Non­fic­tion

Til Faith Do Us Part: How Inter­faith Mar­riage is Trans­form­ing America

  • From the Publisher
May 13, 2013
In the last decade, 45% of all mar­riages in the U.S. were between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent faiths. The rapid­ly grow­ing num­ber of mixed-faith fam­i­lies has become a source of hope, encour­ag­ing open­ness and tol­er­ance among reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties that his­tor­i­cal­ly have been insu­lar and sus­pi­cious of oth­er faiths. Yet as Nao­mi Schae­fer Riley demon­strates in Til Faith Do Us Part, what is good for soci­ety as a whole often proves dif­fi­cult for indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies: inter­faith cou­ples, Riley shows, are less hap­py than oth­ers and cer­tain com­bi­na­tions of reli­gions are more like­ly to lead to divorce. Draw­ing on in-depth inter­views with mar­ried and once-mar­ried cou­ples, cler­gy, coun­selors, soci­ol­o­gists, and oth­ers, Riley shows that many peo­ple enter into inter­faith mar­riages with­out much con­sid­er­a­tion of the fun­da­men­tal spir­i­tu­al, doc­tri­nal, and prac­ti­cal issues that divide them. 

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