I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.

By measuring the proportion of children living with the same parents from birth and whether their parents report a good quality relationship we are driving home the message that social programmes should promote family stability and avert breakdown.

At one point in my life I was very involved with social causes. I'm still involved but now I have a family and it's important to me.

The family only represents one aspect however important an aspect of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

My mother has always been the social glue holding the family together.

The practice of patience toward one another the overlooking of one another's defects and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family in the professions and in society.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week the minimum wage family leave health insurance Social Security Medicare retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

Parents need all the help they can get. The strongest as well as the most fragile family requires a vital network of social supports.

Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men to that extent denies the faith of the Master.

So when the only domestic social policy is tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans we say 'Where is faith being put into action here?'

In light of these facts Republicans have put forth a variety of proposals to make Social Security remain solvent for future generations. But up to this point Democrats have chosen to oppose our good faith efforts and insist that indeed there is no problem.

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center in order to replace it for example with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.

By concentrating on what is good in people by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice and by asking them to put their faith in the future socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.