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WORK TITLE: Soul Mates
WORK NOTES: with W. Bradford Wilcox
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WEBSITE: http://www.nicholaswolfinger.com/
CITY: Salt Lake City
STATE: UT
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https://faculty.utah.edu/u0046574-NICHOLAS_H_WOLFINGER/biography/index.hml * https://faculty.utah.edu/bytes/curriculumVitae.hml?id=u0046574 * https://contemporaryfamilies.org/experts/nicholas-wolfinger/
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Male.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D., 1998.
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Educator and writer. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, adjunct professor of sociology and professor of family and consumer studies.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Sociologist Nicholas H. Wolfinger teamed with sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox to write Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos. Both scholars have a background studying marriage and family structures, and they apply this lens to African American and Latino communities. Noting that these communities have different marriage and divorce rates than white communities, the authors set out to explore why these different rates exist. Wilcox and Wolfinger conduct group interviews, draw on national data sets, and conduct long-term studies to explore issues of sex, love, and religion, and they consider how each factor influences attitudes toward marriage and divorce in their subjects’ lives.
Online Reading Religion correspondent Nikki Young remarked, “I find Wilcox and Wolfinger’s exploration in Soul Mates an intriguing—albeit heterosexually focused—contribution to discourse on American families. Smartly researched and coherently written, their text offers insight into the shifting landscape of relationships within communities that experience significant external pressures and face systematic oppression. This concentrated study on minoritized relational practices results in an informed description of the religious resources positively impacting African American and Latino communities.” Peter Wehner, writing in the National Review, was also impressed, as he announced: “Analyzing the crack-up of the American family, including families among minority groups, is not a ground-breaking effort; scholars have been doing it for decades, and Wilcox and Wolfinger rely on many of them in their book. But what is a genuinely new contribution is the book’s examination of the role faith plays in shaping relationships, marriage, and family life.” Wehner found that “Wilcox and Wolfinger repeatedly remind us that religion is no silver bullet. For instance, religion does not seem to have any impact on marital stability for blacks and Latinos (religious attendance does not reduce the divorce rate for either group, even as it substantially reduces divorce among whites). But overall there’s no denying that religion is a force for good in African-American and Latino family life.”
Another positive assessment appeared in Commentary, as Naomi Schaefer Riley advised that “the authors go to great pains to show that they have not approached their subject from a particular political perspective—Wilcox describes himself as a married, conservative, religious person, while Wolfinger is single, liberal, and secular. For every cultural argument they offer for the problems of the family, they advance an economic one. They are always sure to suggest that racism, segregation, or even the historic legacy of slavery could be among the causes of the problems they see.” Riley continued: “The real contribution of Soul Mates comes in its analysis of the marital habits of blacks and Latinos and how religious life has and has not affected them. The first set of statistics that stand out are the ones regarding infidelity. Twenty-nine percent of black women report ‘infidelity or suspected infidelity’ in their relationships, compared with 22 percent of Latina women and 7 percent of white women. And those are among the ones who are married. When one looks at partnerships among never-married adults, the patterns become even more stark.” Proffering commendation in Choice, B. Weston declared that Soul Mates is a “readable book” that “will be the standard academic reference on this subject for some time to come.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Books & Culture, January-February, 2016, Anna Sutherland, review of Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos.
Choice, June, 2016, B. Weston, review of Soul Mates, p. 1549.
Commentary, February, 2016, Naomi Schaefer Riley, review of Soul Mates, p. 49.
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, December, 2013, Sarah Klitenic Wear, review of Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower.
National Review, February 29, 2016, Peter Wehner, review of Soul Mates.
ONLINE
Council on Contemporary Families Web site, https://contemporaryfamilies.org/ (April 25, 2017), author profile.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger Home Page, http://www.nicholaswolfinger.com (April 25, 2017).
Reading Religion, http://readingreligion.org/ (August 30, 2016), review of Soul Mates.
University of Utah Web site, https://faculty.utah.edu/ (April 25, 2017), author profile.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA in 1998.
Wolfinger's books include Understanding the Divorce Cycle (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (Springer, 2005; edited, with Lori Kowaleski-Jones), Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (Rutgers University Press, 2013; coauthored with Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden), and the newly released Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, & Marriage among African-Americans and Latinos (with W. Bradford Wilcox), published by Oxford University Press.
More information about Do Babies Matter? can be found on the book's website, www.dobabiesmatter.com. Read more about Soul Mates at www.soulmates-thebook.
Wolfinger's next book, The Changing Economics of Single Motherhood (with Matthew McKeever), will be published by Oxford University Press. In addition, Wolfinger is the author of about forty articles or chapters in academic journals and books. He popular writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Huffington Post, National Review, and other outlets.
Follow @NickWolfinger on Twitter, or learn more at www.nicholashwolfinger.com. Wolfinger lives in Salt Lake City and Northern California.
NICHOLAS H WOLFINGER
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Adjunct Professor, Sociology Department
Adjunct Professor, Family And Consumer Studies
Professor, Family And Consumer Studies
Email nick.wolfinger@fcs.utah.edu
Phone 801-581-7491
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Ph.D., Sociology, UCLA
Biography
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah.
He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. at UCLA, both in sociology. His books include Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (edited, with Lori Kowaleski-Jones; Springer, 2005), Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (with Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden; Rutgers University Press, 2013), and, most recently, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (with W. Bradford Wilcox; Oxford University Press, 2016). Wolfinger is also the author of about 40 articles or chapters, as well as short pieces in The Atlantic, National Review, Huffington Post, and other outlets.
He is currently working, with Matthew McKeever, on a new book on the changing economics of single motherhood to be published by Oxford University Press.
Geographical Regions of Interest
United States of America
CV: https://faculty.utah.edu/bytes/curriculumVitae.hml?id=u0046574
Nicholas Wolfinger
Professor of Family & Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology, University of Utah
Phone:
(801) 364-3283
Email:
Nick.Wolfinger@fcs.utah.edu
Topics of Expertise:
Cohabitation, Committed Relationships & Marriage / Couples Conflict, Separation & Divorce / Economic Inequality / History & Trends on Gender, Marriage & Family Life / Marriage & Divorce / Public Policy
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah.
He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. at UCLA, both in sociology. His books include Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (with Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden), and Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (edited, with Lori Kowaleski-Jones).
He recently completed work on a fourth book, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (with W. Bradford Wilcox). Nick is also the author of about 40 articles or chapters.
Nick splits his time between Northern California and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah.
He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. at UCLA, both in sociology. His books include Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (edited, with Lori Kowaleski-Jones; Springer, 2005), Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (with Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden; Rutgers University Press, 2013), and, most recently, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (with W. Bradford Wilcox; Oxford University Press, 2016). Wolfinger is also the author of about 40 articles or chapters, as well as short pieces in The Atlantic, National Review, Huffington Post, and other outlets.
He is currently working, with Matthew McKeever, on a new book on the changing economics of single motherhood to be published by Oxford University Press.
Nick splits his time between Northern California and Salt Lake City, Utah. He lives happily alone in both places. Follow him on Twitter at @NickWolfinger.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. at UCLA, both in sociology. His books include Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower (with Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden), Fragile Families and the Marriage Agenda (edited, with Lori Kowaleski-Jones), and most recently Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos (with W. Bradford Wilcox). Nick is also the author of about 40 scholarly articles or chapters, and short pieces in Academe Blog, Atlantic, Huffington Post, Family Studies Blog, First Things, and National Review. Nick splits his time between Northern California and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Love and order
Peter Wehner
68.3 (Feb. 29, 2016): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger (Oxford, 248 pp., $27.95)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 2000, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y) was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his 40-year political career. Moynihan, a man of unusual wisdom, experience, and perspective, responded this way: "The biggest change, in my judgment, is that family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world." This change has occurred in "an historical instant," Moynihan said. "Something that was not imaginable 40 years ago has happened."
In order to help us better understand what has happened and why, two authors with different life experiences and worldviews--W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia (conservative, Catholic, and a married father) and Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah (an unmarried, childless liberal, and a nonbeliever)--have written Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos. As the subtitle implies, Professors Wilcox and Wolfinger discuss the influence exercised by churches on relationships and marriage among blacks and Latinos.
The authors begin the book by discussing the family revolution that has swept across the United States over the last half century, a revolution characterized by unprecedented levels of non-marital childbearing, divorce, single parenthood, and multiple-partner fertility. "Marriage," Wilcox and Wolfinger write, "has been deinstitutionalized as the anchor of the adult life course and of family life itself." This has disproportionately affected Latinos and especially African Americans, the nation's two largest minority groups, who today make up a quarter of the American population and are projected to constitute more than 40 percent of the population in 2050.
In 1970, 57 percent of blacks were married; today, the figure is 25 percent. For Latinos, the corresponding figures are 72 percent and 47 percent. From 1980 to 2011, the percentage of children born outside wedlock rose for blacks from 56 to 72 percent and for Latinos from 24 to 53 percent. (For whites, the figure rose from 9 to 29 percent over the same period.) In 2011, 67 percent of black children, 40 percent of Latino children, and 25 percent of white children lived outside a two-parent, married family.
Wilcox and Wolfinger point out that most African Americans and Latinos will marry at some point in their lives, most of them are married or in a live-in relationship when they have children, and most black and Latino couples are happy and monogamous. Family life for these two groups, they argue, is more positive than some contemporary accounts convey. Yet there's no denying that the retreat from marriage in modern life has disproportionately affected them--and as a result, tremendous hardships have been inflicted on their children in particular. (Children raised in single-parent homes are much more likely to suffer from psychological problems such as depression, get in trouble with the law, live in poverty, and drop out of high school. Their chances of succeeding in life are a lot lower, the challenges they face a lot greater.)
Soul Mates argues that a "confluence of economic, policy, and cultural currents came together with sufficient force in the late 1960s and 1970s to generate a tidal wave of family change"--and African Americans and Latinos were most susceptible to its effects. The explanations, the authors argue, have to do with history, most especially the poisonous effects of slavery, segregation, and other forms of discrimination; with culture, since Latinos and African Americans are more likely to be consumers of popular culture and therefore its messages of hedonism and radical individualism; and with structural issues such as deindustrialization, poverty, incarceration, and poor education. William J. Bennett once pointed out that an earthquake that struck Mexico City in the mid 1980s was less powerful than the one that would hit San Francisco only a few years later. But in Mexico City, the casualties were many times higher and the overall damage much worse. The reason? The amount of devastation often depends less on the magnitude of a quake than on the stability of the structures it affects. This is essentially what Wilcox and Wolfinger argue as to why African-American and Latino families have suffered disproportionately from the aftershocks of the family and sexual revolutions.
Analyzing the crack-up of the American family, including families among minority groups, is not a ground-breaking effort; scholars have been doing it for decades, and Wilcox and Wolfinger rely on many of them in their book. But what is a genuinely new contribution is the book's examination of the role faith plays in shaping relationships, marriage, and family life.
