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Six years into the papacy of Pope Francis, Catholics are still figuring out how to respond to his image of the church as a field hospital —a church that goes into the streets rather than remaining locked up behind closed doors.

Marriage and family are primary sites of the field hospital, called to meet people's need for healing and accompaniment with compassion and love. The authors of this collection —all lay, a mix of single and married, traditional and progressive Catholics —take up this work.

They offer practical wisdom from and critical engagement with the Catholic tradition but avoid rehashing decades-old theological debates. Instead, their essays engage with and respond to realities shaping contemporary family life, like religious pluralism, technology, migration, racism, sex and gender, incarceration, consumerism, and the call to holiness. The result is a collection that envisions ways that families can be places of healing and love in and for the world.