Soul Searching : The Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers
$84.00
Winner of the 2006 Christianity Today Book Award for Christianity and Culture Description
In most discussions and analyses of American teenage life, one major topic is curiously overlooked–religion. Yet most American teens say that religious faith is important in their lives. What is going on in the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers? What do they actually believe? What religious practices do they engage in? Do they expect to remain loyal to the faith of their parents? Or are they abandoning traditional religious institutions in search of a new, more “authentic” spirituality?
Answering these and many other questions, Soul Searching tells the definitive story of the religious and spiritual lives of contemporary American teenagers. It reports the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion, the largest and most detailed such study ever undertaken. Based on a nationwide telephone survey of teens and their parents, as well as in-depth face-to-face interviews with more than 250 of the survey respondents, Soul Searching shows that religion is indeed a significant factor in the lives of many American teenagers. Chock full of carefully interpreted interview data and solid survey statistics, Soul Searching reveals many surprising findings. For example, the authors find that teenagers are far more influenced by the religious beliefs and practices of their parents and other adults than is commonly thought. They challenge the conventional wisdom that many teens today are “spiritual seekers.” And they show that greater teenage religious involvement is significantly associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes.
Soul Searching reveals the complexity of contemporary teenage religious life, showing that religion is widely practiced and positively valued by teens, but also de-prioritized and very poorly understood by them, yet significant nonetheless in shaping their lives. More broadly, Soul Searching describes what appears to be a major transformation of faith in the U.S., away from the substance of historical religious traditions and toward a new and quite different faith the authors call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
in stock within 3-5 days of online purchase
SKU (ISBN): 9780195180954
ISBN10: 019518095X
Christian Smith | Melinda Denton
Binding: Cloth Text
Published: January 2005
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Print On Demand Product
Related products
-
Grief Observed
$15.99Add to cartWritten by C. S. Lewis with love and humility, this brief but poignant volume was first published in 1961 and courageously encounters the anger and heart-break that followed the death of his wife, an American-born poet, Joy Davidman. Handwritten entries from notebooks that Lewis found in his home capture the doubt and anguish that we all face in times of great loss. He questions his beliefs in this graceful and poignant affirmation of faith in the face of senseless loss.
-
Great By Choice
$29.99Add to cartThe new question
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.The new study
Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness-beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years-in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.
The new findings
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.
The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe.Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck.
This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncer
-
Devil At My Heels
$14.99Add to cartAthletically gifted, Louis Zamperini propelled himself from the tough streets of Southern California to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and to an NCAA mile record at USC that stood for 20 years. When war came he left the track for a B-24-a move that would have heartbreaking consequences. On a routine mission his plane crashed into the shark-infested Pacific and he would drift 2,000 miles for 47 days before being found by the Japanese. As a prisoner of war, Zamperini endured two years of horrible torture and humiliation at the hands of a psychopathic guard nicknamed “The Bird.” Yet Zamperini endured and returned home a hero.
Unfortunately, the terrible memory of his experiences haunted him. Zamperini turned to alcohol and spiraled into the depths of despair until a young preacher named Billy Graham helped him rediscover the faith that would eventually lead him to return to Japan and personally forgive all his now-imprisoned captors. Moving and unforgettable, terrifying and inspirational, Devil At My Heels is not to be missed.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.