According to Soul Mates, religion is an important bulwark against marital and family decomposition. The data and findings the authors amass are impressive: Religious participation decreases infidelity and out-of-wedlock births and profoundly increases the likelihood that people will marry. Churchgoing Latinos and African Americans are significantly more likely to be gainfully employed, to steer clear of criminal activity or substance abuse, and to be happy compared with their peers who don't attend church or attend only infrequently. According to Wilcox and Wolfinger, religious faith "serves as an important source of personal, familial, and communal strength for many Latinos and especially many African Americans."
Addressing those who claim that what is going on here is self-selection--that family-oriented people seek out religious institutions to reinforce their preexisting orientation toward marriage and family life--the authors argue that the evidence indicates that "the effects of religion are largely causal, and not representative of selection." (The basis for this finding is, in part, controlling for numerous social, demographic, and psychological differences between survey respondents.)
Professors Wilcox and Wolfinger repeatedly remind us that religion is no silver bullet. For instance, religion does not seem to have any impact on marital stability for blacks and Latinos (religious attendance does not reduce the divorce rate for either group, even as it substantially reduces divorce among whites). But overall there's no denying that religion is a force for good in African-American and Latino family life. Religion, for example, "helps sustain Latinos and Blacks in their efforts to be hardworking, temperate, law-abiding members of their communities who steer clear of the temptations of the street."
"Churches foster an ethic of care and reinforce a code of decency among their members," according to Soul Mates. (All of this explodes the silly claim by the late Christopher Hitchens that religion "poisons everything.")
One of the many virtues of this textured, balanced, and sober book is that it interjects compelling human stories to illustrate the authors' empirical findings. For example, we're introduced to Eduardo and Graciela Valdez, a Mexican-American couple from Spanish Harlem who were children of divorce and had experienced fractious family lives. But their faith led them toward marriage.
"This commitment came from that faith in God," Eduardo told the authors. He had faith in marriage "despite all my brokenness, despite all my flaws," he added. Graciela was "the only person that I believe, that I know, that loves ... not just the good Eduardo, but also the broken Eduardo. And I felt called also to do the same thing for her."
Loving another person in his or her brokenness is a beautiful description of what it means to be committed to another person for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do them part. This has never been easy, and in our age--in which relational commitments are increasingly attenuated, contingent, and impermanent; in which what the sociologist Daniel Bell called an ethic of self-expression and self-gratification now dominates--it might be harder than ever. There is a reason scholars refer to our "post-marriage" society.
To restore marriage in 21st-century America will require many things, including public policies that can help on the margins. Soul Mates briefly makes some recommendations, including eliminating marriage penalties and disincentives for the poor and for unwed mothers, expanding the earned-income tax credit, and increasing the child tax credit and funding for proven vocational-education and apprentice programs.
But what is most required to revivify marriage is what is most beyond the power of government to do: reconfigure the order of our loves. A marriage culture will be rebuilt one person at a time, through finding greater fulfillment in self-giving, elevating our affections and desires, and loving others as we love ourselves. None of us does this very well, and all of us could do it much better than we do. Yet for all the moral failures that can be laid at the feet of religion and those acting on its behalf, there is nothing in human history that has helped people improve their character and refine their loves more than faith.
Faith, it has been said, is an anvil that has worn out many hammers. We need it now more than ever, as the hammer of modernity has fractured our most precious human institutions, marriage and family, leaving much human wreckage behind.
Fortunately for those of us who are believers--in my case, a follower of Jesus--there is some comfort in knowing that our faith teaches us that what has been wrecked can also be redeemed.
Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wehner, Peter. "Love and order." National Review, 29 Feb. 2016, p. 43+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443739034&it=r&asid=6731ac75f5277c0f0d342ffdfb9edc3e. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443739034
Don't take me to church
Naomi Schaefer Riley
141.2 (Feb. 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Soul Mutes: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among-African Americans and Latinos
By W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger
Oxford University Press, 218 pages
A HALF century ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan was compiling his extensive list of problems contributing to the breakdown of the black family, he included this: "Observers report that the Negro churches have all but lost contact with men in the Northern cities as well. This may be a normal condition of urban life, but it is probably a changed condition for the Negro American and cannot be a socially desirable development."
He reported that the only religious group to whom these men seemed to be gravitating were Black Muslims, "a movement based on total rejection of white society." The loss of church, particularly as a factor helping to teach responsibility and middle-class values to black men, led Moynihan to conclude that "the tangle of pathology is tightening."
It is among the most bitter ironies of this story that the black family experienced a uniquely awful decline even while African Americans remained the most religious group in the country. And while church attendance has typically been a reliable bulwark of marriage and responsible childrearing for white Americans, its effects on blacks in recent years have been much weaker and in some cases nonexistent.
This is among the findings in Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos, a new book by sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the University of Utah.
The two begin their book with an account of how changes in the American family have adversely affected all racial groups in America, but blacks and Latinos disproportionately so. "In 1960, only 5 percent of children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, 41 percent of children were," they write. "From 1980 to 2011, the percentage of children born out of wedlock rose for blacks from 56 to 72 percent and for Latinos from 24 to 53 percent; by comparison, for whites it rose from 9 to 29 percent." More than two-thirds of black children lived outside of a married, two-parent family in 2011.
The authors argue that both economic and cultural factors have led to lower rates of marriage, higher rates of divorce and, most important, higher rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. Scholars such as Andrew Cherlin and Robert Putnam have made the case that the decline in the family was due in large part to the underemployment and falling wages of working-class men in the late '60s and early '70s. Without the skills necessary to earn a good living, non-college-educated men became less desirable marriage partners. Not only that; women's entry into the workforce meant that women needed men's contributions less. Or thought they did.
