Orphanology unveils the grassroots movement that’s engaged in a comprehensive response to serve hundreds of millions of orphans and “functionally parentless” children. You’ll see a breadth of ways to care with biblical perspective and reasons why we must. Heartwarming, personal stories and vivid illustrations from a growing network of families, churches, and organizations that cross culture show how to respond to God’s mandate. The book empowers: - churches—to plan preaching, teaching, ministering, missions, funding adoption, supporting orphans; - individuals and families—to overcome challenges and uncertainties; - every believer—to gain insights to help orphans in numerous ways. Discover how to - adopt; - assist orphans in transition; - engage in foster care; - partner with faith-based fostering agencies; - become orphan hosts. Along with their families’ adoption stories, Merida and Morton give steps for action and features on churches doing orphan ministry, faith-based children’s homes, orphan-hosting groups, and other resources.

The global orphan crisis is complex. The church’s response should be comprehensive, but is it? In this provocative follow-up to Orphanology, author Rick Morton provides the framework for families and churches to have a gospel-centered response to the growing global issue of orphan care. KnowOrphans addresses three distinct areas associated with global orphanology. Delving deeper into the criticisms of the movement, the need for reform, and what families can expect, author Rick Morton helps shape realistic perceptions of the challenges and rewards adoptive parents face in transnational adoptions. Through illuminating the work internationally adoptive families can expect, KnowOrphans offers solutions for the church in remedying the ills and deficiencies surrounding the church’s role in equipping and supporting families before, during, and after the adoption process. Knowing that the church’s response and attitude should be one that goes beyond adoption, KnowOrphans also addresses the complexities of how Christians are to respond ethically, compassionately, and comprehensively to the biblical call to care for orphans. KnowOrphans is the next step in conversation as this evangelically based movement of orphan care matures and begins to live out James 1:27 globally.

Illustrates the hidden challenges embedded within the evangelical adoption movement. For over a decade, prominent leaders and organizations among American Evangelicals have spent a substantial amount of time and money in an effort to address what they believe to be the “Orphan Crisis” of the United States. Yet, despite an expansive commitment of resources, there is no reliable evidence that these efforts have been successful. Adoptions are declining across the board, and both foster parenting and foster-adoptions remain steady. Why have evangelical mobilization efforts been so ineffective? To answer this question, Samuel L. Perry draws on interviews with over 220 movement leaders and grassroots families, as well as national data on adoption and fostering, to show that the problem goes beyond orphan care. Perry argues that evangelical social engagement is fundamentally self-limiting and difficult to sustain because their subcultural commitments lock them into an approach that does not work on a practical level. Growing God’s Family ultimately reveals this peculiar irony within American evangelicalism by exposing how certain aspects of the evangelical subculture may stimulate activism to address social problems, even while these same subcultural characteristics undermine their own strategic effectiveness. It provides the most recent analysis of dominant elements within the evangelical subculture and how that subculture shapes the engagement strategies of evangelicals as a group.

Every Christian isn’t called to adopt, but everyone is called to care for orphans. The evangelical adoption movement is but one strand in a long cord of Christian care for orphans. While adoption trends have fluctuated over time in different contexts, the Bible has not changed its position. The gospel is decidedly pro-adoption and on the side of the orphan. Yet many obstacles stand in the way of the Christian’s mission to provide care to the least of these. So, what now? Editors Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) assemble leading voices to frame the issues with a gospel-centered perspective. The Gospel for Life series gives every believer a biblically-saturated understanding of the most urgent issues facing our culture today, because the gospel is for all of life.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018 International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Joyce makes clear, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.

"As I write this introduction, the third season of the Israeli series, Schtisel, has arrived on Netflix, eagerly awaited by viewers around the world who would never have imagined how caught up they would get by this family drama of four generations of ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem. One episode focuses on Ruchami and Hanina, a young couple who have been married for five years, but without children. It turns out that pregnancy and childbirth would threaten Ruchami's life. She is using an IUD, but she keeps threatening to have it removed, risking her life to become a mother. Finally, with great reluctance, Hanina visits the rebbe, the spiritual authority in their community, to discuss the possibility of using a surrogate. They are, says the rebbe, caught between two "non-ideal" situations: surrogacy, normally forbidden, is non-ideal, but so is Ruchami's unhappiness and the possibility that she might go ahead and take the risk, which is also forbidden"--