This is Speaking of Face Unheard Cut. I'm Krista Tippett. You're listening to my

unedited conversation with psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Spiritual Life of Children.

I spoke with him in the year 2000, in his home outside Boston, Massachusetts.

This interview is included in our program The Inner Lives of Children,

which was originally broadcast in December 2008. Download the MP3 of that

produced show at speakingoffaith.org.

You know, the place I'd like to start, and we don't have to spend a lot of time here,

but you know, something that I've been curious about that I haven't actually found,

sometimes it's hinted at in your books, is something about your own, the religious background

that you brought to your work with children.

Well, my religious background is a story in itself.

My mother comes from the Midwest or came from the Midwest. She died a few years ago,

but she came from Sue City, Iowa. She was from a farm family that became a business family

in Iowa, and they were a piscopalian and very religious people, especially she.

My father, on the other hand, was born in England and came from a rather unusual background.

I think it's fair to say. He was English, but he was also half Catholic, half Jewish.

His father's family were Jews in Spain, who fled Spain during the inquisition and came

first to Holland and then England, and his mother's family were Catholics, they were French Catholics.

So if that isn't a confusing background, I don't know what is, but it's a varied background.

Especially for European.

Yeah, and it brings in aspects of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism.

The Judaism had been unfortunately watered down by the assimilationist

...