As authors Sally Quinn and Ellen McCarthy note:
The holidays can be a minefield for interfaith couples, unearthing disparities that lay mercifully buried throughout the rest of the year. Because the tree isn’t just about the tree, of course. Like the menorah, or Iftar feasts at sundown during Ramadan, it’s about family and ritual, identity and culture.All of which can be called into question when life is shared with someone who grew up doing it all differently.
More than a quarter of married Americans have a spouse of a different faith, according to a 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. That statistic climbs to 37 percent when Protestants from different denominations are included.
The pervasiveness of this dynamic was the inspiration behind On Faith and Love, a new Washington Post project exploring the experiences of interfaith couples. Few things are more meaningful than our intimate relationships and spiritual beliefs. And few things can be more fraught and precarious — especially when they seem at odds with each other.
As part of the series, they’ve posted a compelling video interview with journalists Steve and Cokie Roberts, who talk about their interfaith marriage as a Jewish man and a Catholic woman.
posted November 16, 2009 at 7:54 am
Sounds like Cokie ought to have Campbell Brown over for tea.
posted November 16, 2009 at 1:12 pm
When does life begin? Beginning implies a previous state of existence,
the movie begins when it is taken out of the can and inserted in the projector. Human beings, however, cannot be alive before they are alive.
There is therefore, no previous state of existence before human life begins and life, therefore, does not begin. It is wholly and completely present.