Losers Loners And Rebels

Revealing that adolescent boys often identify themselves as losers, loners, and rebels, this book investigates the interior lives of boys as they develop their sense of self and begin the spiritual journey that will carry them throughout their lives. (Practical Life)

Drawing on research and case studies, three pastoral care experts argue that one of the primary contexts in which the faith formation of teenage boys takes place is in their relationships with other adolescent males. Written by the authors of Losers, Loners, and Rebels: The Spiritual Struggles of Boys, this book is an important resource for anyone interested in helping adolescent males navigate years often marked by isolation and loneliness to develop a meaningful spiritual identity.

Religious Mourning is about a common experience among those who study religion: religious loss. When people of faith study religion critically, or when life experiences such as death and divorce trigger personal reflection on faith, religious intellectuals often become estranged from their own tradition. Sometimes this estrangement causes them to leave religion altogether. But for those who study religion from a psychological perspective, a certain kind of introspective and iconoclastic religiosity can be revived by means of academic writing. Religious Mourning explores this phenomenon by focusing on psychobiographical writings about religious leaders--including Donald Capps' portrait of Jesus of Nazareth, James Dittes' portrait of Saint Augustine, and William Bouwsma's portrait of John Calvin--to show how these authors' personal lives, and especially their experiences of loss, influence their scholarship. As Capps, Dittes, and Bouwsma subversively scavenge the lives of Jesus, Augustine, and Calvin to reverse and restore a religion that is rich with experience, including (and especially) their own, they invite us to do the same.

When a boy cries, his father trains him in the way of the ancients. He is taught to "man up," and rejects anything feminine in his life. Thus he begins the process of becoming a man in the image of his culture. This transformation comes at the expense of his own calling to reflect the image of God. Men and women, however, were both created in this divine image and were meant to live in harmony rather than enmity. Recently, influential Christian writers and leaders have suggested that men have become too feminized and need to return to their calling to be "real men." Clark believes that this "new masculinity" is in reality a return to the way of the ancients. Drawing from his experiences as a minister, domestic- and sexual- violence prevention advocate, and community leader, Clark suggests that Jesus came to redefine masculinity and resist the cultural view of manhood, power, and oppression.

America is a country of characters, many of them larger than life, many of them shrinking from life, and many tenaciously asserting their individuality even as they succumb to the weight of life. As the author observes, "Asserting ones identity obviously has its penalties, but to do so is infinitely greater than proceeding to ones grave without having achieved the fullest of self-realization. As an extraordinary American lyric poet, arguably the best at her art, Emily Dickinson created an enduring place for herself not only in American letters but in world literature. Notwithstanding, her grave is behind a Mobil filling station in Amherst, Massachusetts." This is a broad-spectrum, academically oriented book, an historical, sociological and ideological examination of the continuing acrimonious mutual conflict waged between America's loners and joiners. Divided into five chapters, it is generously researched, provocatively iconoclastic, contrarian and comical. The initial chapter defines and copiously illustrates the plight of individuality and its collision with collaboration in American life. It then moves from classical and renaissance culture and philosophy into the subject as it is tellingly, abundantly and amusingly illustrated in American literature from Franklin through Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman and Twain. The second chapter advances into the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring the essence of the conflict as illustrated biologically, socially and anecdotally the object being to elucidate the causes of division between the minority who function well as hermits and the majority that inexorably forms itself into insidious herds. The third chapter, "What Price Affiliation?" examines such nefarious matters as Group Think, the rise of corporate culture and trade unionism. The fourth chapter examines even more intensively the intellectual and emotional costs of fraternal life. The fifth and final chapter looks closely at the American intellectual as loner and outcast. It's all good stuff, and an exceedingly provocative good read.

Drawing on their experiences as fathers, eleven men share what they have learned about parenting, living a Christian life, and the relationship between the two. As fathers to children ranging in age from the very young to adults, contributors reflect on some of their joys and successes as fathers but also on their questions, concerns, mistakes, sorrows, and hopes--for themselves and for their children. They invite all parents to reflect on and learn from their own parenting experiences. This kind of reflection fosters wisdom, perspective, and, in solidarity with other parents, gratitude, confidence, and hope in the parenting life.

This revealing collection presents a selection of twenty poets, prophets, and preachers who share their understandings of what makes a "good spiritual life." They draw on their professional experiences and, as important, grace us with their personal thoughts. The result is essentially a textbook for spirituality courses, exposing readers to the spiritual lives of a wonderfully diverse group of people with a wide range of Christian experiences. Every reader is sure to find a perspective with which he or she can identify.