An Apt and Cheerful Conversation on Marriage

This Article argues that modern Anglo-American marriage law was formed out of two traditions -- one rooted in Christianity, a second in the Enlightenment. Each of these traditions has contributed a variety of familiar legal ideas and institutions of modern domestic life, lore, and law -- some overlapping, some conflicting. The overlapping and creatively juxtaposed legal contributions of these two traditions hold the promise of creating a new understanding of marriage that is neither blindly nostalgic about a purported golden of marriage nor naively myopic about the massive social, psychological, and structural costs of the modern revolution of sex, marriage, and family