What Christians Talk About When They Talk About Marriage: A Roundtable on Courtney Ann Irby’s Guiding God’s Marriage

How do Christians understand the question, “What makes a good marriage?” How do evangelicals and Catholics alike frame this question and how do they answer it in our contemporary moment, when Christians are concerned that the institution of marriage is on life support? And, what does studying these questions reveal about how Christians navigate gender, sexuality, and intimacy as they practice their lived religion? Courtney Ann Irby’s insightful new book Guiding God’s Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling (New York University Press, May 2024) answers these questions and more through rich qualitative analysis. This roundtable panel gathers sociologists of religion and historians of religion, gender, and sexuality to amplify its important contributions to the sociology of religion specifically and the study of religion more broadly.