Customer Reviews

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

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This is absolutely a seminal piece for those interested in adolescent development, the transition to adulthood, and/or religion. In a wonderful extension to the first book (Soul Searching), Souls in Transition provides a rigorous, yet amazingly accessible, account of the forces and mechanisms at play in adolescents religious lives as they make the transition to young adulthood. The balance the book is able to maintain between using rigorous methodology, empirical evidence, and engaging explanation is quite impressive. The book will be of great use to academics, religious leaders, and the public alike.

Christian Smith's work in the National Study of Youth and Religion is the gold standard for research on religion and adolescents--and this must-read follow-up looks at young people's faith as they begin the transition into adulthood. Smith's research challenges much conventional wisdom about 18-23 year olds, revealing them to be a highly varied lot in whom religious disinterest abides, but it is neither inevitable nor universal. The red thread throughout young people's religious lives continues to be the massive importance of parents and congregations--even after young people leave home--in determining whether those who grow up with faith keep it in the years following high school. I found Smith's interpretation of cultural trends equally intriguing, including a discussion of our culture's current "crisis of knowledge and value," and the paradoxical triumph of liberal Protestant values in the emerging adult worldview. Tim Clydesdale's *First Year Out* and Robert Wuthnow's *After the Baby Boomers* complement this study well, but Smith's comprehensive view--and passion for the subject--are one of a kind. Two thumbs up.

Christian Smith (with Patricia Snell) has done it again with this powerful book on emerging adult religion. The potency of this work lies in the broader cultural context meticulously laid out in chapter two "The Cultural Worlds of Emerging Adults." This sets the stage for the rest of the work where the religious and spiritual lives of this cohort are explored. Smith and Snell succeed in distilling an amazing amount of research into a work that everyone from social scientists to religious leaders to emerging adults will enjoy.

This is a great book, one of the best written in the social sciences in the last 10 years. The authors have done an amazing amount of work on the National Study of Youth and Religion, and they have managed to put it all together in a highly readable form. They use diverse methods, including surveys, interviews, and case studies, and the combination is illuminating. The book is also extremely well-written. I highly recommend it!

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).

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 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 am sorry that I came to learn of this author Christian Smith. This author confirms all my worst fears about the cyptic tactics of Catholic scholars, and the underlying gay animus attendant with it. Also the really propagandistic sense of scholarly entitlement, as if they have the right to make an argument which fits their preconceptions. It is instructive, and highly telling, that basically all the references to gay issues vis-a-vis the "Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults" are negative. And when they felt compelled to have one wanly positive reference about changing opinions it was coupled with a testimonial that the more "liberal" view is contiguous with someone who feels they are now a "dirty hippy." I find the hidden agenda of this book grotesque, and once again an indication that some reporter needs to get on the story of Oxford University Press' anti-gay agenda.