Youth Ministry Initiative

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Year of Publication

1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at page 170:

The most daring of these proposals can be found in Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue.42Friedman’s book primarily addresses the minister or rabbi as leader. The uniqueness of the book is his point that the minister is a leader and potential change agent in three overlapping families – the families that make up the congregation, the congregation as family, and the minister’s own family. Friedman argues that the minister should go beyond pastoral counseling, with its emphasis on techniques and psychological knowledge. What is important, he says: to change any kind of “family” is not knowledge of technique or even pathology but, rather, the capacity of the family leader to define his or her own goals and values while trying to maintain a nonanxious presence within the system.43

Friedman’s emphasis is clearly on the minister as leader of these three family systems. The power to change a family system rests in the leader’s firm self-definition.

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1995

From Don S. Browning, Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church (1995) at page 169:

This is the meaning of Erik Erikson’s close juxtaposition of generativity and mutuality as the normative value of the human life cycle. The generative person works to maintain the life cycle, but does so with shifting articulations of mutuality with the young and the old as he or she moves to various age positions in that cycle.36

Notes:
  1. 36 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), pp 266-268. See also my Generative Man (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1975), pp. 197-217, my Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 204-237; and my Pluralism and Personality (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), pp. 149-151.
Author 
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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at pages 165, 166:

General principles, such as the ethic of neighbor-love, are always surrounded by metaphors and narratives (what I sometimes call the visional level of ethical thinking) which project an image of the origins, purposes, and general trustworthiness of life. For instance, in Christianity the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us a model of sacrifice that empowers our need to work hard – indeed to go the second mile – to restore our relationships to mutuality. The theological concepts of grace and forgiveness help us overcome our inordinate self-concern by releasing us from the guilt of past failures and empowering us for renewed efforts of mutuality and equal-regard, even at some sacrifice to ourselves.

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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at page 164:

Janssens believes that the heart of a Christian ethic of love can be found in the formal structure of the love commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” which is repeated no less than eight times in the New Testament (Matthew: 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31,33; Luke 10:27; Romans 13:2; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8). Janssens believes that the fundamental meaning of the principle of neighbor-love is that: “Love of neighbor is impartial. It is fundamentally an equal-regard for every person, because it applies to each neighbor qua human existent.”26But by “impartial” Janssens does not mean indifferent, nonaffective, or uninterested. In fact, it is just the reverse. Janssens’s ethic of love as equal-regard means that we are to take the neighbor’s needs and interests with equal seriousness as we take our own. But the reverse is also the case. The principle of neighbor-love tells us to take our own needs and interests as seriously, but no more seriously, as those of the neighbor. Quoting the work of the American theological ethicist, Gene Outka, who has influenced Janssens profoundly, he writes that: “Valuing the self as well as others remains a manifest obligation.”27 For the same reasons one is obligated to value the other constitute the reasons one is to value oneself.

Author 
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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at page 158:

The response of some religious commentators to the emerging ethic of autonomy and self-actualization is to reassert an ethic of duty and self-sacrifice. This is their understanding of both the commands of the Christian faith and the requirements of modern life. This is close to what Robert Bellah and his associated appear to do in their chapter on “Love and Marriage” in Habits of the Heart.

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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at page 162:

Both D’Antonio and Hargrove, in their concepts of love, are struggling to take account of the contemporary drive toward autonomy; both are envisioning a religious image of love that includes, rather than overrides, this contemporary thrust toward autonomy, individuation, and self-actualization. Yet they are attempting to balance this with an equally strong emphasis on a love that is concerned with the autonomy, individuation, and self-actualization of the other. Hence, in a rather unclear and inarticulate way, both are attempting to formulate an understanding of love that includes both autonomy or individuation and relatedness.

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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at pages 160-161:

D’Antonio agrees with recent critiques by Bellah and others that the value of individual autonomy has become significantly disconnected from the restraints that, as Tocqueville noticed so astutely, the Protestant ethic provided during an earlier era. Barbara Hargove, in her essay, “The Church, the Family and the Modernization Process,” extends this analysis, and shows how both Western religion, of which liberal Protestantism may be the prototypical illustration, and the family have undergone this persistent drift toward the values of autonomy, individualism, and privatism.

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1995

From Don S. Browning, Work, Family, and Religion in Contemporary Society, ch. 7 Religion and Family Ethics, A New Strategy for the Church" (1995) at page 158:

I am further convinced, however, that, for the mainline churches to do this, they must devise a commanding new family ethic. This new ethic must be flexible enough to relate to a variety of family forms that exist today, but firm enough to both guide and protect the family from the acids of modernization, rapid social change, and the associated drift toward anomic individualism typical of much of contemporary life. On the other hand, it should be an ethic that not only can relate to the families of the congregation and the families of the wider society, it also should apply to the minister’s own family, as well as to the way the church itself constitutes a kind of family to its members.

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1996

From Mary Pipher, Ph.D., The Shelter of Each Other - Rebuilding Our Families (1996) at page 21:

In our era families have the worst of all worlds. In the wilderness a family is a self-contained unit that can protect itself from external forces by building a cabin with strong walls. In a caring community, a family can survive without walls. Family members live among friends who share their values and will help them out. Today families are neither self-contained nor embedded in caring communities. They do not have walls, and yet in many places the wolf is at the door.

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From Joshua Meyrowitz:

We are becoming a nation of neither children nor adults. Rather we all exist in some age zone between childhood and adulthood. We’re a nation of adolescents – preoccupied with ourselves, sexualized, moody and implusive, seeking freedom without responsibility.

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