Jonathan Pettigrew

Why does the family matter? How can the family truly flourish with so many different opinions about what family means and what role it plays in society? How can we strengthen the family to reflect God's design for it? Family Communication and the Christian Faith: An Introduction and Exploration (Integratio Press, 2023) provides answers to these questions. This book examines the family from a biblical worldview while integrating theories and practices from diverse academic disciplines (psychology, theology, family studies, sociology) with special emphasis on how communication creates and sustains healthy, rewarding, and godly families. An Instructor's Resource and Teaching Guide is available. Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major distributors and retailers.

This book offers a novel analysis of communication in stepfather-stepson relationships and is one of the first to examine the ways stepfathers communicate and to integrate the perspectives of adolescents into research on stepfamily communication. In order to understand the complex dynamics of stepfamilies, Jonathan Pettigrew presents six case studies of different families. They are written as engaging narratives – including interviews – that offer flavorful accounts of family members and their relationships with each other. Pettigrew then looks across cases to identify, describe, and examine patterns of stepfather support. This book builds upon current understandings of stepfamily life by providing a descriptive and heuristic model of supportive stepfather-stepson communication, making it valuable for those who study and work with families.