Welcome to the podcast Think Bivocally, Conversations on Faith and Culture.

The podcast from Taub School of Theology, Biola University.

I'm your host, Sean McDow, Professor of Apologetics.

And I'm your co-host Scott Ray, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Christian Ethics.

Today we have with us a return guest speaking about a new book he's written called

handing down the Faith.

His name is Dr. Christian Smith, and he's a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

He's written more than 20 books, many on the topic we're discussing today, which is about

passing on the faith to the next generation. Dr. Smith, we really appreciate you

coming back and is I've been a huge fan of your work soul searching souls in transition as a youth

worker your insights and as a parent have been so helpful but for starters tell

us what makes this book handing down the faith unique?

Well, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, in the past I've spent many years studying the religious and spiritual lives of teenagers

and 20 year olds.

But this book is focused on their parents instead.

So we learned from the earlier studies in a way

we hadn't fully appreciated how very important parents are

in forming their children, even their teenage children even when the

children and the parents don't realize that. So we went ahead and said well what

there's not a lot of study on religious parents so we we did a big study on religious parents. So we did a big study on religious parents,

how they approach passing on faith to the children,

...