Download or read book Religious Parenting written by Christian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How parents approach the task of passing on religious faith and practice to their children How do American parents pass their religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal “spirituality,” Religious Parenting investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children’s religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo explore American parents’ strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one’s best self on life’s difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals’, to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same “cultural models” when passing on religion to their children. Taking an extensive look into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious Parenting uncovers parents’ real-life challenges while breaking innovative theoretical ground.

Download or read book Families and Faith written by Vern L. Bengtson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Distinguished Book Award from American Sociology Association Sociology of Religion Section Winner of the Richard Kalish Best Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America Few things are more likely to cause heartache to devout parents than seeing their child leave the faith. And it seems, from media portrayals, that this is happening more and more frequently. But is religious change between generations common? How does religion get passed down from one generation to the next? How do some families succeed in passing on their faith while others do not? Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down across Generations seeks to answer these questions and many more. For almost four decades, Vern Bengtson and his colleagues have been conducting the largest-ever study of religion and family across generations. Through war and social upheaval, depression and technological revolution, they have followed more than 350 families composed of more than 3,500 individuals whose lives span more than a century--the oldest was born in 1881, the youngest in 1988--to find out how religion is, or is not, passed down from one generation to the next. What they found may come as a surprise: despite enormous changes in American society, a child is actually more likely to remain within the fold than leave it, and even the nonreligious are more likely to follow their parents' example than to rebel. And while outside forces do play a role, the crucial factor in whether a child keeps the faith is the presence of a strong fatherly bond. Mixing unprecedented data with gripping interviews and sharp analysis, Families and Faith offers a fascinating exploration of what allows a family to pass on its most deeply-held tradition--its faith.

Download or read book Losing Our Religion written by Christel Manning and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-20 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The fastest growing religion in America is--none! Among adults under 30, those poised to be the parents of the next generation, fully one third are religiously unaffiliated. Yet these "Nones," especially parents, still face prejudice in a culture where religion is widely seen as good for your kids. What do Nones believe, and how do they negotiate tensions with those convinced that they ought to provide their children with a religious upbringing?"--Publisher description.

Download or read book Handing Down the Faith written by Christian Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new examination of how and why American religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally representative surveys of American parents about their religious parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how parents have been influenced by their experiences as children influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church, synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains, providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.

Download or read book Parenting Beyond Belief written by Dale Mcgowan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gathering the perspectives of educators and psychologists, as well as wisdom from everyday parents, Parenting Beyond Belief offers insights and advice on a wide range of topics including instilling values, finding meaning and purpose, navigating holidays, coping with loss, finding community without religion, and more. The second edition of this secular parenting bestseller brings back reflections from such celebrated freethinkers as Richard Dawkins and Julia Sweeney, and adds new voices including journalist Wendy Thomas Russell, essayist Katherine Ozment, sociologist Phil Zuckerman, and many others" --

Download or read book Handing Down the Faith written by Christian Smith and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about how American religious parents approach the handing on of their religious practices and beliefs to their children. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission and factors that influence its effectiveness. But we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves when it comes to the intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice"--

Download or read book Relax It s Just God written by Wendy Thomas Russell and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gold-medal winner of a Next Generation Book Award, silver-medal winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award. As featured on the PBS NewsHour “A gem of a book.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL (STARRED REVIEW) A step-by-step guide to raising confident, open-minded kids in an age of religious intolerance. Relax, It's Just God offers parents fresh, practical and honest ways to address issues of God and faith with children while promoting curiosity and kindness, and successfully fending off indoctrination. A rapidly growing demographic cohort in America, secular parents are at the forefront of a major and unprecedented cultural shift. Unable to fall back on what they were taught as children, many of these parents are struggling, or simply failing, to address issues of God, religion and faith with their children in ways that promote honesty, curiosity, kindness and independence. The author sifts through hard data, including the results of a survey of 1,000 nonreligious parents, and delivers gentle but straightforward advice to both non-believers and open-minded believers. With a thoughtful voice infused with humor, Russell seamlessly merges scientific thought, scholarly research and everyday experience with respect for a full range of ways to view the world. "Relax, It's Just God" goes beyond the numbers to assist parents (and grandparents) who may be struggling to find the right time place, tone and language with which to talk about God, spirituality and organized religion. It encourages parents to promote religious literacy and understanding and to support kids as they explore religion on their own -- ensuring that each child makes up his or her own mind about what to believe (or not believe) and extends love and respect to those who may not agree with them. Subjects covered include: • Talking openly about our beliefs without indoctrinating kids • Making religious literacy fun and engaging • Talking about death without the comforts of heaven • Navigating religious differences with extended family members • What to do when kids get threatened with hell

Download or read book Religious Parenting written by Christian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How do religiously-observant American parents pass on their religion to their children? Sociologist Christian Smith and his team sought to answer this question by interviewing over two hundred parents from across the U.S. affiliated with religious congregations of various types. The book presents the voices of parents from diverse socioeconomic and religious backgrounds interested in passing on their religious convictions and practices to their children, with the focus on why they think this matters, and how they do it. What Smith and his team found was surprising. Almost all the parents interviewed- whether Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, or Hindu, and whether politically or theologically conservative or liberal-view the transmission of religion in much the same way. Most religious parents do not expect professional clergy and youth ministries to play a large role in imparting to young people a taste for continued religious affiliation and participation. Rather, they expect to do this work themselves, viewing their children as ongoing "projects". Moreover, very few of these religious parents regard what we might call the "truth" of religious claims-beliefs in salvation or the trinity (for example), the afterlife, heaven, etc.-as important reasons for the centrality of religion in their lives and the lives of their children. For nearly all, including the most conservative, religion is almost always about community, morality, and a sense of purpose, all of which lead to a better quality of life for themselves and their children in the here and now. Smith and his co-authors ground their discussion of religious parenting in a broader set of theoretical claims about the way in which religious transmission occurs. Drawing on cognitive anthropology and inspired by work in cognitive science, the authors present and describe the background "cultural models" that American religious parents hold and use to inform their parenting"--

