Jack and Judy Balswick offer a vision of marriage that is both profoundly spiritual and thoroughly practical for the twenty-first century.

This proven, comprehensive resource covers every issue that affects Christian family life. It has been in print for over thirty years and has sold nearly 100,000 copies. This new edition is updated throughout with discussions of recent family-related issues. It includes a new chapter on work and family balance and a new section on the increasing role grandparents take in parental responsibilities.

Two respected senior professors in the marriage and family field cover every issue that affects family life, including marriage, parenting, sexuality, communication, social dynamics, and family life in modern society. This proven resource for studying the most established of human institutions has been in print for over twenty years, with over 80,000 copies sold. The fourth edition has been updated to address current family-related issues and refined to reflect teaching practices for the contemporary classroom, including updated references to online resources.
Praise for a Previous Edition
"An excellent resource for preachers and teachers and an obvious choice for a text in family studies in a Christian college."--"Calvin Theological Journal"

On the basis of a theologically grounded understanding of the nature of persons and the self, Jack O. Balswick, Pamela Ebstyne King and Kevin S. Reimer present a model of human development that ranges across all of life's stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and elder adulthood. They do this by drawing on a biblical model of relationality, where the created goal or purpose of human development is to become a reciprocating self-fully and securely related to others and to God. Along the way, they provide a context for understanding individual development issues-concerns, tensions, worries or crises encountered by the self in the context of change. Awareness of these issues is most pronounced at developmental transitional points: learning to talk and walk, beginning to eat unassisted, going to school, developing secondary sexual physical features, leaving home, obtaining full-time employment, becoming engaged and then married, having a child for the first time, parenting an adolescent, watching children move away from home, retiring, experiencing decline in physical and mental health, and, finally, facing imminent death. The authors contend throughout that, since God has created human beings for relationship, to be a self in reciprocating relationships is of major importance in negotiating these developmental issues. Critically engaging social science research and theory, The Reciprocating Self offers an integrated approach that provides insight helpful to college and seminary students as well as those serving in the helping professions. Those in Christian ministry will be especially rewarded by the in-depth discussion of the implications for moral and faith development nurtured in the context of the life of the church. In this revised and expanded second edition, Balswick, King and Reimer have added research from developmental neuroscience and neuropsychology, which connects transitional behavior to a changing brain. They have also included a wealth of research on the moral, spiritual and religious dimensions of human development, in which they introduce the notion of reciprocating spirituality. In addition the authors engage with the burgeoning fields of positive and evolutionary psychology. Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

Sex pervades our culture, going far beyond the confines of the bedroom into the workplace, the church, and the media. Yet despite all the attention and even obsession devoted to sex, human sexuality remains confusing and even foreboding. What, after all, is authentic human sexuality? That is the question Judith and Jack Balswick set out to answer in this wide-ranging and probing book. Informed by sociology, psychology, and theology, the Balswicks investigate how human sexuality originates both biologically and socially. They lay groundwork for a normative Christian interpretation of sexuality, show how authentic sexuality is necessarily grounded in relationships, and explore such forms of "inauthentic sexuality" as sexual harassment, pornography, and rape. Since its first publication, Authentic Human Sexuality has established itself as a standard text at numerous colleges and seminaries. Now this third edition features updated theological and social science research, insights from current neuropsychological evidence, and an expanded biblical model of authentic sexual relationships, along with updated discussion of sexual minorities, same-sex attraction, and LGBTQ issues. A new generation of students, pastors, psychologists, and sociologists engaged in counseling will be indebted to the Balswicks for this study of an endlessly fascinating and perplexing facet of human identity.