Healthy adolescent spiritual development is being hindered both by U.S. culture, which demands conformity to unattainable standards, and by the failure of the Church to become relevant in the lives of young people. This article explores how the alternative religious community found at a Christian summer camp can lead to positive growth in the…

This article describes how communal aspects of faith find their way back into the lives of adolescents. The communal aspects of faith within individualized societies need more attention. It seems that with the current emphasis on individual faith, the intrinsic power of communal aspects of faith has been lost. This study shows that informal…

Adolescent religion is increasingly well researched but the youth rallies staged by many Christian groups remain understudied. This article adds to our understanding of these rallies through a case study of a large Catholic youth rally in Toronto. We identify the reported religious experiences of rally participants and compare them with the goals…

Drawing on perspectives from sociocultural theory, this article investigates how Christian denominations are represented in Norwegian textbooks of religious education and by young believers. The main finding is that textbooks and young adherents present religion in substantially different ways. While textbooks relate religion to global and…

Engaging the work of Robert Kegan, Mary C. Boys, and John Caputo, this article explores whether disaffiliation, or more accurately deconversion, might be one possible outcome of successful religious education forming a mature religious consciousness for postmodernity's changing religious landscape. Through a presentation of deconversion literature…

The characteristics of a spiritual direction formation program as part of a postgraduate course were compared with a range of standard higher education academic agendas of learning. The formational characteristics included acknowledgment of prior experience, cooperative community approaches to learning, teachers as partners in learning, reflective…

Religious education (RE) is arguably one of the most legislated curriculum areas anywhere in the world, and yet in countries where legislation and educational policy exist to support its provision, how schools implement the subject in practice has not received much attention in the discourse. This article attempts to address this lacuna by…

This article reports the findings of interviews conducted with students (aged 11-13) in four English secondary schools, examining reasons why young people find it difficult to understand Christian beliefs regarding Jesus' miracles, resurrection, and status as the Son of God. For the students in this sample, understanding and belief are closely…