What is the status of the American family? How is it changing? Are these changes making anything better? What is the future of the family? Does religion offer a positive answer? Not since "Habits of the Heart" has one book confronted these important issues with such personal and societal impact. This groundbreaking study argues for the creation of a new family ethic that must be central to the agendas of both contemporary society and the church.

The Family, Culture, and Religion series offers informed and responsible analyses of the state of the American family from a religious perspective and provides practical assistance for the family's revitalization.

Franklin's book urges direct engagement by African American and other churches with America's mounting social problems and details programs for children, elders, and economic action.

The four men spotlighted in this book, together with other black religious and political leaders and communities, have developed distinctive and significant traditions of moral thinking and social criticism. . Although the principal concern of these thinkers was social justice entailing significant institutional transformations in American society, they were also attentive to the substantive content and formal character of the authentically free life and moral person. Indeed, most of them realized that authentic liberation required personal as well as social transformation. . Despite the significance and diversity of perspective in black theology, however, much of it does not adequately attend to the host of issues related to personal identity, wholeness, and fulfillment. ... This general inattention to the personal dimension of the liberation enterprise has important consequences. Failure to understand the person-centered dimension of a broader, inclusive societal transformation can lead to a disturbing paradox: an optimism concerning the future of society existing alongside personal and familial disintegration, despair and frustration. . Our method for. correcting the perspectival imbalance in black theology is to identify the finest and most-trusted resources and reflections on personal wholeness in the modern black community and to present them for revision, reconsideration, and possible reappropriation. . In this book, I examine visions of human fulfillment and of the just society as presented by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Malcolm X (1925-1965), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). . As I examined the ranks of post-Reconstruction African American leaders, I did so with an eye for those whose intellectual and political influence upon past and present Americans could be characterized as monumental.