Book Review Preview: The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller (with Kathy Keller)

See also the review of this book.

I have had a copy of The Meaning of Marriage (by Tim Keller and his wife Kathy Keller) for a while, and I even got a good way through it a few years ago, but I don't remember too much of what it says now, as far as I can recall. Since it's related to families, and that is a theme of this blog recently, it seems like now is a good time to read the book and review it.

For some reason, I feel like not setting strong expectations, or trying to set out to get anything out of this reading.

I will point out that there are some parallels between marriage and international relations. Each spouse is a foreign nation to the other, with their own native culture and customs, based in their own history. Interspousal relations can involve diplomacy, game theory, assessments of one's own vulnerabilities, putting up walls and enforcing boundaries, the fear of exploitation, hopes for mutual benefit, and so on, just like in international relations. One theory of reality is that wholes emerge from their parts, and so then a nation's pattern of trusting and of going about relating to "the other" would emerge from millions of marriages. Millions of Russian marriages have something to do with Putin, millions of American marriages have something to do with Trump and Biden. Perhaps even the marriages (and past marriages and quasi-marriages) of Trump, Biden, and Putin have, or have had, a further effect on their own on American and Russian foreign policy, through those heads of government. Anything one could point out about national issues might be applicable to individual spouses and marriages, so for instance, the idea of "having nothing left to lose and speaking the truth" or of "remembering yourself from a position someone who can no longer win" (as discussed in my review of Holy Resilience, in the context of Jewish cultural memory) could be applied to individuals in a marriage, or at least it might be worth seeing how applicable it could be.

But as interesting and potentially valuable as those topics are, I feel like I should not invest too heavily in them in this reading.

I am interested in applying the ideas of the New Wine System and ethical theism to this reading, in other words, to see what dangers there are that come from marriage and what Keller says about marriage, from those perspectives.

Otherwise, I plan to simply react to the book as it comes to me.