#38: The Pop-Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ

My guest in this edition of the College Faith Podcast is Dr. Ted Turnau, co-author of The Pop-Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ. Ted has spent many years thinking about how to help children (from the early years through young adulthood) understand, evaluate, and flourish in pop culture that is all around us. He shares some of his insights from his study, how his parents helped and didn’t help him, and lessons learned from raising his own children.

In this podcast we discuss:

• What “pop culture” is conceptually and biblically
• The two ways Christians tend to respond to popular culture, and a better “middle way”
•  Daniel and his colleagues as examples of a healthy posture toward  popular culture
• The goal of the Christian parent in the midst of pop culture
• How various parenting styles tend to influence a student’s decisions once at college
• The five questions that can help you and your children evaluate things in pop culture
• A case study: Evaluating the extremely popular Baldur’s Gate 3 video game
• Six things to keep in mind when we talk with our children about pop culture

Resources mentioned during our conversation:

• Ted Turnau’s website
• Ted Turnau, E. Stephen Burnett, and Jared Moore, The Pop-Culture Parent: Helping Kids Engage Their World for Christ
• Ted Turnau, Popologetics: Popular Culture in Christian Perspective
• Ted Turnau, Oasis of Imagination: Engaging Our World Through a Better Creativity
• Ted Turnau and Ruth Naomi Floyd, Imagination Manifesto: A Call to Plant Oases of Imagination
• Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
• Christ and Pop Culture (an online magazine and podcast)
• Love Thy Nerd (a website thinking Christianly about pop culture)
• Ask About Games (a website by Andrew Robertson providing a Christian perspective and evaluation of video games)
• Hollywood Jesus: Your Bridge to Pop Culture (a website evaluating streaming shows, movies, and much more from a biblical perspective)
• “A Guide to Majoring in the Arts,” College Faith podcast #34 with Cam Anderson, M.F.A.