He writes perceptively about the state of the home, marriage, and the local church, when it comes to families. He diagnoses where sub-Christian thinking is likely to be lurking, and gets under the skin of reality of bringing up children, showing how they remain strangers. I'd recommend it for all Christians finding themselves single through design or choice, as well as all Christian parents.

The only down side is that some of the examples are now dated (eg, suggesting it's rare for people to be using pornography), and the discussion of the home now sounds sexist. ( )

"Scant decades ago most Westerners agreed that . . . Lifelong monogamy was ideal . . . Mothers should stay home with children . . . premarital sex was to be discouraged . . . Heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm . . . popular culture should not corrupt children. Today not a single one of these expectations is uncontroversial." So writes Rodney Clapp in assessing the status of the family in postmodern Western society.In response many evangelicals have been quick to defend the so-called traditional family, assuming that it exemplifies the biblical model. Clapp challenges that assumption, arguing that the "traditional" family is a reflection more of the nineteenth-century middle-class family than of any family one can find in Scripture. At the same time, he recognizes that many modern and postmodern options are not acceptable to Christians. Returning to the biblical story afresh to see what it might say to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Clapp articulates a challenge to both sides of a critical debate.A book to help us rethink the significance of the family for the next century.