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This book aims to provide new insights on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It presents the main findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents conducted at the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2005. The survey captured a broad range of differences among U.S. teens in religion, age, race, sex, socioeconomic status, rural-suburban-urban residence, region of the country, and language spoken. The book provides answers to questions about the character of teenage religion, the extent of spiritual seeking among youth, how religion affects adolescent moral reasoning and risk behaviors, and much more. It is hoped that by informing readers about the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, it will help foster discussions in families, religious congregations, community organizations, and beyond, not only about the general state of religion in the United States, but also about cultural and institutional practices that may better serve and care for American teens.

G.I. Messiahs examines soldier veneration in twentieth- and twenty-first century America and argues that soldiers are the theological center of American civil religion. This book also recognizes that soldiers engage with and are shaped by the symbols, rituals, and mythologies of American civil religion and are thus its most committed, consistent practitioners. G.I. Messiahs builds this argument by examining episodes from the long American century in which the nation has interpreted itself through the bodies, words, and deeds of soldiers and by describing and analyzing soldiers’ struggles with the burdens placed on them. The aim of this book is to redirect conversations about American civil religion toward consideration of its contours as a lived tradition focused on the service, suffering, and sacrifice of the American soldier.

This book provides an in-depth description and analysis of American Catholics (and ex-Catholics) ages 18–23. The main focus is on their religious and spiritual lives but also includes an examination of how their religious faith and practice do and do not affect other life outcomes. Based on nationally representative survey and interview (longitudinal/panel) data of the highest quality, the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR—first and third waves). It describes the distribution of religious beliefs and practices among them, how they cluster into different types of young adults religiously, shows the kind of changes that have happened in the lives of this group of (ex-)Catholic emerging adults, and which factors from their teenage years tend to produce higher levels of religiousness five years later. It also contains the most careful and sophisticated methodological discussion of how to conceptualize and measure who in the U.S. should even count as “Catholic” in social-science studies. It contributes both to our scholarly knowledge about religious change and stability in the U.S., especially among emerging adults, and to our understanding of how and why the Catholic Church is undergoing changes over time, particularly with its younger members. All of the findings are also set into big-picture historical context with a chapter that shows how sweeping changes in the twentieth century set up the Catholic Church for what it is confronting today.

What do the religious and spiritual lives of American young people look like as they reach their mid to late 20s, enter the full-time job market, and start families? In Back Pocket God, the authors provide a look beyond conflicting stories that argue that emerging adults either are overwhelmingly leaving religion or are earnest spiritual seekers maintaining a significant place in their lives for religion. Denton and Flory show that while the dominant trend among young people is a move away from religious beliefs and institutions, there is also a parallel trend in which a small, religiously committed group of emerging adults claim faith as an important fixture in their lives. Yet, whether religiously committed or not, emerging adults are increasingly personalizing, customizing, and compartmentalizing religion in ways that suit their idiosyncratic desires. For emerging adults, God has become increasingly remote yet is highly personalized to meet their particular needs. In the process, they have transformed their conception of God from a powerful being or force that exists “out there” to their own personal “Pocket God”—a God that they can carry around with them but that exerts little power or influence in their daily lives. God functions, in a sense, like a smartphone app—readily accessible, easy to control, and useful but only for limited purposes. Back Pocket God shows the changing relationship between emerging adults and religion, providing a window into the future of religion and, more broadly, American culture.

In Our Own Image is a work of comparative philosophical theology answering three questions. First, it is a study of the roles anthropomorphism and apophaticism play in the construction of conceptual models of ultimate reality. This answers the question: Do we create our ideas of God? Second, it is a comparative analysis of three major classes of ultimacy models, paying particular attention to the way those classes are impacted by anthropomorphism while tracing their relative strengths and weaknesses. This answers the question: Can there be better and worse in our constructed ultimacy models? Third, it is a constructive theological argument on behalf of an apophatic understanding of ultimate reality, showing how this understanding subsumes, challenges, and relates ultimacy models from the three classes being compared. This answers the question: Is there a best way to think about ultimate reality? The book describes and compares competing ultimacy models, fairly and sympathetically. The conclusion is that all models cognitively break on the shoals of ultimate reality, but that the ground-of-being class of models carries us further than the others in regard to the comparative criteria that matter most.