Hardcover: 280 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publish Date: April 1, 2014
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199959188
ISBN-13: 978-0199959181
Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality is a skillful distillation of a diverse body of work, represented by a wide range of experts from diverse disciplines. The result is an enriching, thought-provoking, and comprehensive analysis of emerging adults and their religious and spiritual development.
— Varda Konstam, PhD
Professor Emerita, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Emerging and Young Adulthood and Parenting Your Emerging Adult
Although most American children are raised in a faith tradition, by the time they reach their early twenties their outward religious expression declines significantly, with many leaving the faith in which they were raised in favor of another faith or none at all, though many still claim that religion and spirituality are important. Reasons for this change in religious behavior include adolescents’ forging their own identities, increased immersion in contexts beyond the family, and exposure to media. As emerging adults encounter events such as attending university, breaking up with a romantic partner, and traveling, they are likely to make sense out of them, a process known as meaning-making. Thus, coming into one’s own takes on great prominence during the years of emerging adulthood (18-29), making it ripe for religious and spiritual development.
Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality seeks to understand how the developmental process of meaning-making encompasses American emerging adults’ religiousness and spirituality. This volume does not focus on disentangling religion and spirituality conceptually, but rather emphasizes their centrality in the psychology of human development. It highlights the range of experiences and perspectives of emerging adults in the U.S. grounded in social context, social position, and religious or spiritual identification. Chapters are written by an interdisciplinary group of authors and explore topics such as the benefits and detriments of religiousness and spirituality to emerging adults; contexts and socializing agents such as parents and peers, the media, religious communities, and universities; and variations of religiousness and spirituality concerning gender, sexuality, culture, and social position. Using a developmental lens and focusing on a significant period within the lifespan, this volume embodies the key aspects of a developmental perspective by highlighting specific domains of development while considering themes of continuity and discontinuity across the lifespan.
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Copyright Page
Series Foreword
Foreword
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Contributors
Part I Introduction
1. Seeing the Forest and the Trees: How Emerging Adults Navigate Meaning-Making
Part II Foundational Perspectives
2. Emerging Adults’ Religious and Spiritual Development
3. Potential Benefits and Detriments of Religiousness and Spirituality to Emerging Adults
Gina Magyar-Russell et al.
Part III Contexts and Socializing Agents in Emerging Adults’ Religious and Spiritual Lives
4. The Role of Parents in the Religious and Spiritual Development of Emerging Adults
Larry J. Nelson
5. The Role of Peer Relationships in Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality
Carolyn McNamara Barry and Jennifer L. Christofferson
6. Faith in the Digital Age: Emerging Adults’ Religious Mosaics and Media Practices
Piotr S. Bobkowski
7. The Law’s Promise of Religious Freedom to Support Emerging Adults’ Religious Development and Experiences
Roger J. R. Levesque
8. Religious Congregations and Communities
William B. Whitney and Pamela Ebstyne King
9. Changing Souls: Higher Education’s Influence Upon the Religious Lives of Emerging Adults
Perry L. Glanzer et al.
Part IV Variations
10. Gender, Religiousness, and Spirituality in Emerging Adulthood
Jacqueline S. Mattis
11. The Roles of Religiousness and Spirituality in the Sexual Lives of Heterosexual Emerging Adults
Tara M. Stoppa et al.
12. Sexual Minorities
Geoffrey L. Ream and Eric M. Rodriguez
13. Religion, Spirituality, and Emerging Adults: Processing Meaning Through Culture, Context, and Social Position
Mona M. Abo-Zena and Sameera Ahmed
14. Nonreligious and Atheist Emerging Adults
Luke W. Galen
Part V Conclusion
15. Reflections on the Long and Winding Road of Meaning-Making
End Matter
Index
Endorsements
This groundbreaking book brings together a distinguished group of scholars, including pioneers in the exciting new field of emerging adulthood, to address the fascinating issue of religion and spirituality in the third decade. Authors provide a holistic developmental perspective on a number of important and interesting contexts. This volume provides scholars and students with a state of the art look at how emerging adults navigate the connections between their faith and the rest of their lives.
— David C. Dollahite, PhD
Professor of Family Life, Brigham Young University
Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality is a skillful distillation of a diverse body of work, represented by a wide range of experts from diverse disciplines. The result is an enriching, thought-provoking, and comprehensive analysis of emerging adults and their religious and spiritual development. The discussion acknowledges individual variation without compromising patterns related to thriving and floundering. The book is required reading for researchers, students, and clinicians alike. There is no comparable book in the field.
— Varda Konstam, PhD
Professor Emerita, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Emerging and Young Adulthood and Parenting Your Emerging Adult
This wonderful volume represents an exciting moment in our study of emerging adults. I’m especially impressed by the balance of both familiar issues such as family influences with the novelty of fascinating topics including legal issues, sexual minorities, nonreligious/atheist youth, and digital media.
— Chris Boyatzis, PhD
Professor of Psychology, Bucknell University
This book takes up the challenges of exploring the doubly under-explored: the religious and spiritual challenges of the third decade of life. An exciting tour both for lifespan developmentalists and those fascinated by religious change and growth. Higher education, gender, and the internet are among the varied areas of influence which will capture readers’ interest.
— Kate Loewenthal, PhD
Professor Emerita of Psychology, Royal Holloway College, University of London
This anthology is essential reading for anyone who cares about the spiritual lives of today’s young adults—which should be nearly everyone. Professionals and scholars alike will find the range of topics covered excellent for both an introduction to the conversation as well as a deepening of one’s knowledge of the kind of research that’s out there—and who’s talking about it.
— Donna Freitas
Author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses
Barry and Abo-Zena began their volume with an explicit recognition that the field itself is emergent and in transition, grappling with a range of epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues and questions. The contributions they assembled not only bring the field up to its current state, but they foreshadow future prospects for research and practice. One hopes that future efforts can build on this contribution to move the field forward within the dynamic domain of spiritual and religious development within this pivotal period of human development.
— Eugene C. Roehlkepartain
Journal of Youth Adolescence
Overall, Emerging Adults’ Religiousness and Spirituality provides an excellent resource for scholars and practitioners to gain an overview of emerging adults and their meaning-making processes. … Even in fifteen chapters focused on a range of concepts, the overall punch line is that we need to know more than we do. In the end, this volume does more to stir a hunger for what needs to come than it does to quench a thirst, but as such it accurately represents the dearth of our understanding on this important topic. I hope the content of this book serves as the roadmap for a thousand grant proposals and studies investigating the many remaining questions on emerging adulthood religiousness and spirituality.
— Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
This volume helpfully outlines what scholars do know about religious development in these years, calls attention to gaps, and sets a framework for moving the scholarship forward. While the book focuses primarily on developmental psychological understandings, it is consistently and critically attuned to the possibility of cross-cultural and contextual variation. … The book is an excellent resource for reviewing a range of social scientific hypotheses and models about the influences that affect religiosity in this age group. … Unlike many multi-author volumes, this one is exceptionally well integrated, with authors regularly connecting ideas in different chapters. … Readers will be grateful for the clarity and expansiveness they bring to the subject, and this reader hopes that the work will yield new research to answer many of the questions they raise.
— Thomas M. Landy, PhD
Director, McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture, College of the Holy Cross
There are gems to be found in these accounts… Readers of all backgrounds will find the tone of epistemological humility alternatively comforting (the book is relatively free of unwarranted judgments).
— Brett C. Hoover
Loyola Marymount University