Marriage and Family in Context

Abstract

For a number of years, Lee Butler and K. Samuel Lee organized the Pre-Conference of the Society for Pastoral Theology in an effort to support the scholarly life of ‘scholars of color’. We are delighted that the Pre-Conference meeting has been ongoing every year, now with a new leadership team of Gregory Ellison, II and Seunghae Yoo, Michael Cook and Kirsten Oh. We believe that the current high level of racial/ ethnic diversity achieved by the Society for Pastoral Theology is because of the networking and mutual support within the Pre-Conference of the Society by and large. The attendance at the Society’s annual study conference is relatively small and conducive to intimate and supportive conversation. This was not always the case for ‘scholars of color’ who did not have readily available colleagues, mentors, role models, or advisors in academia who understood or shared their racial/ethnic experiences. We remember the awkward days of the Society when ‘scholars of color’ passed by each other without knowing each other’s names, let alone acknowledging each other’s presence. Most ‘scholars of color’ stayed within their own racial/ethnic enclaves in those years. We are glad that those days are long gone. ‘scholars of color’ come together now every year, sharing their thoughts and experiences, trying to be listening ears and a supportive presence for each other. In some years, at least % of the Society’s participants were ‘scholars of color’. One of the goals of the Pre-Conference has been to create a venue where ‘scholars of color’ could encourage and support the publication of their research. With this special issue of the Journal of Pastoral Theologywe are delighted that this goal is becoming a reality. Many doctoral students of color have done research on the related topic of ‘family’. In fact, ‘family’ has been one of the most frequently chosen topics to which pastoral theologians have devoted their research (e.g. see Anderson, Browning, Evison, & Leeuwen, ; Anderson, Foley, Miller-McLemore, & Schreiter, ; Blankenhorn, Browning, & Leeuwen, ; Browning,  & ; Browning, Miller-McLemore, Couture, Lyon, & Franklin, ; Butler,  & ; Couture, , , & ; Miller-McLemore, , , & ; Nyengele, ; Poling, ; Wimberly, ). For this reason, we selected the theme ‘Marriage and family in context’ for this special issue. The family, although very complex, is the most fundamental unit of society. The family functions as the carrier of tradition and the stability of community. In recent decades, however, we have witnessed rapid and dramatic changes in all aspects of family life. Split families due to global diaspora, high incidence rates of divorce, same-gender loving marriage and its impact on religious communities, challenges in single parenting, economic hardship and gender disparity, and so on, have had a significant impact on family structures, dynamics, and our understanding of the Journal of Pastoral Theology, . , –, 