How to Find a Spouse

From First Things, an article by Betsy VanDenBerghe on what is truly important when looking for a spouse. She lists the five factors that John Van Epp (author of How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk), says are essential to consider in a relationship:

• compatibility in familial, religious, and financial values and priorities,
• communication skills like self-disclosure, mutual assertiveness, and ability to apologize,
• behavior in other relationships,
• patterns of family background, and
• a healthy conscience (neither underactive nor overactive).

The Way of Aporia

In her article Uneasy Grace, Meghan Sullivan discusses four approaches to resolving struggles between Christian faith and other evidence:

1. On the Way of Dilution, one gives up things one believes.
2. On the Way of Fundamentalism, one refuses to reason and dismisses the other evidence without thought.
3. On the Way of Separation, one keeps the two types of beliefs completely separate and does not try to reconcile them.
4. On the Way of Aporia, one accepts that one's understanding is limited and works to resolve the conflict while accepting both types of beliefs until understanding arrives.

According to Sullivan,

there are some conflicts that we never get to resolve in this life. At the heart of the Way of Aporia is a conviction that you shouldn’t ignore conflicts between faith and reason. They are bound to happen, especially if you have a valuable, thick faith. But you also should not give up important beliefs too quickly or too flippantly in the face of conflict. This is a perfectly respectable stance in other branches of inquiry. And it is perfectly respectable for Christians to assume.