Gender & Grace: Love, Work Parenting in a Changing World

• Winner of a 1991 Christianity Today Critics' Choice Award (1st place; contemporary issues).

How are men and women different?

How does being a male or a female affect us at work? What are the roles of husband and wife in marriage and parenting? What does Christianity have to do with any of these things?

Sexual identity lies at the core of the crucial questions that everyone asks of life. Yet today those questions are harder and harder to answer. Traditions about the "real man" and the "woman's place" have been challenged. Scientists debate what nature actually dictates for male and female. And theologians engage in heated controversy over what the Bible really says about female submission andmale headship.

In this sane yet provocative book, an informed social scientist and committed Christian thinker braves a jungle of confusion to offer unusual insight on the part genes, culture and faith play in making us the men and women we are -- and ought to become.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. She taught at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) for many years, and she has been a senior editor of Christianity Today. Currently she is a contributing editor for Books Culture. Van Leeuwen has written, cowritten, and contributed to several books, including The Psychology of Intergroup Relations (with L. Kidder, McGraw-Hill, 1975), The Person in Psychology (Eerdmans, 1985), After Eden (one of several contributors, Eerdmans, 1993), Religion, Feminism the Family (co-editor, Westminster John Knox, 1996), The Family Handbook (co-editor, Westminster JohnKnox, 1998) and Women and the Future of the Family (with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Mardi Keyes and Stanley Grenz, Baker, 2000).