And that in turn also weakened marriage. As Wilcox and Wolfinger write: "Even as women's labor-force participation began to rival men's they still found themselves doing the lion's share of housework and child care. This threatened marriages by producing more domestic strife. Accordingly, men and women, especially in working class and poor communities where women's relative gains have been strongest, became less likely to get and stay married."
The authors go to great pains to show that they have not approached their subject from a particular political perspective--Wilcox describes himself as a married, conservative, religious person, while Wolfinger is single, liberal, and secular. For every cultural argument they offer for the problems of the family, they advance an economic one. They are always sure to suggest that racism, segregation, or even the historic legacy of slavery could be among the causes of the problems they see. In addition to changing the culture of the ghetto, they suggest things like eliminating jail sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
Their effort to be bipartisan sometimes results in the disingenuous use of quotations from sources. For instance, they say they agree with the New York Times's Charles Blow when he says that he "takes enormous exception to arguments about the 'breakdown of the family,' particularly the black family, that don't acknowledge that this country for centuries has endeavored, consciously and not, to break it down."
But on the next page, the authors cite the changes in welfare policy in the 1960s that had the unintended effect of increasing dependence on the government and "penalizing marriage among the poor and working class." For Blow and many on the left, the problem is that government is not giving the poor and working class enough money, not that it has given them too much. Indeed, later in the same column Blow writes, "I don't buy into the mythology that most poor people are ... happy to live with the help of handouts from a benevolent big government that is equally happy to keep them dependent."
Happy might not be the right word--but dependence is dependence.
The real contribution of Soul Mates comes in its analysis of the marital habits of blacks and Latinos and how religious life has and has not affected them. The first set of statistics that stand out are the ones regarding infidelity. Twenty-nine percent of black women report "infidelity or suspected infidelity" in their relationships, compared with 22 percent of Latina women and 7 percent of white women. And those are among the ones who are married. When one looks at partnerships among never-married adults, the patterns become even more stark. Thirty-six percent of black men have had two or more sexual partners in the past year, compared with 23 percent of Latino men and 21 percent of white men.
Forty-two percent of unmarried black women say that "most of the single men I know are not earning enough money." But 55 percent of them say, "men cannot be trusted to be sexually faithful." While there are those who claim that these findings are the result of the legacy of slavery in which black families were forcibly broken up, such theories do not explain why black marriage rates were higher and single motherhood rates were lower in the first half of the 20th century than they are now.
"Whatever their historical roots," note Wilcox and Wolfinger, "concerns about infidelity and distrust come up frequently in our interviews." Keisha, one of the women they spoke with, explained: "I was in a relationship for a long time.... It ended because I was cheated on; so I don't think I don't [sic] really value relationships anymore either."
The authors speculate that there may be other cultural causes of this instability: "Since the 1960s, American popular culture has taken an increasingly hedonistic turn, such that consumers ... are exposed to an ethic of immediate gratification ... that encompasses a range of behaviors from drug use to sexual infidelity." Since blacks and Latino children consume almost twice as much television as whites, this may be having some effect on their behavior.
But the bottom line is this: Even if all the Great Society policies that conservatives see as contributing to these problems were to end tomorrow, the legacy of these decades of family breakdown and mistrust would be hard to erase any time soon.
The only institution that is working against these trends is the church. Unfortunately, for blacks, the church seems to have a weaker effect than it has on whites and Latinos when it comes to all sorts of problems afflicting the communities. For instance, "Churchgoing whites are about half as likely as their less religious peers to have used drugs in the last month, compared to about one-third less likely for Latinos and approximately 15 percent less likely for African Americans." The same is true for binge drinking.
Similarly, there is a strong association between regular church attendance and the belief that premarital sex is always wrong. Regular attendees are also less likely to believe that a single mother can bring up a child as well as two parents can. But in both cases the effects of churchgoing seem to be stronger for whites than for minorities.
So what about marriage? Regular church attendance increases the odds by about two-thirds that someone will be married. For black women, though, the odds go up only about 50 percent. And for Latina women, there is only a 17 percent increase in marriage rates. Church attendance can actually move couples away from the altar, according to the authors, if one partner (usually the woman) is attending and the other is not. In other words, a woman's standards may rise by being a regular churchgoer and she may be more inclined to reject the available options.
Marital happiness tends to increase with churchgoing for all races. And usually it tends to increase marital stability. But the old adage that couples who pray together stay together does not necessarily hold true across the board. Surprisingly, the researchers find that "regular church attendance substantially decreases divorce rates, but only for whites."
Perhaps, the authors propose, this is a selection problem. Whites who attend church are already less likely to believe that divorce is acceptable; indeed, that may be why they want to go to church. But for blacks, attending church is "the expected thing to do." For whites, on the other hand, churchgoing has become "less conventional."
For many blacks, church is more of a social or even a political institution than it is a place to hear messages about personal sin. Wilcox and Wolfinger sample the messages at churches in a number of black and Latino neighborhoods and find that they are fairly watered down. As one black woman reports about her Baptist church in Harlem, her pastor "doesn't talk about [sexual conduct] often." The one time he did, the many single mothers and unmarried couples were very uncomfortable.
The authors write: "We suspect that the abundance of nontraditional families in black and Latino congregations has often left their clergy and lay leaders disinclined to address questions of sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing. This may help explain why religion is less likely to guide the sexual and reproductive behavior of blacks and Latinos."
