Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults

Souls in Transition by Christian Smith “According to emerging adults, the absolute authority for every person’s beliefs or actions is his or her own self.” “For an emerging adult to remain deeply involved in religious life, he or she probably have to feel greater sense of dependence and need…” “Normally, the best predictor of where people are going is where they have come from.” Young people - which includes adolescents and emerging adults - are essentially self-absorbed. We can argue if this quality is intrinsic or extrinsic, but the fact remains that young people are narrowly focused on themselves. I believe the environment creates this egocentric behavior, but I do not blame the environment. As Smith states in this book, “the emerging adult years often entail repeated life disruption, transitions, and distractions.” As a simple defense mechanism, emerging adults simply convert to self-preservation mode. When your emotional, spiritual, and physical energy is spent surviving there is very little opportunity to thrive. Souls in Transition is a great study on the spiritual lives of emerging adults. It challenges preconceived notions that young people are frankly disinterested in religion and that somehow our collective spirituality is at risk. Even though there is a dip in religious activity during one’s early twenties, there is very little change in the spiritual perspectives between one’s young life and one’s adult life. Anyone working with college students would enjoy this book.

New information from cover to cover and very helpful for today's young people. I will be using somethings out of this book. Thanks

The scholarship in this book will become baseline knowlegde. The question you have to ask is can I plow through the source material, or do I wait for the inevitible popularization that will both summarize and simplify while whisking away the original scholar's reticence at sweeping conclusions. This book is the continuation of the study looked at in "Soul Searching" about teenage faith. That book contained its own popularization in the phrase moralistic theraputic deism. The message read out of the data in this book is not quite as clear and pithy. Maybe reflecting the complexity of adult life, the "emerging adults" of "Souls in Trasition" are following a wider variety of paths. The charts and graphs are worth the price of admision in describing the cultural context of any ministry to emerging adults, especially for those reaching outside of a set group (i.e. conservative protestants reaching the non-religious). The largest message for confessing churches out of the book should be that every generation is up for grabs - this one maybe to a larger extent than prior generations as they are less fixed in a social web. This group of emergine adults have already made several transition. The clearer message is that there are better and worse ways to align ministry if your goal is to build faith. The effective ways are what they always were: parents that care about faith, active in prayer and scriptures, and consistent worship.

Like Smith's previous book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers , Souls in Transition should be required reading for anyone concerned with the spiritual lives of teenagers and emerging adults. Smith, Snell, and their fellow researchers have done the hard work of surveying and interviewing thousands of emerging adults. The result is an insightful, objective portrait of their complicated lives and the many factors that make them so complicated. Most helpful to me were the demographic "close-ups" of specific groups (e.g. black Protestants, Catholics, religiously disconnected youth).

Amazing information that every parent and pastor must read!

This book is amazing in the information that is presented about teenagers in our society. As a student of teenage behavior and worldview, this material is intellectually challenging. It is highly recommended to anyone working with teenagers in any setting. It helps one understand where they are coming from and their needs.

Great book!

This book is hugely important in terms of the scope of the research that went into it and the scale of the data generated. This is a critical cornerstone in the literature right now that all persons working with or researching emerging adults should know about. However, it is a loooooooooooooooooong and heavy read that could be neatly summed up in far fewer words. I realize that you would lose much of the information that way, but this reads more like a very long research article and not much like a book. I feel like most of this information should have been (and probably was) published in an academic journal, and the book could be a little bit on the lighter side, but Christian Smith is one of the leaders in his field, and I am not. So I'm not surprised that he didn't ask me. This is a very important book, but buyer beware, it is not easy to read.

I had to read this for a university course, but I found it quite interesting and worth the read. It came well packaged within the expected amount of time.