Download or read book The Earthbound Parent written by Richard A. Conn, Jr. and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard A. Conn, Jr. demonstrates why all parents who value science and reason can help stop the centuries-old practice of religious indoctrination and offers advice on how to encourage children to discover the world and their place in it for themselves. Only by teaching them that we are in this world together and have a limited time to live can we truly enable them to flourish and build a peaceful world—not just for their generation but for the future.

Download or read book Religion and Family Life written by Richard J. Petts and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been increased interest among scholars in recent decades focused on the intersection of family and religion. Yet, there is still much that is not well-understood in this area. This aim of this special issue is to further explore the influence of religion on family life. In particular, this issue includes a collection of studies from leading scholars on religion and family life that focus on ways in which religion and spirituality may influence various aspects of family life including family processes, family structure, family formation, family dissolution, parenting, and family relationships. The studies included incorporate both qualitative and quantitative analyses, incorporate a number of different religious traditions, focus on religiosity among both adults and youth, and explore a number of important issues such as depression, intimacy, sexual behavior, lying, divorce, and faith transmission.

Download or read book How Did God Do It A Symphony of Science and Scripture written by Walt Huber and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered... How Did God Do It? How did God perform the many miracles and supernatural events described in the Holy Bible - without violating the laws of physics and chemistry that He Himself put into place? And without conflicting with the basic tenets of Judaism and Christianity? This book proposes a theory that marries faith and rationality in a symphony of science and scripture....

Download or read book Your God is Too Glorious written by Chad Bird and published by New Reformation Publications. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us are regular people who have good days and bad days. Our lives are radically ordinary and unexciting. That means they're the kind of lives God gets excited about. While the world worships beauty and power and wealth, God hides his glory in the simple, the mundane, the foolish, working in unawesome people, things, and places.In our day of celebrity worship and online posturing, this is a refreshing, even transformative way of understanding God and our place in his creation. It urges us to treasure a life of simplicity, to love those whom the world passes by, to work for God's glory rather than our own. And it demonstrates that God has always been the Lord of the cross--a Savior who hides his grace in unattractive, inglorious places.Your God Is Too Glorious reminds readers that while a quiet life may look unimpressive to the world, it's the regular, everyday people that God tends to use to do his most important work.

Download or read book Sticky Faith written by Kara Powell and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sticky Faith delivers positive and practical ideas to nurture within your kids a living, loving faith that lasts a lifetime. Research indicates that almost half of high school seniors drift from their faith after graduation. Struck by this staggering statistic, and recognizing its ramifications, the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) conducted the "College Transition Project" in an effort to identify the relationships and best practices that can set young people on a trajectory of lifelong faith and service. This easy-to-read guide presents both a compelling rationale and a powerful strategy to show parents how to actively encourage their children’s spiritual growth so that it will stick with them into adulthood and empower them to develop a living, lasting faith. Written by Fuller Youth Institute Executive Director Dr. Kara E. Powell and youth expert Chap Clark--authors known for the integrity of their research and the intensity of their passion for young people--Sticky Faith is geared to spark a movement that empowers adults to develop robust and long-term faith in kids of all ages. Further engage your family and church with the Sticky Faith Guide for Your Family, Sticky Faith curriculum, and Sticky Faith youth worker edition. Sticky Faith is also available in Spanish, Cómo criar jóvenes de fe sólida.

Download or read book Growing Up Godless written by Deborah Mitchell and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a nation where religion plays such a big role, how can you raise a child without God? How do you instill morality, answer questions about mortality, and handle believers who expect to get a one-way ticket to heaven by converting you? Deborah Ann Mitchell, who has blogged and written columns on the subject, provides guidance to agnostics and atheists struggling with how to assert their beliefs in a reasoned, nonconfrontational, and honest manner.

Download or read book Religion written by Christian Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new theory of religion Religion remains an important influence in the world today, yet the social sciences are still not adequately equipped to understand and explain it. This book advances an innovative theory of religion that goes beyond the problematic theoretical paradigms of the past. Drawing on the philosophy of critical realism and personalist social theory, Christian Smith explores why humans are religious in the first place—uniquely so as a species—and offers an account of secularization and religious innovation and persistence that breaks the logjam in which religious scholarship has been stuck for so long. Certain to stimulate debate and inspire promising new avenues of scholarship, Religion features a wealth of illustrations and examples that help to make its concepts accessible to readers. This superbly written book brings sound theoretical thinking to a perennially thorny subject, and a new vitality and focus to its study.

Download or read book God Grades and Graduation written by Ilana M. Horwitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. Upper and middle-class parents invest considerable time facilitating their children's activities, while working class and poor families take a more hands-off approach. These different strategies influence how children approach school. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories? Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation (GGG) offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. GGG introduces readers to a childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for Americans' deep relationship with God: religious restraint. This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper class kids--and for girls especially--religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, GGG offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality"--

Download or read book Are You There God It s Me Margaret written by Judy Blume and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.