Bess Bergeron, C. Annie Chen, Sarah Sparks, and C. Michael Shea. The university also granted me sabbatical leave and a Mellon summer research grant in 2006 that allowed me to write the first several chapters of the book uninterrupted. Discussions with students in my courses—Sexual Ethics, Social Justice, and Marriage and Family Ethics— helped to develop my thinking on the idea of practices and made me more realistic in my outlook on them. The Puleo family gave me the opportunity to go to Nicaragua with four of my students in the summer of 2007 to experience both incredible poverty and overwhelming hospitality and to think again about the ethical import of American family life. My many students who have made much more radical choices than I have inspired me to keep searching for ways to bring social justice concerns into the lives of ordinary Christian families. Work with the Karen House Catholic Worker community in St. Louis never failed to get me thinking about the deficiencies of middle-class life in the suburbs where I live. The discussion group my husband and I formed at our parish five years ago has been an ongoing source of support as we balanced practices of resistance with the ordinary travails of family life. We are blessed to have Richard Baugh and Elizabeth George, Mike and Maureen Hoock, and Kathleen Gallagher and Jim Buckley as our good friends and companions on the journey. It is always my own family that offers me the most inspiration and the most spirited challenges. Dominic, Tom, and Stephen tolerated my enthusiasm for new practices and were generous with their love when I had a deadline to meet or just needed to laugh. My husband, Marty, always listened , even when he surely wished we could simply be married for a change, instead of talking about it. He has been my friend for twenty-five years and my husband for seventeen. With deep gratitude for his love for me, his work as a teacher, and his care for our three boys, I dedicate this book to him. xii Acknowledgments ...