Family-making in America is in a state of flux—the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties. Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoption—once wholly stigmatized—is now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family.

Stories provided by women explore the loyalty and acceptance in their relationships with girlfriends, best friends, soulmates, and confidants

THE 128 POEMS IN "Enduring Ties" celebrate family life, collecting in a single anthology the human story through poetic glimpses of our most intimate and committed relationships. Organized in sections that track the course of a single life -- growing up, marrying, childbearing, parenting, growing older, parting, and inheriting -- these short and accessible poems are drawn from twenty-five-hundred years of world literature: from Sappho to Nikki Giovanni and Elizabeth Bishop, from John Donne to Yehuda Amichai and James Merrill. The ties of family life are universal, and Grant Hardy's selection represents a multicultural experience. African American, Latino, and Asian American voices are all represented here, as are poetic traditions from around the world and through the ages, including a generous sampling from medieval China. Each poet affirms the strength and fragility of the long-term ties of kinship, the joy and pleasure set against the real possibility of disappointment and loss. And each poem in this volume is an expression of deep and abiding love, the kind that calls forth what is best in us and motivates us to keep trying. Brief biographies of the poets and an appendix with notes on poetic form, using examples drawn from poems in the anthology, will inform readers drawn to experiencing these works again and again.

At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.

In this companion volume to her best-selling Enduring Grace, Flinders profiles the lives of four contemporary women of faith. Contending that her modern subjects are spiritual heirs to saints and mystics she draws parallels between her modern subjects and their historical predecessors.

Mary Renck Jalongo Interpersonal relationships present an interesting paradox to the young child. Although human bonds are a source of love, security and joy, they are, at the same time, the context in which children feel intense and complicated emotions such as jealousy, shame, resentment, sorrow, and rage. To illustrate, consider a series of incidents in the life of a young child named Melissa. All of these events were so memorable that they became oft-repeated family stories. At age 4, after Melissa was reprimanded by her mother, she packed a small plastic suitcase and announced that she was running away. Her mother kept a watchful eye while the preschooler stood at the end of the driveway for several moments. The child’s sister—eight years her senior—decided to go out and gently inquire about her younger sibling’s plans, to which Melissa responded ruefully, “I can’t run away. I remembered that I’m not allowed to cross the street by myself. ” Months later, Melissa enters kindergarten and she arrives home at the end of her school day, obviously upset. When asked about it, she says, “One of the kids told me I was doing my work wrong and it ruined my whole day. ” In first grade, Melissa has experience with one of the school child’s greatest fears: a mean teacher.

Argues that understanding the impact of past injustices faced by some peoples can help us understand and overcome injustice today.