Angels (and neighbors) watching over us: child safety and family support in an age of alienation.

M ore than 8 years ago, my daughter Jennifer and my son-in-law Tom were married in the small-town Methodist church that had been the focal point of much of my childhood in Granite Quarry, North Carolina. About 75 years earlier, Jennifer’s greatgreat-grandfather had served as the minister in the little stone church. By coincidence, Jennifer’s wedding occurred on the same day as the observance of the town’s centennial, and her great-grandfather’s service as mayor was highlighted in one of the displays at the festival. One of Jennifer’s uncles (my brother David), who is a United Methodist minister, officiated, and the vocalist was another uncle (my brother Scott), who is an accountant by day but a classically trained singer and actor by night. Reflecting Jennifer’s affinity for Norway, the site and focus for much of her college education, the wedding also had a Scandinavian touch in music, costumes, and participants—fortunately not, however, in food. (Codfish marinated for months in lye has yet to appear on any known list of approved wedding fare!) In short, Jennifer’s and Tom’s wedding was a highly personalized celebration that I remember fondly. Nonetheless, the most moving and indeed the most educative aspect of the wedding for me was not a particular part of the ritual or the social events that celebrated it. Instead, the really powerful element was the context in which the wedding occurred—the tightly woven network of relationships that we hoped would provide security for Jennifer and Tom as they had for four generations before them. Those relationships sustained each generation when, as the vows go, they were richer or poorer, in sickness, or in health. The connections among them rested not just in the church but also in and among the bridge group, the civic club, the Little League baseball team, the Scout troop, the street dance, the town council, and the school classroom. The day following the wedding, my wife Robin and I joined my siblings in attending the Sunday service at the little church for the first time in many years (at least in my case). Then and in some subsequent visits, I was awestruck by the number and specificity of parishioners’ memories of my family’s involvement in the everyday life of the community—notably including mundane but nonetheless personally important illustrations of our participation in the community as children (e.g., my brother David’s attention to a Little League teammate who lost first a leg and then his life to bone cancer; my own service as an impromptu guide to the county for an adult