The demand for stability in marriage and family is more apparent than ever these days. Here contributing editor Channing Walker considers the basis of such stability. Other articles in this month's Journal discuss moral and spiritual issues that are central to this challenge.
Maybe the answer to the title's question isn't as obvious, or as gloomy, as it first looks. Sure, plenty of alarming statistics exist. They number latchkey children coming home to unsupervised Internet surfing, multitudes of single-parent households barely holding together, parents disconnected from their kids, and spouses feeling as if strangers. A brighter set of stories, humming with togetherness rather than isolation, also abounds. But it's not the bent of this magazine simply to pick the cheery over the gloomy—as if ignoring dark statistics would erase them. The Christian Science Journal is intended "to put on record the divine Science of Truth," The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353 which brings healing solutions to life's problems. You'll find truths here that lift thought from the shaky terrain of materialistic living and that help cement our lives on a sure foundation.
If all that shaped marriage and family was the ebb and flow of popular currents of thought, these institutions could ebb right into obsolescence. Like sand castles too close to a rising tide, they could wash away. Traditionalists might try to slow the process, grumble over crumbling morals, maybe do some blaming, but not change the outcome. That might happen if marriage and family had nothing more undergirding them than society's acceptance and endorsement.