All of which is to say that the situation is even worse today than it was when Moynihan wrote his report. It's not simply that not enough black men are attending church--a decline he had already begun to see. It's that the people going to church are not getting the messages they used to get. The tangle of pathology is indeed tightening.
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY is the author of 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Riley, Naomi Schaefer. "Don't take me to church." Commentary, Feb. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443059516&it=r&asid=f0c2ea802ad06302c454b1b6e4f174a0. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443059516
Marriage and the church: a new study focuses on African Americans and Latinos
Anna Sutherland
22.1 (January-February 2016): p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Soul Mates
Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos
W. BRADFORD WILCOX AND NICHOLAS WOLFINGER * OXFORD UNIV. PRESS, 2016 * 248 PP. * $27.95
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"I used a lot of drugs, I drank a lot, I didn't care for my family.... When the weekend came I left my wife and I would go play soccer with friends ... and then go drinking and that was my whole weekend." That's how Roberto Flores, a 37-year-old Mexican American living in San Diego, describes his former life. When his wife, Marcia, convinced him to attend a couples' retreat at a nearby Catholic church, everything changed.
"That's when I met God," Roberto explains. "I cried before God, which was something I never did. I never cry. But a lot of things I never did before I did on that day." After that retreat, Roberto left behind his destructive habits and re-engaged with his wife and kids. He also started going to church, where he has been taught that God "has a plan for marriage," and that "you need a lot of love to raise a good family." Roberto and Marcia's story, one of many recounted in Soul Mates, vividly illustrates how churches can transform marriages and support families--not just among middle-class white evangelicals, but also among racial minorities facing complicated problems like addiction and economic instability. And these days, resources for struggling families are perhaps more crucial than ever. For a combination of cultural, political, and economic reasons, Americans of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are more likely to delay or forego marriage, more likely to divorce, and more likely to have kids outside of marriage than they were fifty years ago. As previous researchers have documented, Christians who attend church regularly have happier and more stable marriages than non-churchgoers, and they are less likely to have children out of wedlock, for reasons I'll get to below. They have been protected to some degree from the post-1960s revolution in family life that is still unfolding today. Yet African Americans and Latinos, who are more religious on average than other racial/ethnic groups, have been particularly vulnerable to that revolution, and religious practice has less of a positive effect on their relationships than it does for whites.
Sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger teamed up to investigate the questions that these patterns raise. Wilcox is a professor at the University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project, and a colleague of mine at the Institute for Family Studies; Wolfinger is a professor at the University of Utah. The modest length of Soul Mates belies the extensive research behind the book: it incorporates the results of six national surveys as well as insights gleaned from interviews with 25 members of the clergy and 60 other adults, visits to black and Latino churches, and focus groups in four cities. The volume is accessible, engaging, and at times even moving, despite occasionally getting bogged down by statistics.
At least a few of those statistics are relevant here for the sake of background. In the 1970s, 57 percent of black prime-age adults (20-54 years old) and 70-some percent of whites and Latinos were married. In the current decade, by contrast, the figures stand at 25 percent for African Americans, 47 percent for Latinos, and 49 percent for whites. Contra the common perception, divorce rates are not at an all-time high, but roughly one in five blacks, one in seven whites, and one in eight Latinos who have ever been married are divorced.
Most couples in every racial group report being happy in their relationships, yet by this measure as well, black couples are disadvantaged. Americans of all backgrounds have become far more likely to have children outside marriage since the 1970s; as of 2011,29 percent of white children, 53 percent of Latino children, and 72 percent of black children were born to unmarried parents.
Wilcox and Wolfinger show convincingly that the roots of these racial and ethnic differences are both economic and cultural. First, both African Americans and Latinos are more likely than whites to live in poverty and suffer unemployment, and these factors strain relationships among Americans of all races. It's easy to object to this claim: plenty of couples endured the Great Depression with their marriages intact, after all. But financial stressors are more destructive today, several scholars have argued, because the dominant understanding of marriage has changed. In Wilcox and Wolfinger's words, marriage is now considered "a relationship capstone of sorts that signifies that a couple is 'set,' both financially and emotionally, at a certain level of middle-class comfort and security." Poor and working-class Americans generally still desire marriage, but for many, it's a dream as remote as financial security.
Socioeconomic disparities do not wholly explain divergent patterns in marriage and childbearing, however. Other factors behind black and Latino Americans' fracturing families include the ongoing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the stress of experiencing contemporary racism and discrimination, greater exposure to TV and media, and the pull of "street culture." It is worth underlining that the last item--"a lifestyle marked by violent self-assertion, criminal activity, off-the-books work ... and infidelity"--is relevant only to a minority of African Americans and Latinos. But because it affects more black and Latino people than whites, it contributes to racial/ethnic gaps in family formation and stability. (Substance abuse is also tied to street culture, yet it does not seem to be more of a problem for racial minorities than for whites.)
Churches that serve black and Latino communities offer relief from and push back against these relationship-damaging forces. In opposition to the "code of the street," churches preach a "code of decency" entailing "hard work, temperance, responsibility, sexual fidelity, and the Golden Rule," and provide activities and social networks that make it easier to adhere to that ethic. Many churches also address congregants' financial and career struggles by, for instance, pointing them to job opportunities or offering financial management classes. Further, "black and Latino churches often provide a message of hope, acceptance, and comfort as well as opportunities for enthusiastic worship that can be therapeutic for attendees." (This being a work of sociology rather than theology, Soul Mates does not mention the role of divine grace or other supernatural interventions in believers' lives.)
