The Soul Of Adolescence

By taking time to listen and learn from the teenage community in our midst, the author gives voice to their hopes and dreams, fears and frustrations. This is a book that should be read and discussed by all those entrusted with the souls of adolescents.

Patricia Lyons' searing first-person accounts of adolescent ethics, spirituality, conscience, and struggles with despair are unforgettable. In this book, she deciphers the language of youth so that any teacher, parent, or mentor can learn how to hear, understand and respond more effectively to the spiritual hopes and longings of teenagers.

"The Soul of Adolescence Aligns with the Heart of Democracy" follows the author's compelling journey of discovering his life's purpose. The author evolves in his understanding of adolescent potential and wisdom through direct involvement with youth and communities. Developing a portfolio of meaningful engagement with young leaders and communal movements requires gradually shedding unconscious bias. The author's journey reminds readers that acknowledged and affirmed teen participation results in young people finding their full potential, and communities becoming sustainable.

'The disease he has is addiction,' Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend. 'The disease I have is loving him.' Their affair is dramatic, urgent - an intoxicating antidote to the lonely days of early motherhood. But soon, K starts using again. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, thinking she can save him. It's a familiar pattern, developed in an adolescence marred by family trauma - how can she break it? If she leaves, has she failed? In this unflinching memoir, Aron shows the devastating effect of addiction on loved ones. She also untangles the messy ties between her own history of enabling, society's expectations of womanhood and our ideas of love. She cracks open the feminised phenomenon of co-dependency, tracing its development from the formation of Al-Anon to recent research in the psychology of addiction, and asks uncomfortable questions about when help becomes harm, and when we choose to leave.

In innumerable discussions and activities dedicated to better understanding and helping teenagers, one aspect of teenage life is curiously overlooked. Very few such efforts pay serious attention to the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of American adolescents. But many teenagers are very involved in religion. Surveys reveal that 35% attend religious services weekly and another 15% attend at least monthly. 60% say that religious faith is important in their lives. 40% report that they pray daily. 25% say that they have been "born again." Teenagers feel good about the congregations they belong to. Some say that faith provides them with guidance and resources for knowing how to live well. What is going on in the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers? What do they actually believe? What religious practices do they engage in? Do they expect to remain loyal to the faith of their parents? Or are they abandoning traditional religious institutions in search of a new, more authentic "spirituality"? This book attempts to answer these and related questions as definitively as possible. It reports the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion, the largest and most detailed such study ever undertaken. The NYSR conducted a nationwide telephone survey of teens and significant caregivers, as well as nearly 300 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a sample of the population that was surveyed. The results show that religion and spirituality are indeed very significant in the lives of many American teenagers. Among many other discoveries, they find that teenagers are far more influenced by the religious beliefs and practices of their parents and caregivers than commonly thought. They refute the conventional wisdom that teens are "spiritual but not religious." And they confirm that greater religiosity is significantly associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes. This eagerly-awaited volume not only provides an unprecedented understanding of adolescent religion and spirituality but, because teenagers serve as bellwethers for possible future trends, it affords an important and distinctive window through which to observe and assess the current state and future direction of American religion as a whole.

Encourages the art of journal keeping and will inspire teenagers to write about their confusion, joys, and challenges. The guided exercises act as a map for self-exploration and encourage emotional honesty about family and friends.

Publisher description

This book is based on the author’s Psychology, now in preparation, which should logically have been published first. The standpoint of the latter is roughly and provisionally indicated in Chapter X, with which it is hoped any reader with philosophic interests will begin. This point of view is further set forth in the last part of Chapter XVI, and some of its implications appear in Chapter XII, which should follow. That, recognizing fully all that has hitherto been done in this direction, the genetic ideas of the soul which pervade this work are new in both matter and method, and that if true they mark an extension of evolution into the psychic field of the utmost importance, is the conviction of the author. Although most of even his ablest philosophical contemporaries, both American and European, must regard all such conceptions much as Agassiz did Darwinism, he believes that they open up the only possible line of advance for psychic studies, if they are ever to escape from their present dishonorable capitivity to epistemology, which has to-day all the aridity, unprogressiveness, and barrenness of Greek sophism and medieval scholasticism, without standing, as did these, in vital relations to the problems of their age.