In my earlier article, “The Meaning of Marriage (Part 1)”, I suggested that there are three options when it comes to the meaning of marriage. These three options can roughly be reduced to the following:

1. Although the concept of marriage involves a degree of cultural relativity, at its core marriage is something specific, namely a sexually complementary (or dimorphous) union publically recognized because of its potential fecundity;
2. Although the concept of marriage involves a degree of cultural relativity, at its core marriage is something specific, namely a union of consenting persons (or adults) who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life.
3. The concept of marriage is entirely culturally relative; therefore marriage is a social construct and can mean whatever we choose for it to mean.

The Church in India

Although we think of Christianity as a Western religion, there are Christian churches in Asia that are older than most of those in Europe. One example is the Mar Thoma Church in India.

Even before the Roman Empire, extensive trade existed between India and the Mediterranean region. By the first century AD, Jewish merchants had founded communities in Malabar in India. According to tradition, in 52 AD, Thomas the Apostle traveled to India and evangelized this area. Thomas may have picked Malabar for his work because of the numerous Jewish communities there, or perhaps he was more successful in evangelizing the region because of those communities. Either way, he converted a significant number of people and appointed teachers and elders to lead them. He then moved on to Tamil Nadu, where he was martyred.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

In my previous article about the meaning of marriage, I outlined the following three options that are available to us when asking the question, “What is marriage?” I closed the article by promising to offer a defense of the first definition.

Background
Michael Madhusudan Dutt was born to Rajnarayan Dutt and Jahnabi Devi in Sagordari, Jessore District in East Bengal (now in Bangladesh). Rajnarayan Dutt was a famous lawyer. Madhusudan’s formal education started in a school in the village of Shekpura, where he studied Persian. His intellectual and literary talents and imagination were quickly recognized. His parents decided to give him an English education, so he studied European literature at home before being sent to the prestigious Hindu College in Kolkata (i.e. Calcutta) in 1833.

At Hindu College, Dutt studied Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian, among other subjects. He also began writing poetry. In 1834, he attracted a great deal of attention by reciting a poem he had composed at a public event at the college. By 1842, he was publishing poems in English and Bengali in a number of literary journals in India.

Medicine and missions
Christianity has always been concerned about the body, the mind, and the soul, which is one reason why when Christianity spread, the missionaries established hospitals, schools, and churches. In China in particular, Western medicine was an important component of the growth of Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many important Chinese Christians, such as Sun Yat Sen, had their first introduction to Christianity and to Western learning via medicine.

Shi Meiyu was the daughter of a Chinese Methodist pastor in Jiujiang, Jianxi Province, China. Her mother was the principal of a Methodist school for girls in the city and taught her the Chinese classics and Christian literature. They broke with Chinese tradition by refusing to bind Meiyu’s feet, a practice which broke the bones in the feet to make them artificially small, leaving many Chinese girls nearly crippled for life.

More than a game
Across from our city hall is a giant sculpture of two heads – the faces of two brothers who were some of our most illustrious citizens: Jackie and Mac Robinson. Mac was an Olympian, and Jackie the first African American to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball. With professional sports now dominated by athletes of color, it is hard for those under forty to realize how difficult and courageous it was for Robinson to suit up with the Brooklyn Dodgers; likewise for the general manager and president, Branch Rickey, to hire him. We too easily forget as well how these forged decisions by two men, one black and one white, were so transformative of individual lives, communities, structures and even a nation.