Hello, welcome to this special very brief Theology Pugcast episode and the theme of the little show today is that Trad Dad 24 conference that we're going to be hosting

in battleground Washington and we had Scott Yeneron yesterday to talk a little

bit about what he's going to address or what he's going

to say when he's at the conference and right now I've got Alan C Carlson with us.

Alan and I are both senior editors at Touch Dome magazine, but he's also involved with lots of

other stuff so Alan can you just tell us a little bit about those other things

okay well I begin my academic career 50 years ago, but interested in falling fertility

into the decline of the birth rate that was going on in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s and wrote my first book of doctoral

dissertation on how the Swedes, how the Swedish socialists responded to it.

Ever since I've been interested in the question of fertility. What

encourages fertility, human fertility? What discourages it? Why is there a crisis

repeated the a crisis over falling human numbers?

And I've also tried to do something about it.

It was now 20 some years ago I helped launch something called the World Congress of Families, which was meant to be a regular gathering and there have been about 15 big ones to discuss the main issue has always been fertility and how do we encourage marriage

and pro-creative marriage and how do we encourage young people to have babies.

And so that's been a big part of what I've done.

Yeah, and so the theme of the conference

is pro-natal thinking with regard to fathers and churches and so forth.

So you're going to be right, you know, so you're exactly the guy we need to talk about this kind of stuff. So we joked a little bit

earlier about the sort of the growing awareness of the crisis and even the fact that

the Wall Street Journal has been spending some time on the theme lately.

They had a piece they put out the other day that essentially commiserated the fact that governments

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