In answering the question about the purpose of the family, I liked Rubio’s (2003) reference to the Catholic tradition of encouraging families to ask: “What, ultimately, are we about?”(p. 185). Rubio then goes to discuss two important types of love. She refers to the love between family members as intimate passion, and the sentiment towards justice in the world as social passion. Research supports the common belief that feeling lonely is damaging to the human being. In a theoretical and empirical review of the consequences of loneliness, Hawkey and Cacioppo (2010), detail the serious emotional and physical consequences of loneliness, including earlier mortality. We need other human beings in order to survive. As Christians, we believe that
