As friends were saying goodbye to their sons and daughters leaving home to attend college last fall, I made the comment, “Don’t worry. They’ll be back.” Many of us who know and love young adults can expect that at some point we will experience the phenomena of a return to the nest for some period of time. This seems to be a rather new thing and many of us are struggling to not only understand it but to live with it! I gained some new insight last week when I attended the C3: Christ, Church, Culture Conference at St. George’s Episcopal Church. I was introduced to a new area of sociological research by Christian Smith , the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith runs the National Study of Youth and Religion , a longitudinal study funded by the Lilly Foundation designed to identify the “dispositional culture” of this age gro...
Comments from a Christ-follower on things that matter to him