Religion, Marriage, and Family: Elements of Human Flourishing

Dear Colleagues,

We invite proposals for a Special Issue of Religions on the theme Religion, Marriage, and Family: Elements of Human Flourishing. This Issue seeks to address how the family, its nature, structure and meaning (telos) have become central cultural questions in the wake of the profound social upheavals that began in the early 1960s.

Before this period, a commonly held Judeo-Christian framework for marriage and family predominated in the West. Since then, with the rejection of mediated authority and the rise in new ideological movements, the social, psychological and moral cohesion of the family has been rigorously questioned and often rejected. Increasingly, hyper-individualism—grounded in modernity’s unresolved debates over the nature of freedom—has elevated self-determination above any sense of things having ‘a given nature’ (with its corollary objective structures and values), especially casting marriage and family as obstacles to personal autonomy.

The effects of over 60 years of social and legal experimentation are evident: weakened familial relationships, the decline of marriage as a social norm, damaging effects of divorce on children and confusion over gender identity. Contemporary debates oscillate between two poles: one group advocates for the self-definition (or even abandonment) of marriage, family and sexuality, while others seek to recover the ontological bases of the human person, marriage and family as indispensable for human flourishing.

This Issue invites contributions that explore these themes and draw upon theological, psychological, Biblical and sociological research to clarify the essential nature of marriage and family. The aim is to show how human freedom and nature necessarily include both personal and communal dimensions and how authentic marriage and family life serve the good of the human person.

Core Questions Include:

• Can marriage and family be recovered as fundamental goods necessary for human flourishing?
• In what ways has hyper-individualism challenged objective and corporate values?
• Do marriage and the family possess a given nature or is it subjectively designed?
• How can the Judeo-Christian worldview address the crisis in the family and in persoal identity?
• What are the effects of family disintegration on children and wider society?
• How have social and cultural shifts since the 1960s reshaped understandings of marriage and family?

Topics of Interest May Include (but are not limited to):

• Psychological, theological, Biblical and sociological principles underlying marriage and family
• The effects of divorce and family breakdown on children and intergenerational relationships
• Marriage, family and human freedom: personal and corporate dimensions
• Competing cultural visions of family and society
• Modern Sociological Studies on Marriage, Gender, Families, Fatherhood and Motherhood
• Gender identity and the redefinition of family structures
• The family as the foundation of human formation
• The Judeo-Christian vision of reality as it pertains to marriage, family and the human person
• Corporate Personality vs. subjective individualism

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions, particularly from psychology, sociology, Biblical studies and theology that address the cultural, legal and religious debates around the nature and purpose of marriage and family.

Dr. Joseph C. Atkinson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.