ABSTRACT
In the 2020s, an account of transcendence and family that both honors Christian tradition and resonates in increasingly secular cultures faces significant challenges. Christians have linked “transcendence” and “family” through marriage, excluding many intimate, committed relationships from full participation in both family and transcendence. The secular global north ricochets between a sentimental vision of family unsupported by social institutions and a pragmatic view of families as mere practical, legal, bureaucratic units of care, financial support, and taxation. Nevertheless, de facto historical Christian flexibility around family and secular, inductive perspectives – enriched by Judith Butler’s reflections on precarious life – can produce a common account of family and transcendence that is both experientially credible and theologically robust. Families connect people to ancestors, descendants, and infinite networks of interdependence with others. These connections bestow identity, include people in goods arising out of community, and invite their conscious, hopeful solidarity in the face of the unknown. “Family” retains its quality as a noun but also becomes a verb that signifies enacting goods beyond self-chosen desires, its transcendent character rooted in a universal human interdependence that both grounds and inflects individual choice. This account of family and transcendence returns to confirm recent Christian theologies of sacrament.
