Short stories, crafts, games, and traditional decorations remind children of the time-honored customs of the season -- Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, and a few secular holidays, too.

If you can round up some construction paper, a few old magazines, a box of Q-Tips, a spool of ribbon, and some glue, this book will show you how to make hours of fun for young children. These are all faith-centered, classroom-tested activities, and it's the only book of its kind made especially for Catholic children.

This newly revised, expanded edition answers the questions most commonly asked by both Catholics and non-Catholics. Dues outlines traditional Catholic religious history, gives an engaging overview of the rich variety of customs associated with Advent, Christmas, Holy Week, and Lent, and provides a thorough understanding of why Catholics practice their faith the way they do.

Fostering faith in children is a shared privilege and responsibility of parents, godparents, and the church community. We promise our children at baptism that we will support them in their faith formation--in the formation of their relationship with God. We need to take this promise seriously. This book is intended to be an accessible and helpful resource for parents and other adults who seek to foster children's faith. This book succinctly explores many ways we can support children's faith formation, including our day-to-day interactions with children, the images of God we share with them, how we pray together, the rituals we create, service opportunities we provide, music we share together, the stories we tell and listen to, our celebration of the sacraments, and more. While this book has a distinctly Roman Catholic orientation, much of the content will be relevant for a wider Christian audience. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, this book is rooted in the conviction that the God we seek relationship with and that we hope to foster our children's relationship with is one who is infinitely loving, welcoming, and always yearning for deeper connection with us.

G.K. Chesterton once said, "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” Taking that notion to heart, this collection of short articles and essays seeks to inform, inspire, but also at times amuse. Topics range from the light-hearted (coffee and baseball) to the heart-wrenching (St. Edith Stein and St. Gianna Beretta Molla). And then, of course, there are the angels. Archangels, guardian angels, angels in disguise, and angels loud and proud. They are the glue that holds this book of seemingly disparate topics together, reminding us on each page they appear that they are our friends, our protectors, our teachers, and our guides. Based on the blog of the same name, Angels and Saints and the Rest of Us roughly follows a year’s worth of Church celebrations with teachings from the saints, actions from the angels, and a few personal anecdotes from the author. All in all, an enjoyable reading experience that even an angel would approve of.

Many beautiful; traditional religious customs that will give Catholic homes a truly Catholic spirit year round: E.g.; blessing of children; name days; feast days; Advent and Christmas customs; etc. Great reading for all. Essential to help every Catholic family overcome secularism. Shows the religious source of even such common things as pretzels; hot cross buns; the Easter ham; Thanksgiving Day; Spring Cleaning; etc. What parts of the Christmas Tree are Catholic; and which ones came from secular influence. Very interesting and useful!

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.