Johann Christoph Arnold is a senior pastor of the Bruderhof – an international communal movement dedicated to a life of simplicity, service, sharing, and nonviolence. In forty years of pastoral experience, Arnold has advised thousands of couples and individuals, including the terminally ill, veterans, prison inmates, and teenagers. He is an award-winning author with over a million copies of his books in print, in more than twenty languages, among them Why Children Matter and Sex, God, and Marriage.He and his wife, Verena, have eight children.
"Marriage is more than a private contract between two people. God did not have in mind merely the personal happiness of separate individuals, but the establishment of God-fearing relationships in a communion of families under his rulership."
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Rabbi Sacks is currently the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University and the Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University. He has also been appointed as Professor of Law, Ethics, and the Bible at King's College, London. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2005 and made a life peer in the House of Lords in October 2009.
"When a man and woman turn to one another in a bond of faithfulness, God robes them in garments of light, and we come as close as we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life into being, turning the prose of biology into the poetry of the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance of love."
Rev. Dr. Russell D. Moore is president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention's official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns. He speaks frequently on issues of theology, culture, and public policy, and is often quoted or published by the nation's leading news media. He blogs regularly at "Moore to the Point" and is the author or editor of five books and a regular columnist for Baptist Press. An ordained minister, Moore has served as pastor for several Southern Baptist churches and chairman and four-time member of the SBC Resolutions Committee.
"We are not created as 'spouse A' and 'spouse B,' but as man and as woman, and in marriage as husband and as wife, in parenting as mother and as father. Masculinity and femininity are not aspects of the fallen order to be overcome, but are instead part of what God declared from the beginning to be very good."
Kala Acharya, PhD, has been the director of K.J. Somaiya Bharatiya Sanskriti Peetham Cultural and Research Institute in India since its inception in 1989. During her tenure the institute has been developed as a center for interreligious dialogue between Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, and offers post-graduate programs in Sanskrit, yoga, philosophy, and history. The author of several books, Acharya represented Hinduism in international interreligious meetings organized by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. She has been a member of the Secretariat of the Congress of the Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Kazakhstan and was appointed as an ambassador for the Parliament of World Religions in 2009.
"Human life is all about relationship. It cannot become complete unless it fuses into a fuller integrated bond which includes both man and woman, husband and wife, mother and child, grandmother and child, and male and female colleagues in vocation."
Cardinal Gerhard Müller is prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In addition, he is president of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and the International Theological Commission. From 1986 to 2002, he was professor of dogmatic theology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. He has also taught as a visiting professor at universities in Peru, the United States, India, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Brazil.
"This fact, indelible in human nature, reveals our radical dependence: we do not complete ourselves from our own selves, we are not totally self-sufficient."
Bishop Jean Laffitte, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, is a member of the Emmanuel Community and was ordained a priest in 1989. From 1990 to 1994, he was superior of the chaplains of Paray-le-Monial. He has taught ethics and the spirituality of marriage and family at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute and is the author of numerous publications, including most recently La scelta della famiglia (translated into several languages) and Le Christ destin de l'homme.
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