One Marriage Under God: Building an Everlasting Love
If you're married, your top concern should not be pleasing yourself, or even pleasing your spouse: it should be pleasing God. So says Wright, a popular Christian counselor and prolific author. In an encouraging and straightforward addition to his oeuvre, he marries together, as it were, sociological observations about the benefits of marriage with biblically-flavored self-help instructions for making marriage work. Drawing on studies like Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's The Case for Marriage, Wright criticizes the prevailing marital mores in contemporary America. People who cohabitate before marriage are more likely to divorce, he argues, and cohabitating couples are more likely to be depressed and anxious than married couples. Marriage, on the other hands, tends to lower people's risk for heart disease, cancer, strokes and car accidents, and married couples are generally more financially secure than single or divorced folks. Some of Wright's refrains-such as his explication of male headship-have been sung countless evangelical nuptial how-tos. But much of this book is fresh. To wit, Wright's insistence that Christians be intimately involved in other Christians' marriages, saying to friends whose marriage is on the rocks, "Let's intervene and help you find a better way."Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.