Faithful Becoming: Forming Families in the Art of Paradoxical Living in a Fragmented and Pluralistic World

Abstract

Social, cultural, and religious diversity in today’s society offers many challenges to the beliefs and stability of the Christian family. The author explores strategies to deal with this diversity, foster mutual recognition of equality, promote training in tolerance and fidelity to our basic values, and encourage a hospitality which opens the domestic church to the public mission of a globally oriented faith. M y mother was raised in rural western Minnesota at the beginning of the twentieth century in a context of ethnic and religious homogeneity. Some of that uniformity still existed when I was a child sixty years ago. Everybody I knew then had been socialized into the same worldview and shared values in which I was being formed. Parents raising children and children growing up at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the third millennium will face a much more diverse context with fewer certainties. Adults in families face the same challenges as they seek to continue to be formed for faithful living. The society in which we live is increasingly less homogeneous, stable, localized, and predictable because we live in increasingly heterogeneous, changing, translocal, and unpredictable globalized contexts. We can no longer assume a common worldview in the primary contexts of our lives, even including the church. When the world appears disjunctive or when we participate simultaneously in very