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How important is religion for young people in America today? What are the major influences on their developing spiritual lives? How do their religious beliefs and practices change as young people enter into adulthood? Christian Smith's Souls in Transition explores these questions and many others as it tells the definitive story of the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults, ages 18 to 24, in the U.S. today. This is the much-anticipated follow-up study to the landmark book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Based on candid interviews with thousands of young people tracked over a five-year period, Souls in Transition reveals how the religious pr...
What Women Want comprehensively analyzes the challenges the feminist movement faces today and puts forward a new policy agenda for women.
"From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a revelatory look at the power and potential of social context. As psychologists have long understood, social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. Less widely noted is that social influence is a two-way street: Our environments are in large part themselves a product of the choices we make. Society embraces regulations that limit physical harm to others, as when smoking restrictions are defended as protecting bystanders from secondhand smoke. But we have been slower to endorse parallel steps that discourage harmful social environments, as when regulators fail...
A timely unsettling of old "settled" questions surrounding divorce Amid the current nationwide debate over what "marriage" is, this book examines anew the nature and meaning of marriage from the standpoint of what adult children of divorce have actually experienced. Upholding the inextricable link between our personal identity and our origin in a union of two -- and, more deeply, in the Fatherhood of God -- the contributors to this volume reflect on the damage that divorce does to children, opening up important questions for all of us: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to love and to marry? After decades of talk about the rights of adults to get a divorce and the benefits for children of an amicable split between parents (a so-called "good divorce"), these authors -- theologians, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and cultural critics -- effectively unsettle conventional opinion.
Steven Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. He describes the challenges of adulthood today and puts them into perspective by exploring how past generations achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss.
In Marriage Matters, Janice Shaw Crouse argues that marriage is a critical element in a free society and that society's most vulnerable communities, especially minorities and the poor, suffer the most from the nation's retreat from marriage. Crouse writes that marriage advances the public interest and we should create laws and policies that support rather than undermine it. She demonstrates both the public and private importance of marriage, and organizes her argument in a thoughtful and logical manner. Compared to other household arrangements, Crouse observes, marriage is by far the best for raising children and offers financial advantages as well. Writing about bullying, Crouse shows how t...
Singleness is a much overlooked treasure in Christian tradition. In these pages, Christians (single and married alike) can rediscover the richness of singleness in its great variety. This book offers thought-provoking cultural and theological analysis, along with voices of single Christian people down through the centuries.
This book is a college-level introductory textbook in Christian ethics. It introduces the field of ethics and a variety of approaches to its study. The book is written for college students and is designed to help them develop a method of dealing with the thorny moral issues.
Americans remain deeply ambivalent about teenage sexuality. Many presume that such uneasiness is rooted in religion. But how exactly does religion contribute to the formation of teenagers' sexual values and actions? What difference, if any, does religion make in adolescents' sexual attitudes and behaviors? Are abstinence pledges effective? What does it mean to be "emotionally ready" for sex? Who expresses regrets about their sexual activity and why? Tackling these and other questions, Forbidden Fruit tells the definitive story of the sexual values and practices of American teenagers, paying particular attention to how participating in organized religion shapes sexual decision-making. Merging...
This work explores some of the most interesting and vexing problems in contemporary life. Appealing to reason rather than religious authority, the book tackles the most controversial and talked about positions of the Catholic Church - on contraception, on marriage, on reproductive technologies, on cohabitation, and on divorce - arguing for the reasonableness of the Church's views on these issues. The book's interdisciplinary approach, following the precedent of Thomas Aquinas, looks to human happiness and fulfillment, properly understood, in seeking the answers to questions about how to live. It aims to show to skeptical readers that what the Catholic Church teaches about controversial issue...