Dear Reader,

One summer in late elementary school, I was rummaging through boxes in our family garage (Lord only knows why) when I came across a most unusual depiction of our family tree. Sure, it had all the obligatory lines connecting parents to children, spouse to spouse, throughout the generations. But it also had all these extra lines—colored, dotted, dashed, tripled and quadrupled, criss-crossing over the tree irrespective of biological lineage. Any whitespace was crammed with nearly unreadable bullet-pointed notes. And it stretched across our whole living room floor.

This family (apparently, my family) was a tangled ball of yarn that I couldn’t begin to make heads or tails of.

I later learned that this was a genogram my dad made during his graduate work in marriage and family therapy. Genograms don’t just trace the basic, readily apparent architecture of a family. They trace all dimensions of a family’s emotional and relational geography. Who was close? Who was distant, or estranged, and why? Who supported who? How did some patterns carry through generations, and how were others disrupted? As the years went on, I occasionally returned to study this genogram, grappling with the deep power of familial bonds.

In this issue, we similarly grapple with the beauty and challenge of family ties—defined and experienced in several ways. Our interview with sociologist Dr. Amy Adamczyk provides a glimpse into how American parents of many religious traditions approach the task of passing belief on to their children. Learning from her team’s conversations with over 200 parents, we uncover how the goals of modern parenting shape the contours of religious life within families today.

We also consider how family constrains, or unlocks, the capacity for a deeper experience of the divine. Karis Ryu reflects on how a family’s continual choice to move toward one another, even in difficulty and pain, reflects the movement of God toward us, while Sarah Clark explores how belief evolves in the wake of tragedy close to home. While the relationship between family influence and spiritual imagination cannot always be linearly traced, the burgeoning of selfhood is a central player in the drama, as Vienna Scott captures in her meditation on twinhood.

Indeed, few people experience family as a static entity; it is reformulated with the passage of time and shifts in circumstance. In some cases, this leads to unexpected expansions in our definition of family, as Ali Moore suggests while recounting her work in long-term care facilities. In others, it reveals the spiritual poverty we can bring to the most intimate of relationships, as Kelsey Waddill draws out in her analysis of Oscar-nominated film The Power of the Dog. No matter which pole we are gravitating toward, close connections have an uncanny knack for revealing what is most true about ourselves.

Whatever vantage point you bring to this tender and complex topic, reader, we hope the words in this issue broaden your own contemplation of the significant ties in your life, and how your becoming is bound up with that of others.

Fare Forward,

Jake Casale

Editor