Thomas Knieps-Port le Roi INTAMS review | Volume 13 | Issue 2 | Autumn 2007 | Pages 147 > 148 Editorial (Full-text) If there is, apart from a general academic interest, any common line in the various contributions that have appeared in this journal over the last years, it is the conviction that although marriage may have become more optional on the one side and more fragile on the other, it still matters in the lives of many people. For many a fervent defender of the marital institution this may seem an insufficient or unsatisfactory reason to maintain and substantiate a discourse that ought to be less pragmatic and more prescriptive and timeless instead. However, while it is both true that normative orientation and practical utility mutually enrich each other and that neither can do without the other, marriage and the family do not exist in the abstract but are always part of concrete living conditions within a changing social, cultural, and religious setting. That is why at a specific moment in history, previously unseen challenges and opportunities may emerge that put traditional convictions or earlier achievements into question and demand new answers and solutions. The value of institutions such as marriage and the family ultimately depends on their ability to cope with challenges and to turn them into opportunities. Most of the contributions to this issue of the INTAMS review again test out the resiliency of marriage and the family in the various areas in which they have increasingly come under strain in today’s context. Michael G. Lawler has been among those theologians who have made a major effort to understand the growing phenomenon of non-marital cohabitation in Western societies and to sort out its pre-nuptial variant as a legitimate, and historically not unparalleled, way of entering Christian marriage (see, for example, his article “Becoming Married in the Catholic Church: A Traditional Postmodern Proposal”, in: INTAMS review 7/1, 2001, 37-55). In his proposal for “A Marital Catechumenate”, referencing the long-established Christian practice of a baptismal catechumenate, he draws pastoral conclusions from a theological argument that aims to turn what others have found only as shaky ground for lifelong marital commitment into solid and fruitful soil. It is hoped that a marital catechumenate will provide the intensive marriage preparation the churches have – often in vain – been insisting on for quite a while. The “big wedding day” is a major event in many couples’ lives; they may welcome the lavish feast in it, but will also realize it as a pivotal moment in their shared life trajectories. For Remco Robinson and his co-authors, the church ritual should help couples review their past history and look ahead into an unknown future. Interviews with couples and their guests at the marriage celebration confirm that it does, which may indeed explain why the majority of wedding celebrations are strongly personalized and fashioned according to the individual wishes and biographies of the couple. What is much more difficult to achieve in these celebrations, however, is a connection of the personal story and its destiny with the transcendent dimension. Pastors and theologians alike will have to ponder the question whether an “immanent” ritual risks obfuscating the transcendent dimension altogether or should rather be regarded as a necessary step for its self-transcending. The instability of today’s marital and familial relationships confronts secular and religious institutions with new challenges. Those churches that uphold the idea of a marriage-based family are often torn between defending their ideals on the one hand and not withholding pastoral care for their members who are unable to or refuse to live up to their moral standards on the other. Karlijn Demasure ventures into a hitherto unexplored area in the pastoral and theological literature and suggests concrete guidance for the pastoral care of stepfamilies and their members. If marriage matters, does sexual difference matter for and in marriage? Chris Roberts is convinced that it does and so criticizes what he calls “revisionist theologies” for not sufficiently taking into consideration a significant strand of the theological tradition from Augustine to Karl Barth. Two further articles invite us to leave Western culture and delve into the Asian and African contexts instead. Soosai Arokiasamy points to the risks for and challenges of the growing number of interreligious marriages in Asian countries while recognizing them as an extraordinary opportunity for interreligious dialogue. For Petri Assenga, the African family is a strong and convincing model to build community amid the social, economic, and political upheavals and ethnic rivalries in Africa – so much so that it lends itself to developing an indigenous concept of the Church as the “family of God”. Jean Marie Gueullette searches for an appropriate and appealing expression to convey that even today marriage responds to the deep desire of men and women to construct strong, stable relationships, to be recognized and loved, and to give of themselves. A married priest in the Greek-Catholic Church in Hungary, Papp Miklos offers a personal testimony to both the benefits and difficulties of the lives of priestly couples in the Eastern tradition, giving insight into a type of relationship that Western Christianity is widely unfamiliar with. Finally, Sophie Veulemans reads René Magritte’s painting La réponse imprévue of 1933 as an allegory of the lifelong marital promise.