Michael G. Lawler

Problematic Issues in the Early Years of Marriage: Content for Premarital Education

This article presents findings about problematic issues from a national study of couples married five years or less. It argues that the top 10 issues identified as problematic suggest key content areas for premarital education and makes suggestions for both program development and existing program evaluation. The top three issues reported by this sample are balancing job and family, frequency of sexual relations, and financial issues. For each of the 10 issues, comparisons by gender, parental status, cohabitation status, and age are also reported.

Religious heterogamy and religiosity: A comparison of interchurch and same-church individuals

Based on a national sample of Christian couples, interchurch respondents reported lower levels of religiosity than same-church respondents on a number of religious variables. Respondents in same-church marriages were similar in religiosity regardless of whether the relationship was initially interchurch or same-church. The study did not find evidence that interchurch respondents were more likely than same-church individuals to drift away from church practice. Strength of denominational identity at engagement was the strongest predictor of religious behavior among interchurch respondents, while church attendance at engagement was the strongest predictor among same-church respondents. Interchurch respondents and their spouses were less likely to emphasize religion in raising children than same-church respondents, and were more likely to differ as a couple on their emphasis on religion in raising children. Interchurch parents predominantly raise their children exclusively in one parents church, although 12 percent reported raising their children in both churches.

Marital Satisfaction and Religious Heterogamy A Comparison of Interchurch and Same-Church Individuals

Using a national sample of Christians, this study compared interchurch and same-church respondents on several relationship variables and explored possible predictors of marital satisfaction. Interchurch and same-church respondents were not different on marital satisfaction or other nonreligious relationship variables but were different on several religious relationship variables. The relationship between marital satisfaction and religious heterogamy was dependent on how religious heterogamy was operationalized. Communication was the most important predictor of marital satisfaction for both interchurch and same-church respondents. Parenting variables were also predictive of marital satisfaction for both interchurch and same-church respondents.

Quaestio Disputata Catholic Sexual Ethics: Complementarity and the Truly Human

This disputatio is an inquiry into the nature of the truly human sexual act. The authors first present and critique the types of complementarity—heterogenital, reproductive, communion, affective, and parental—that the magisterium finds in a truly human sexual act. They then suggest that heterosexual or homosexual orientation as part of a persons sexual constitution requires adding orientation complementarity to the equation. This addition yields the conclusion that holistic complementarity—an integration of orientation, personal, and biological complementarities—is a more adequate sine qua non of truly human sexual acts.

Interchurch Couples: The Issue of Acceptance

Although the literature suggests that couples who belong to two different churches or denominations (interchurch marriages) may face lack of acceptance, there is practically no research on this issue. Based on a recent qualitative study, this article explores the ways in which interchurch couples struggle to gain acceptance. Also discussed are the attitudes or factors that relate to level of acceptance, as well as the strategies that interchurch couples utilize to deal with lack of acceptance.

Virtue Ethics: Natural and Christian

The article seeks to give an account of Christian virtue ethics. To this end, it first examines virtue and natural virtue ethics deriving from the Aristotelian tradition and its contemporary incarnation. It then considers Christian virtue ethics deriving from the following of Jesus the Christ, and compares and contrasts this virtue ethics with natural virtue ethics. It concludes by offering an account of virtues necessary to human flourishing in the contemporary world.

Method and Catholic Theological Ethics in the Twenty-First Century

The article proposes a Catholic ethical method for the 21st century. To that end, the authors first address the magisteriums concerns with relativism and distinguish relativism from Bernard Lonergans perspectivism. After proposing perspectivism as an epistemological tool that accounts for a plurality of Catholic ethical methods, the authors explore virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and a Christian stance that contribute to a reconstructed Catholic ethical method. The article concludes with a definition of chastity from two methodological perspectives that have different anthropological and normative implications.

Conscience and Experience: Choosing the True and the Good:

This essay examines the practical judgment called conscience that binds a person to do or not to do a particular action. Drawing from the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, scripture, tradition, reason/science, and human experience, it focuses on the connection between communal human experience and conscience. It concludes that the teaching that no one is to be forced to act contrary to her or his conscience and that no one is to be restrained from acting according to her or his conscience is a long-standing Catholic moral tradition.

The Mystery of Sexuality

Abstract Mystery is a term that permeates and energizes the Catholic tradition. In its strictest terms, it refers to the infinite incomprehensibility of God, but the USCCB speaks also of “the great mystery” of human sexuality. In this essay, only to establish the meanings of mystery as we use the word, we consider, first and briefly, the mystery of God and the oikonomia established by God and, then and more extendedly, the mystery of human sexuality. We offer a meditation on this mystery, leading to a theological understanding of it as a lower-case sacrament of the presence of the incomprehensible God in human history. This analysis leads us to conclude that human sexuality demands ongoing analysis to be better understood physically, psychologically and spiritually in order to be better understood theologically as a lower-case sacrament revelatory of the presence of God.

Human experience and Catholic moral theology

Catholic moral theology is based on a quadrilateral of sources: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This article focuses specifically on the correlations between moral theology and experience. It examines the ecclesial experience embedded in the concepts of sensus fidei, reception, and non-reception; the experience analyzed by liberationist and feminist theologians; and the experimental experience of the sciences. Since all believers, laity, theologians, and bishops alike, and their theologies are inevitably influenced by the societies in which they live, the article also inquires into the science of sociology and the light it can shine on the actual experience and, therefore, the actual theologies of all those believers. It concludes, with the Second Vatican Council, that by making use of the sciences, and experience in general, all the faithful ‘will be brought to a purer and more mature living of the faith.’