Mary Anne Oliver develops an alternate to 'celibate' religious practices, drawing from the experience of couples and diverse sources in the Christian tradition. This work explores the dynamics of conjugal love.

Addresses the long-standing estrangement between spirituality and sexuality and integrates them in a manner that is both practical and hopeful.

Most Christians hold marriage to be a sacrament, created and uniquely blessed by God. Yet, the theology of marriage rarely matches its actual experience. Marriage is too often discovered to be a violent, loveless institution, and increasingly it is delayed, avoided, and terminated.

This textbook is a systematic guide to the extensive field of spirituality. Kees Waaijman charts the multiform phenomenon of spirituality: the spirituality of ordinary people, the great spiritual traditions and the force of counter-movements. From the foundation of this survey he answers questions like: What exactly is spirituality? What forms can a scholarly approach take? Finally, the book provides methodic access to the study of spirituality, focusing on the following questions: Which are the different forms of spirituality and how can we describe them? How can spiritual texts be given a reliable reading? Which themes can be distinguished in the field of spirituality and what would be a meaningful way to address them? What do we mean by spiritual guidance and what can we learn from it? This textbook has no equal. It is indispensable to scholars wishing to study the subject, but also to others who want to learn about spirituality.

You attend church on Sunday while your husband golfs. You want to join a weekly small faith-sharing group, but your wife wants you to spend time with her. You want to talk about a great spiritual book youve read, but you cannot engage your spouse in discussion. During a family crisis, you want to pray with your spouse, but your spouse doesnt know how to pray. Whats a spouse to do?

The early Christian and medieval practice of spiritual marriage, in which husband and wife mutually and voluntarily relinquish sexual activity for reasons of piety, plays an important role in the development of the institution of marriage and in the understanding of female religiosity. Drawing on hagiography, chronicles, theology, canon law, and pastoral sources, Dyan Elliott traces the history of spiritual marriage in the West from apostolic times to the beginning of the sixteenth century.

This book seeks to open the possibility of a unique spirituality for any couple seeking to respond to God's presence in their lives.

The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love is a book by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologist, scientist, thinker and mystic, here providing a thorough spiritual understanding of marriage love and sex. Excerpt: "Spiritual cold in marriages is a disunion of souls and a disjunction of minds, whence come indifference, discord, contempt, disdain, and aversion; from which, in several cases, at length comes separation as to bed, chamber, and house. That these effects take place with married partners, while their primitive love is on the decline, and becomes cold, is too well known to need any comment. The reason is, because conjugial cold above all others resides in human minds; for the essential conjugial principle is inscribed on the soul, to the end that a soul may be propagated from a soul, and the soul of the father into the offspring. Hence it is that this cold originates there, and successively goes downward into the principles thence derived, and infects them; and thus changes the joys and delights of the primitive love into what is sad and undelightful."

Does the New Testament teach that a wife must submit to her husband as head? If so, does it have a lasting value beyond the cultural milieu in which it was first articulated? The Politics of Conjugal Love takes a fresh approach to this classic issue in theological anthropology, paying specific attention to the role of theological hermeneutics in its interpretation. Conor Sweeney and Brian T. Trainor contend that both “subordinationist” and “anti-subordinationist” readings of headship and submission miss the mark. Their alternative is a baptismally specified trinitarian reading in which headship and submission appear as modes intrinsic to both life in Christ and the love proper to the highest mode of trinitarian love.

In Africa, the emphasis on family, marriage, and offspring suggest that there is a kind of an unwritten ancestral law that imposes on every male the duty of begetting a son. The reason is because the core of African soteriology is centered on offspring. The predicament of the childless couples, therefore, stems from the desire for immortality and salvation that culminates in the admission of the dead into the ancestral world. This quest for salvation and immortality constitute social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual problems for Christian as well as non-Christian childless couples.