When Marriage is Dying: The meaning of Christian marriage

Peter Leithart

Peter Leithart writes that dying -- losing one's life for the neighbor -- is necessary for making marriage work.

Marriage is dying. That has been a recurrent theme of cultural conservatives for several decades. Recent census figures indicate that the number of single-parent families increased by 25 percent in the past decade. The 1990 census found 3.1 million unmarried couples living together, and that number had risen to 5.4 million by 2000. Nearly a third of American children are being raised without two parents.

...All this is no doubt true, and legal efforts to fix the problem must be explored. But something more fundamental has happened: Marriage is dying because we have forgotten that marriage is always about dying...At the wedding, that world dies. And when that world dies, the couple dies too.

For the complete article go to the Touchstone Journal website.