10 Crucial and Surprising Steps to Build Trust in a Relationship

He/she had the Affair - Why do I Need to Change?

What Everyone Needs to Know About Extramarital Affairs.

10 Fair Fighting Rules for Couples

Getting The Love You Want

Incredible Intimacy

The Good Marriage - How and Why Love Last

Preventing Marriage Meltdown

Communicating Across Cultures

Love Without End

Fun! But We're Married...

The Hidden Costs of Keeping Love Alive

Celebrating Our Differences

More Lasting Unions: Christianity, the Family, and Society

Guidelines For Sexual Desire

What Is Romantic Love Anyway?

The Marriage Spirit

Reconcilable Differences

The Power of Two: Secrets to a Strong & Loving Marriage

The Power of Two: Ch. 1 - Secrets to Talking

The Second Half of Marriage

How to Have a World Class Marriage

In Celebrating Our Differences, we share our experiences in making an interfaith marriage work without losing touch with our own religious roots.

Ned
I was born into a highly assimilated Reform family that had only a tenuous Jewish identity; now I am Coordinator of the Judaic Studies Program at Dickinson College where I am a Professor of Religion and Classics. But my interest is not only academic. As the Talmud says: Study is more important than practice, because study leads to practice. I have become steadily more observant over the years, to the point of now keeping mostly kosher and declining to ride or drive on the Sabbath. In this development, Mary Heléne has assisted, encouraged, and often pushed me along the way to finding my religious home. In Yiddish story writer Chaim Grade’s words, she “shouted at me as though I were a dark cellar and she was calling to someone hiding in me.” Jews especially, but gentiles as well, need to be aware of what religious yearning may be hiding in each of us.

Mary Heléne
I am a practicing Roman Catholic, a lector and teacher in my church. When I felt disaffected in the wake of sweeping changes brought by Vatican II, it was Ned who prodded and challenged me to redefine myself as a Catholic and return to the fold. Today, when I get discouraged at the institution’s attempts to creep back to the rigid certainties of the 50s, he cheers me on to persist in fomenting renewal from within the establishment. For me, the links with tradition combine with the Catholic insistence on the link between soul and body, spirit and flesh, to integrate daily reality with religious feeling and intellectual theology. This is a major way in which Catholic and Jewish approaches to spirituality run in tandem. Where Catholics use sacraments to link sacred and the profane, observant Jews use the wide-ranging ethical and ritual structure developed from Torah and tradition to bind the visible world to the invisible.

Our interreligious marriage has been going strong since 1963. We have successfully negotiated the early years of “voluntary poverty” and round-the-clock diapers. We’ve also weathered our own and each other’s religious ups and downs and come out stronger as individuals and as a couple. We maintain that each of our particular religious commitments has helped strengthen the other, and created a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

We have both written articles, given lectures, and conducted workshops on Christian-Jewish marriage. Out of this experience comes our book.