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This edited volume investigates young people within their social contexts. The focus is on engaging young people as they transition from youth into young adulthood. Key advantages of this book are its embodiment of interdisciplinarity in gathering research across a range of diverse methods, theories, settings, and countries. The volume begins with reviews of key theories and methods in understanding young people within their social networked contexts of generosity, networks, identity, and ethnic heritage. The second section includes chapters attending to education and work as contexts for transitions to adulthood, counseling, meaning, and aesthetics from high school to college and into workp...
As Your Children Grow, Will Their Faith Grow Too? As both stories and statistics attest, the number of evangelical children who abandon Christianity in adulthood is staggering. To see effective change, parents cannot leave their child’s faith to chance. Rather, families must start nurturing faith early—you cannot start once your child is grown, you must start at home. Strengthening family and home life is the best way to encourage your children to maintain a lifelong faith. It Starts at Home upholds marriage and family as the proving ground for lasting success. Experienced pastors Kurt Bruner and Steve Stroope provide a clear purpose, an effective strategy, and a simple plan for anyone who wants to be intentional in their homes. Their insights will help leaders recalibrate their priorities by asking them to evaluate their leadership where it counts most. This newly revised edition evaluates the current trends families and young adults face that can contribute to this crisis. Don’t let your child’s faith fade to memory—learn how you can create a home that will prepare them for lifelong faith.
In this book Veteran disciplemakers Rick Dunn and Jana Sundene offer concrete guidance for those who shepherd and care for emerging adults, emphasizing relational rhythms of discernment, intentionality and reflection to meet emerging adults where they are at and then to walk with them further into the Christlife.
Jesus didn't fall back on parables because he lacked the right words. Parables were the exact way Jesus intended to communicate. What pictures or analogies today can give us greater understanding of our faith? Adam English finds fresh insight in four: Christianity as story, game, language, culture. Here is a new way to view the Kingdom of God.
"If Christian hope is reduced to the salvation of the soul in a heaven beyond death," wrote Jürgen Moltmann, "it loses its power to renew life and change the world, and its flame is quenched." Thomas Rausch, SJ, agrees, arguing that too often the hoped-for eschaton has been replaced by an almost exclusive emphasis on the "four last things"-death and judgment, heaven and hell. But eschatology cannot be reduced to the individual salvation. In his new book, Rausch explores eschatology's intersections with Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and, perhaps most intriguingly, liturgy. With the early Christians, he sees God's future as a radically social reality, already present initially in Christian worship, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist. This fresh and insightful work of theology engages voices both ancient and contemporary.
The internationally growing Cursillo movement, or "short course in Christianity," founded in 1944 by Spanish Catholic lay practitioners, has become popular among American Catholics and Protestants alike. This lay-led weekend experience helps participants recommit to and live their faith. Emphasizing how American Christians have privileged the individual religious experience and downplayed denominational and theological differences in favor of a common identity as renewed people of faith, Kristy Nabhan-Warren focuses on cursillistas--those who have completed a Cursillo weekend--to show how their experiences are a touchstone for understanding these trends in post-1960s American Christianity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork as well as historical research, Nabhan-Warren shows the importance of Latino Catholics in the spread of the Cursillo movement. Cursillistas' stories, she argues, guide us toward a new understanding of contemporary Christian identities, inside and outside U.S. borders, and of the importance of globalizing American religious boundaries.
Growing up is harder than it used to be. Exploring Blue Like Jazz is a guide about how to do life and faith well in the phase after high school that some have termed “emerging adulthood.” It’s a book intended to make growing up a little easier. Using the topics, themes, and questions addressed in Blue Like Jazz: The Movie as a means of starting the conversation, Donald Miller and Dixon Kinser offer an extremely frank look at sex, drugs, questions of faith, and other topics students face when moving from high school to the freedom of college, a work environment, and beyond. This very candid resource guide is the first of its kind, providing practical help for emerging adults, youth directors, mentors, and parents. Features include: Complete index of subjects addressed in the video, with useful statistics, conversation starters, and critical questions for emerging adults to consider A plan for students and twenty-somethings to manage their new-found freedom 5-week study for youth leaders and small groups to help emerging adults work through these issues For use on its own or with the Exploring Blue Like Jazz DVD-Based Study (ISBN 9781418549510).
There is a wide and growing gap in the Catholic Church in the United States between the clergy, who are mostly of European descent, and the large percentages of Catholics who identify as Latinos. While the US Church has made a concerted effort to build Hispanic ministries, many clergy and lay ministers are still ill-equipped to understand the cultural background of their parishioners, especially the large numbers who are foreign born. Because of this disconnect, the Church risks missing "the Hispanic Moment" in the US Church, in which the faith and traditions of these newest waves of US immigration could not just exist in parallel to English-language congregations, but enrich and enliven the...
In Liturgy and the New Evangelization, Timothy O’Malley provides a liturgical foundation to the church’s New Evangelization. He examines questions pastoral ministers must treat in order to foster the renewal of humanity that the New Evangelization seeks to promote. Drawing on narrative, as well as theological concepts in biblical, patristic, and systematic theology, O’Malley invites readers into a renewed experience of the liturgical life of the church, learning to practice the art of self-giving love for the renewal of the world.
Current research shows what many in the Christian community already know: young people are leaving the church. This raises important questions: Why are young people leaving? How can the church respond? Some have responded to this issue out of a posture of fear and anxiety, trying to find new ways to strengthen doctrinal beliefs or practices of faith formation and discipleship. What if the best response isn't to strengthen our theology or tighten our hold on the lives of young people? What if the best response is a posture of love that lets young people go? Using the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Poetic Youth Ministry argues that the church must take seriously the formative power of social and cultural patterns that shape the social imaginaries of young people. Rather than seeing the problem as young people abandoning faith, the Christian community should see the issue as young people exchanging one form of faith for another. This allows the church to approach the issue from a posture of love, calling young people to embrace their identity in the new humanity revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.