Religion and the Family.

In October 1984 the National Council of Family Relations began a new section on religion. The group of NCFR members committed to furthering the cause of the study of religion and the family met to elect officers and chart their course. The group was told that it was an auspicious moment. First, the future looked bright because the recent interest in the religion and family connection was part of a larger movement within the social sciences of focusing on things religious. Second, the current postpositivist era in the social sciences probably would generate fewer dogmatic statements than had occurred earlier in the sometimes heated dialogue between science and religion. Third, the coming together of researchers, theorists, theologians, and practitioners concerned with the religion and family interface had the potential of producing significant payoffs in society's larger effort to understand the human condition (Thomas and Sommerfeldt, 1984). One irony noticed by the NCFR group was that this was really not a new NCFR section in the sense of creating something that had never existed but rather was new in the sense of resurrecting that which had been born, lived a few short years, and died. In 1952 a religion section in NCFR began holding meetings. That section ended in