Samenvatting

This essay introduces John Witte jr. to a Dutch audience, where his lifework until now met little attention. His main aim is to retrieve traditional teachings about family life, marriage and sex and show the relevance of those arguments for today. His more than three decades of study of the Western tradition results in a multidimensional model of the marital family. This model and these arguments can be useful to moderate the often (also in the Netherlands) polarized political debate on family life and related issues and might prevent the debaters to reduce such issues to a single, one-dimensional, perspective.