Presumably for reasons such as these, churchgoing African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be employed, happy, and faithful to their partners, and less likely to commit crimes and abuse drugs and alcohol, than their non-churchgoing peers. Similarly, when couples attend church with their friends (who may support their relationship and serve as role models), they report happier relationships. Praying together likewise boosts relationship quality.
What about family values? Do Americans of different racial backgrounds have different views of right and wrong when it comes to relationships and families, and do churches influence their behaviors? The answer is complicated. According to opinion polls, whites are more liberal than their black and Latino counterparts about premarital sex. Yet "pro-child attitudes and accommodating social norms" toward nonmarital childbearing among these two groups "trump attitudes about sex."
Attending church does make a difference in people's moral convictions and behavior: it is linked to reduced odds of nonmarital sex and childbearing, and a greater likelihood of marrying, among whites and minorities alike. Perhaps surprisingly, that doesn't appear to be attributable to hearing sermons on these subjects. Wilcox and Wolfinger report that religious leaders serving black and Latino congregants "only occasionally mention sex, childbearing, or marriage" in services, perhaps for fear of alienating people. If such churches encourage people to marry, it is usually indirectly--through emphasis on the Golden Rule, forgiveness, and other Christian principles that foster happy relationships--rather than directly. (In my experience, the same could be said of plenty of Catholic parishes serving mostly white, upper-middle-class congregations.) In short, churches may be able to do more to address family breakdown than they currently are, but as Roberto and Marcia's experience and other real-life accounts attest, they already play a vital role in regenerating and sustaining Americans' marriages.
The one issue I wish Wilcox and Wolfinger had examined in greater depth is that of sex ratios, particularly among African Americans. I explained the basic dynamics in my review of Marriage Markets last summer: When a community contains more women than men, the desires of single men tend to win out. That means more hookups and less marriage; more infidelity and less trust. (1)
The theory that a shortage of marriageable men explains much of the decline in marriage rates among all races may be overblown, but among African Americans the thesis is more plausible. Due to black men's higher risk of incarceration and early death and their poor employment prospects, there are just 77 employed, never-married 25- to 34-year-old black men for every 100 employed, single black women in that age range, according to scholars at the Brookings Institution. Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks argues in his 2011 book Is Marriage for White People? that this shortage of black men, particularly in the middle class, goes a long way toward explaining why marriage rates have fallen so far in that community.
In fact, Banks believes that the lopsided sex ratio among middle-class African Americans gave rise not just to African Americans' low marriage rates but also to the somewhat mysterious black-white gap in divorce and marital quality. Because middle-class black women are reluctant to pair up with non-black men, and because they face a shortage of black men with education and careers to rival their own, they are willing to marry (black) men with less education and less income than they have. Or as Banks states it more succinctly, "Black women marry down because they don't marry out." An income gap favoring the woman frustrates both husband and wife (a tendency Wilcox and Wolfinger also note), and a gap in education levels often spells differences in values and priorities. The resulting tensions may contribute to elevated levels of divorce, and lower levels of marital happiness, among African Americans, Banks proposes.
But perhaps it's unfair to criticize a book that breaks new ground for failing to describe every inch of well-tilled soil. In explaining how religion influences (and fails to influence) black and Latino couples, Soul Mates can equip church leaders to better serve couples of all races.
(1.) "Inequality and the American Family," Books & Culture, May/June 2015, pp. 19,21.
Anna Sutherland is editor of Family-Studies.org.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sutherland, Anna. "Marriage and the church: a new study focuses on African Americans and Latinos." Books & Culture, Jan.-Feb. 2016, p. 11+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA444596366&it=r&asid=6b548c093176a491a11c98131dc05f62. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A444596366
Diapers and diplomas
Sarah Klitenic Wear
.238 (Dec. 2013): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Institute on Religion and Public Life
http://www.firstthings.com/
Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower
BY MARY ANN MASON, NICHOLAS H. WOLFINGER, AND MARC GOULDEN
RUTGERS, 188 PAGES, $2.5.95
When colleagues at academic conferences marvel at the latest of my seven pregnancies, my immediate reaction--so they don't think I am the world's worst professor and colleague--is to tell them that I have never, ever taken standard maternity leave. With my last two pregnancies, I modified maternity leave, opting instead for a reduced course schedule. At my university, that means coming back from the hospital to teaching two courses instead of four, days after giving birth.
This information usually elicits the reaction that I must be a "superwoman," but the real reason is that taking maternity leave in academia is very difficult. Unlike other employers, universities are necessarily tied to an academic calendar, and taking off the six weeks granted under federal law means that the other two professors in my department would have to take over my classes.
Do I want to be known as a selfish colleague when review period comes up and there are only a handful of advertised positions in my field with hundreds of others clamoring for a permanent position? When I look around, I don't see other women professors taking maternity leave (or even having children), which only makes me less inclined to ask for it.
Many others seem to feel this way too. In Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower, Mary Ann Mason reports that while women in so-called "fast-track professions" have fewer children than does the average American woman, female faculty are almost half as likely as female physicians and slightly less likely than female lawyers to have a child at all, even though academia offers far more flexible hours than the average law firm or hospital. If female faculty do have children, they are more likely to drop out of the profession than are physicians and lawyers.
So what is keeping academic women from having children? Do Babies Matter?, the culmination of a major study of more than eight thousand tenure-track faculty members in the University of California system, argues that they have fewer children because academic culture demotes motherhood. Women are afraid that they will not be able to publish in competitive fields at the same rate as their childless colleagues; they are afraid that as new mothers they will no longer be taken seriously as scholars; and they are afraid to take advantage of existing family leave policies in the event that chairmen and colleagues bristle at having to take on additional courses and other work when a new mother takes maternity leave.
