W. Bradford Wilcox

For most men and women, endowing sex, not to mention marriage itself, with a sense of sacredness leads not to depression and divorce court but to strong and satisfying unions. Continue Reading »

An improved child tax credit could play a crucial role in strengthening the financial foundations of family life for working- and middle-class families across the country. Continue Reading »

Eduardo and Graciela Valdez met on the dance floor of a New York salsa club in 2000. Graciela, a single mother, had returned to her childhood Catholicism after giving birth to a son out of wedlock. Continue Reading »

All the attention devoted to the first Roman Catholic Synod on the Family, which wraps up this week at the Vatican, is but one sign that the ties binding hearth and altar to one another can still be the subject of considerable concern. That’s in part because the fortunes of the family in the West have largely ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of religious faith over the centuries, as scholars like Peter Berger, Robert Wuthnow, and Mary Eberstadt have noted. Continue Reading »

Earlier this month, W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, addressed the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the increasingly “separate and unequal” character of marriage in the United States. First Things asked him the following questions about his address to the bishops. Continue Reading »

In the wake of the divorce revolution that swept Europe and the Americas over the last half-century, Pope Francis—who celebrates his one-year anniversary this week—is convening a major synod of the world’s bishops this fall in Rome to retool the Catholic Church’s message and . . . . Continue Reading »

Sociologist Christian Smith began his ambitious, multivolume effort to plumb the religious lives of Americans across the life course in his 2005 with Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In that book”aimed at an audience that the author hoped would include general readers as well as clergy and scholars”Smith painted an incisive portrait of religion among America’s adolescents… . Continue Reading »

Marriage and Caste in America:  Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by kay s. hymowitz  ivan r. dee, 192 pages, $22.50 The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families,” wrote John Adams in 1778. Adams recognized, as did many of the founders, that the . . . . Continue Reading »

The family revolution of the last four decades has not been kind to American religion. Dramatic declines in marriage and fertility rates, not to mention increases in divorce, have left many congregations with dispirited, shrinking, and increasingly gray-haired flocks. The growing secularization of . . . . Continue Reading »

At first glance, Hardwired to Connect, the recent report from the Commission on Children at Risk, a group of thirty-three children’s doctors, research scientists, and youth services professionals, might be viewed as yet another harbinger of social decay. The report, jointly sponsored by the . . . . Continue Reading »