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.

This book is full of stories, statistics & a summary of information gathered over a study that took many years. It's well put together & while many of the stats were in general too heady for me, I still was thankful that they were there to support the conclusions provided by the study & for reference to refer back to whenever I want. This book is nice for me as a young adult who would have fit nicely into the selected population studied for this book. It made me feel less alone in the beliefs that I hold & in the ones that I don't, but that I know my peers hold. I really appreciated the unbiased way this book is put together. I like that you can't tell what denomination or personal beliefs the authors may have, but they rely on the case studies to draw conclusions.

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.

This book has lots of information which can help parents understand their children's spiritual formation and growth, and pastors and teen ministers the young people to whom they minister. I'm not surprised by the fact that the influence of parents on the spiritual life of their children is so strong and important. This speaks to the pastoral need to form strong, faith-filled families that live out their faith in everyday life. I'm not surprised by the finding that even those teens who attend youth group and missions can fall away in college. The pull of other things in college is strong but there is something about a loving family life that builds and sustains.It would be good to see a follow-up study on the long-term impact of World Youth Day on those who attend. This is a great topic for a dissertation if it has not already been done.

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.

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).

A very entertaining trip down the path many youth take today regarding religion and faith.

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.