Given that the rest of the world's mothers deal with pressures and choices without expecting employers to bend to their needs, why should babies matter in academia? Because everyone is being educated by a subculture that is averse to children, and more professors with families (and bigger families) would help change that subculture.
The "Do Babies Matter?" project, directed by Mason, the first female dean of the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, found that women who had children within five years of receiving their doctorates were far less likely than men who had done so to acquire tenured professorships. This trend proved consistent across disciplines and types of institutions. Only one in three women who takes a tenure-track job before having a child ever becomes a mother, and women who obtain tenure are more than twice as likely as their male colleagues to be childless twelve years after earning their doctorates.
Interestingly enough, this bias seems to be limited to women with children under five years of age. Having children over the age of five actually correlates with a 14 to 16 percent increase in the likelihood that women (and men also) will get tenure, because having older children provides "a stabilizing effect" for faculty. In the bench sciences, moreover, married scholars publish more than their unwed colleagues.
If marriage and family life ultimately increase faculty success once children reach kindergarten age, what deters women from having children? It is, Mason argues, essentially a cultural problem, driven by both stigma and the perception of stigma. While the survey's respondents gave all the expected reasons for not having children (research is time-consuming, and doctoral work and the pivotal pre-tenure assistant professorships happen during a woman's fertile years), they also stressed that having a child would be negatively perceived by their professors or future employers.
In addition to numbers, the book is replete with anecdotal evidence for this stigma, including tales of departmental heads urging women professors outright not to have children. One male faculty member said, "Having children is both a lifestyle choice and biologically/medically contingent on good health. I am not enthusiastic about excessively subsidizing others' lifestyle choices, no matter how noble they are. In my department, I think we too often bend over backwards for those with children...." Women are also quoted as advising other women not to take advantage of existing leave policies because they will be judged by colleagues as weak and unable to do their jobs.
A woman in a University of California professional school urged women, "Don't have children until after tenure. Don't use the extra one year on the clock unless absolutely required because male faculty interpret this as some combination of: She's not tough enough to do it or let's evaluate her as someone with seven years experience rather than someone with six years who has been given a year extra."
The survey did find that factors other than perception of stigma also deterred childbearing, such as long hours, particularly for research scientists running labs and applying for grants, and the difficulty of finding affordable and reliable childcare. Still, most of these hardships exist in other professions where women have children at far higher rates.
Moreover, many of these "hardships" hardly seem insurmountable for a woman longing to have a baby. Survey respondents pointed to the hardships of pumping breast milk during on-campus interviews and the altogether strange excuse of everyday hassles, including limited faculty parking, which makes it difficult for a woman to find a parking space if she leaves during the day to take a child to a doctor's appointment. For a woman who has jumped through the hurdles necessary to obtain a Ph.D., these reasons do not seem credible.
The reasons Mason cites for women academics not having babies often seem like pretexts for the fact that academia has a cultural aversion to motherhood and family life. Academics tend to be less traditionally minded, more individualistic, and less inclined to accept the sacrificial nature of parenthood, and hence less likely to have children, much less to have large families.
It would seem, however, that women academics face another pervasive cultural obstacle to motherhood not mentioned by Mason, one different from those encountered by women in other occupations. More than business, law, or medicine, academia prizes the achievements of the individual, and these tangible achievements are listed on the lines of a CV.
The academic speaks of "my research," research which is conducted alone, which is recognized or understood by very few, and which is compensated primarily by a gain in scholarly reputation. This is far different from business or law, for instance, where colleagues work in groups on projects that benefit their companies or clients and reap high financial compensation.
Mason and her colleagues deserve credit for changing the culture at Berkeley. They created a family-leave package, the "UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge," which advocates for options to stop the tenure clock and to provide teaching relief for one semester for new fathers and two semesters for mothers. The project also offered part-time tenure track and other perks, including forty hours of emergency childcare per year.
The program succeeded by making the family leave programs entitlements rather than special accommodations. As a result, 59 percent of new fathers obtained teaching relief within four years of the program's implementation, compared with 6 percent before it started. Most impressively, in six years, the percentage of female assistant professors who reported having at least one child more than doubled from 27 percent to 64 percent. For men, it rose from 39 percent to 59 percent.
Mason's changes to UC Berkeley's family-leave policies changed the culture at the university. Because academics so often fear (with good reason) deviating from what senior professors and administrators want, it took a senior administrator lobbying for changes to make family leave part of the normal routine of academic life.
One might be hopeful that this will result in universities retaining more women who can mentor their female students and show impressionable young women and men that motherhood does not mean the end of an intellectual life. Perhaps an academia made up of more parents with more children would be more likely to support the family as a cultural institution.
Sarah Klitenic Wear is associate professor of classics and faculty associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Wear, Sarah Klitenic
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wear, Sarah Klitenic. "Diapers and diplomas." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 238, 2013, p. 54+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA352038826&it=r&asid=0a9a2b20e79f62f45db8e9260ff7f522. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A352038826
Do Babies Matter?: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower
Andrew Burns
67.1 (Fall-Winter 2013): p289.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Columbia University School of International Public Affairs
http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/
DO BABIES MATTER?: GENDER AND FAMILY IN THE IVORY TOWER
Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Marc Goulden
(Rutgers University Press, 2013), 188 pages.
