Five Rings & a Wedding
Marriage & the Concentric Communities That Surround It
by Allan Carlson
As one Massachusetts advocate of a pluralistic bent has phrased it, “The right to love and to celebrate our relationships, in whatever form they take, is a fundamental human right that should be protected.” As a Coloradoan of a more libertarian persuasion puts it, “To be licensed by a bunch of bureaucrats for the most private and sacred act of marriage—that’s demeaning. It’s simply none of the government’s business whom I marry.”
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Allan C. Carlson is the John Howard Distinguished Senior Fellow at the International Organization for the Family. His most recent book is Family Cycles: Strength, Decline & Renewal in American Domestic Life, 1630-2000 (Transaction, 2016). He and his wife have four grown children and nine grandchildren. A "cradle Lutheran," he worships in a congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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more on marriage from the online archives
29.1—Jan/Feb 2016
on Marriage, Moral Corruption & the Christian Duty of Witness by Regis Nicoll
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
21.1—January/February 2008
John Chrysostom’s Discovery of the Blessings & Mysteries of Marriage by Mike Aquilina
more from the online archives
32.3—May/June 2019
on the Implications of Changing the Pater Noster by John M. McCarthy
31.1—January/February 2018
on Taking the Measure of the Deserving & the Undeserving Poor by Martin Bordelon
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
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