Monica Sandor Contemporary Marital Spirituality: A Survey of the Principal Themes (Summary) Following a chronological overview of the rise of marital spirituality as this field has emerged today, this article surveys some of the principal themes in the literature. Marital spirituality has matured and no longer tries simply B and sometimes awkwardly B to adapt spiritualities of past schools to married people today. Its authors and teachers recognise that one cannot simply translate spiritualities that have grown largely out of monastic and clerical (and thus celibate) traditions to the life of the lay couple. Married spirituality certainly draws on some of the time-honoured and fundamental ideas about the inner life, struggles with balancing the active and contemplative lives, with making room for both prayer and action, solitude and relationship, and builds on the developmental or process models of spiritual growth. But the paradigm shift in current approaches to spirituality itself, taking spirituality out of the cloister and planting it firmly in everyday life – or “spirituality from below” – has made possible new types of marital spirituality. A spirituality of marriage rests on a re-evaluated spirituality of the Christian life, or life of the laity, a strengthening of the notion of a universal vocation to holiness, which for a majority of Christians is a vocation to marriage. There is as well a new appreciation for the role of the body and sexual love. It is precisely in light of an incarnational spirituality that one can speak of conjugal sexual union as a spiritual experience, expressing the sacramental nature of the (whole of) married life. The images conventionally used to link the conjugal bond to the divine order are also undergoing rethinking. The nuptial or bridal spirituality so firmly rooted in Christian spirituality, using the marital bond as the key metaphor for expressing the bond between God and the soul, and between Christ and the Church, is being problematised, and other analogies are being proposed. Thus, marriage is looked at in light of baptismal spirituality, as an analogue to the Trinitarian bond between the divine persons, to the communion expressed and created in the Eucharist, to the Cross of Good Friday and the celebration of the Resurrection. Finally, the explicit commitment in many current spiritualities to root themselves firmly in the quest for social justice has led many writers to regard just and loving relations within a marriage and family as the starting point not only for a domestic church but a domestic “reign of justice and of peace” that contributes to the good of society and builds up the reign of God.