Although Do Babies Matter?, a recent publication on the success of women academics, focuses on the last several decades, it is worth considering how extensively higher education has opened itself to women since 1871. This was the year when Harriet Cooke became the first American woman to work as a full-time professor with a salary comparable to her male peers. A century later, women held one-fifth of the country's doctoral degrees, and by the mid-2000s, that figure had risen to just over half. Upward trends have been observed not only in fields traditionally considered feminine, but also in engineering, the life and physical sciences, and mathematics.
Even as barriers are falling for women on a PhD track, Do Babies Matter? documents the impact of children on the careers of men and women in higher education, Citing extensive data provided by the National Science Foundation's Survey of Doctorate Recipients, the authors convincingly demonstrate that although childless men and women in the sciences earn tenure at relatively similar rates, the probability of a woman with a young child earning tenure is dramatically lower. The survey also reveals that whereas 70 percent of tenured male professors have families, the same is true for only 44 percent of tenured female professors. The authors posit that with tenure track positions becoming less common, female doctoral graduates interested in having children face an even greater disadvantage in this increasingly competitive environment.
The authors' research covers several decades, and the book offers a wealth of data about contemporary academia. To address the obstacles that women with families face in academia, they propose entitlement policies mandating flexibility and childcare, as well as ongoing support from university administrations. These solutions are cost effective and largely uncontroversial, adding weight to the book's recommendations. On a practical level, the authors provide advice for mothers at each stage of their academic careers. Although the narrow focus of this book may not appeal to readers outside of this niche, the strength of its arguments and the authors' extensive research should make it required reading for scholars and university department heads.
Burns, Andrew
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burns, Andrew. "Do Babies Matter?: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower." Journal of International Affairs, vol. 67, no. 1, 2013, p. 289+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA353517767&it=r&asid=10faa92ebe5200c8827eb142050be6a4. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A353517767
Soul Mates
Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos
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W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger
New York, NY:
Oxford University Press
, February
2016.
248 pages.
$27.95.
Hardcover.
ISBN 9780195394221.
For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
Review
Religion is, arguably, second only to family as the most influential institution shaping American life, providing practices, values, and social spaces that connect groups of people with one another. The shifting landscape of American family life during the last couple of decades, then, evokes questions about the relationship between family and religion. In Soul Mates, W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger take up the question of religion’s impact on the family, and investigate the possibility that religion creates conditions for successful relationships in both African American and Latino communities. The authors conclude that religion “is linked to higher marriage rates and happier relationships in large part because churches foster an ethic of care and enforce a code of decency among their members” (24).
According to Wilcox and Wolfinger’s research, consistent church attendance breeds a set of orientations and behaviors that support stability and happiness within marriages, families, and relationships. They use this information in chapter 3 to claim that faith makes a difference in how African Americans and Latinos relate to sexual activity and childbearing. Wilcox and Wolfinger find, though this is not as significant as with whites, religious influence on sexual and childbearing behavior is notable for African Americans and Latinos. Even more, they argue that these groups generally maintain traditional views about sex and child bearing and have a low likelihood of both pre-marital and extra-marital sex, and bearing children outside of marriage.
The authors also examine pro-marriage attitudes in African American and Latino communities. They suggest that religion does indeed promote marriage as an ideal relational goal and leads to measurably higher marriage rates among these groups. According to Wilcox and Wolfinger in chapter 4, these higher rates are a consequence of the significant and positive emphasis churches place on family life. Connected with the code of decency, such an emphasis results in collective appreciation for stable, long-standing relationships. They also claim—in chapter 5 and in the conclusion—that religion influences the quality of relationships within these groups. Beyond stability, Wilcox and Wolfinger assert that both married and unmarried couples who engage in religious faith practices enjoy happy, high-quality relationships.
Soul Mates is an interesting exposition of the valuable role religion plays in the lives and relationships of African Americans and Latinos. Wilcox and Wolfinger aptly use survey data and interviews to explore the dearth of information about these communities since much of the information circulating about the social, cultural, and economic realities among African Americans and Latinos excludes religion as an influential vector. Yet their examination of religion in these communities derives mainly from Christian perspectives, and “church” becomes synonymous with “religious institution” in a way that obfuscates other religious practices and beliefs within these communities. Given their attention to the practical and moral value of affinity groups, they would have done well to attend to the diverse ways in which these groups form, and learn from a variety of religiously oriented gatherings and spaces. Even more, their discussion of religion’s impact builds on a notion of decency, yet Wilcox and Wolfinger never explain what such decency entails.
Another concern is Wilcox and Wolfinger’s slippery usage of language related to race and ethnicity. Throughout the book, “black” becomes synonymous with “African American.” For example, they write, “Nevertheless, judging by the preaching, teaching, and pastoral programming of black and Latino churches, we expect religion to foster adherence to the code of decency among African Americans and Latinos in the United States” (55). Such slippage erases the conceptual and concrete complexity of race and ethnicity in a text focused on the experience of racially minoritized groups, designating African American-ness as the lens through which readers ought to understand blackness. What do the authors make, for example, of Afro-Latinos? Intersectional analysis would have been a helpful tool for Wilcox and Wolfinger to apply to the social identity categories investigated in this book.
Ultimately, I find Wilcox and Wolfinger’s exploration in Soul Mates an intriguing—albeit heterosexually focused—contribution to discourse on American families. Smartly researched and coherently written, their text offers insight into the shifting landscape of relationships within communities that experience significant external pressures and face systematic oppression. This concentrated study on minoritized relational practices results in an informed description of the religious resources positively impacting African American and Latino communities.
About the Reviewer(s):
Nikki (Thelathia) Young is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Bucknell University.
Date of Review:
August 30, 2016
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
W. Bradford Wilcox is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He also serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah.