Customer Reviews

Marriage Is for Keeps: Foundations for Christian Marriage

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are getting married, Catholic or not, you need to read Marriage is For Keeps. Each chapter lays out a different topic about how to focus your marriage on the THREE of you - husband, wife and GOD in the center. Each section contains thought provoking questions for you and your mate and lets you ponder how you are going to grow as a person in your marriage. There are tough spots in this book! But marriage is tough too and that's what you are really planning for - a marriage, not a wedding. A must read, whether you are about to be married or already married and wanting to find that something missing. Especially interesting and tough is the chapter on the roles in the marriage. Kippley presents the notion of wives deferring to their husbands very thoughtfully, but also notes that it is counter cultural in the US of A. He remarks that men need to be worthy of the spiritual leadership of their family if they are truly going to lead. Hmm... lots of good stuff to ponder. Enjoy! It put my 10 year old marriage back on His track.

I bought this book when preparing for my wedding sometime in July 2006. It does not tell you what most modern couples would like to hear, but the truth, and nothing but the truth. It takes a great courage to write this kind of book. John Kippley did a wonderful job of reminding us of what Jesus, and subsequently the Roman catholic church teaches about marriage. It does not matter if you agree with him or not, the truth must be told.

In addition to the moral guidance on what to do to keep your marriage away from divorce - the most hideous nightmare of today's marriages, you also have the rite of marriage and readings included in the book.

John Kippley and his wife Sheila performed a remarkable service for the Church in the founding of the Couple to Couple League (ccli.org) in Cincinnati, OH back in 1971. They spent the next 33 years helping hundreds of thousands of people across the world live their faith and deepen their marital relationships. Such was their teaching that, in time, incorporated Pope John Paul II's new theological perspective, called the Theology of the Body, which provides a distinctive unsullied approach to understanding our human bodies as a reflection of our dignity as persons made in the image and likeness of God. It also furnishes a structure for assessing why certain conduct violates that dignity, while others are indisputable gifts of self and love.

With faith and family as the focus of their lives, they "went out into the deep" navigating many unchartered waters that were intersecting with Christian Marriage, Christian Discipleship, the Nature of Christian Marriage, the Essence of Marital Love, Human Sexuality, Communication, Catholic teaching, morality, artificial birth control, and much more. One of the resultant legacies that must be credited to them was the dawn and developmental work in the Natural Family Planning movement and in Ecological Breastfeeding. It's here in a nutshell!

This book represents a small summary of their work, spanning across the many years and these many topics, making this an excellent resource for couples preparing for marriage. It can and many should supplement any Marriage Preparation Program or can act as the bare minimum acceptable for such preparation. Without undue burdening, the first nine chapters can be read and studied privately by couples, three chapters at a time, and later discussed with a local parish priest or preparation team. In doing so, it definitely provides a Catholic understanding of Christian Marriage and what couples are asking of the Church in approaching it to be married.

The book also contains appendices that contain the Rite or Marriage in such a way that the Readings, Prayers, and other options pertaining to marriage can be reviewed and chosen appropriately for Marriage within Mass (Nuptial), outside of Mass (Ceremony), and of differing faiths. Forms are supplied for these selections, which once filled, can be submitted to the celebrant as a final part of the preparation.

A small investment with possibilities of big payoffs!

This is a good book about Catholic marriage, especially the NFP section. Read it! Give it to your friends.

I intially wrote this as a response to another review (the 3 star review), but I thought I'd add it:

Thank you SO much for this review! I am also Catholic and fully agree and am in awe of the beauty of the Church's teachings on contraception, but both my fiance and I were appalled at the way it was presented here. I was also disgusted at the way 'headmanship' was explained - again, the Church (and especially John Paul II) has BEAUTIFUL things to say about the controversial passage, but he has the gall to say that in 30 years most men will want to have an affair, but they won't because the woman has been properly submissive to them and thus entrusted them with the responsibilty of the marriage - no matter how heinous doing the job may be! Not to mention all the crap about a woman having a deep need to be submissive and making her husband feel like a 'real man' after the crap he takes at work, and that her true joy is found in helping him find his self respect. All well and good, but what about MY self respect, and my identity? My fiance - who definitely knows what it means to be a man - was also really put off by this book.

Ultimately I found the book very simplistic and does not do the Church's views on marriage justice. I did like the finances section though - it had some good, practical advice. The template for planning the ceremony is useful too, but I can get that elsewhere.

If you want a better book about this type of stuff, get the Good News about Sex and Marriage by Christopher West, or any of the other Theology of the Body writings, either as summarized by C. West or by John Paul II himself!

This book has some use for Roman Catholic engaged couples. There is a section in the back based on the approved marriage rites that gives you ideas what readings to have, and what prayers should be said at your wedding.
The main text is only mediocre. Kippley confuses in his own mind the distinctions between his ideas, and what the Catholic church teaches, and so the book fails to make this clear. For example, the Catholic church does teach that contraception is always wrong. (Her reasons for teaching that are both more beautiful and more subtle than Kippley discusses.) It's quite unfair to the church for Kippley to summarize her teaching on openness to children by indicating that a couple is likely to get bored with each other if they don't have children. And certainly the Catholic Church does not teach that women should never wear denim jeans.
If a Catholic couple reads this book, I hope they discuss what it says with their priest. I certainly hope that no non-catholics read this book, since they will get a pretty odd view of what the Catholic church teaches.