Legally Married

Legally Married is … as useful to specialists in law as to Christians trying to make sense of the issue … Peterson and McLean offer bracing realism rather than wishful thinking as a basis for thinking through contemporary issues [It deserves] a wide readership both inside and outside the Churches. -- Bernice Martin, Emeritus Reader in Sociology, University of London * Church Times *
I have watched the development of this book with pleasure and gratitude. It brings to the often confused discussion of marriage and associated cultural issues a clearsightedness and well-informed scholarship which will benefit a wide audience. It satisfyingly exposes the glorious variety of marriage throughout history, in the midst of an era in which that variety is becoming still more glorious. * Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford *
In the heat of debate over marriage today, many protagonists make confident simple assertions about something that is truly hard to define. Here Peterson and McLean combine clear and often wry explanation of these issues with their unsurpassed authority on the relationship (perhaps more one of cohabitation than marriage) between Church and State. Implicitly they make the strongest argument for the current debates to be a great deal more sophisticated and nuanced than sometimes they are. * Marjory A. MacLean, former Depute Clerk of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland *