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Book Review: Religion and Society Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. By Christian Smith with Patricia Snell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 368. Price $24.95 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-537179-6 John-Paul Sheridan Irish Theological Quarterly 2010 75: 313 DOI: 10.1177/0021140010368753 The online version of this article can be found at: http://itq.sagepub.com/content/75/3/313.citation
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Reviews
Book Reviews
Irish Theological Quarterly 75(3) 313–334 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021140010368753 http://itq.sagepub.com
Religion and Society Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. By Christian Smith with Patricia Snell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 368. Price $24.95 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-19-537179-6. Reviewed by: John-Paul Sheridan, Trinity College, Dublin
Many of the finest minds in the academy are prepared to inform those that will listen about the needs of successive generations. They expend ink and paper on the needs and wants of young people in parishes or in colleges. Bookshops, both religious and otherwise, have a steady trade in interpreting the minds and mores of various generations—be they X or Y or any other letter in the alphabet. Here is a book that lets them speak for themselves. Souls in Transition is the work of Christian Smith, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, with the assistance of Patricia Snell, Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society at the same university. It comes on the heels of Smith’s previous study, Soul Searching (2005). In that volume, the area of interest was American teenagers, here it is the Emerging Adult in the 18–23 age bracket. From the National Study of Youth and Religion and the General Social Survey, the authors have collected two types of data—statistical samples and over 200 in-depth interviews. Added to this Smith and Snell have returned to a sample of the subjects interviewed for the 2005 book to see how the intervening years have played out in terms of the place of religion in the lives of the interviewees. In their introduction the authors outline four major social transformations that have an effect on the group being studied here: the growth in higher education; the delay in marriage; economic change which has seen the end the stability of life-long careers; the willingness of parents to support their children for longer than would have been the case in the past. Therefore the emerging adult is characterized as a generation which spends longer at college, stays longer in the parental home, takes longer to settle into a career, and waits longer before marrying and having children. The data collected in the study are extensive and varied in both the quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative data answer a wide range of questions which form the core of Chapters four and nine. The statistics are easy to follow and are broken down into a series of broad religious traditions: Conservative Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Latter Day Saints, and Not Religious. The largest religious
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group among 18–23-year-olds in America is Protestant at 46%, followed by Not Religious at 27% and Catholic at 18%. Among the Protestant, Baptist would be the largest grouping. The authors offer a brief analysis of each set of statistics, which is both useful and informative. Although comparisons are always odious, one can’t help comparing and contrasting religious traditions! In Chapter nine the authors try and establish if religious affiliation has any bearing on how one actually lives one’s life and offer a different scale to measure— the devoted, the regular, the sporadic, and the disengaged. The qualitative data are the case studies offered in Chapter one and the content of Chapter seven. The three narratives offered in the first chapter were chosen not because they are necessarily representative, but because they offer an insight into some of the ‘emerging adult life experiences, religious orientations, and cultural outlooks.’ In terms of qualitative data analysis, the ability to read the particular narrative allows for a more comprehensive understanding of religious identity than the statistics might offer. The stories of the teenagers of Smith’s first study, Soul Searching, are revisited in Chapter seven. The narratives make interesting reading, especially in the light of the statistic which showed the decline in religious affiliation and practice in this group from the time they were in the 13–17 age bracket. Chapter three places the subjects of the study in the context of previous generations. Although weekly attendance at religious services is down from the 1970s, there is no evidence for secularization on a wide scale. While they are no less religious than previous generations of emerging adults, it probably comes as no surprise to find them less religious than older adults. Whether this will change in the future may well require another study, but some subjects did say that they expected to be more religious in the future when they were older and had responsibility for rearing children. The data analysis might be considered in a number of ways. Chapters two and five set out some of the cultural themes and structures which define (in as much as that is possible) this generation: transition; independence/dependence; issues around drugs, alcohol, sex and relationships, the law; relationships with parents; moral and cultural relativism, to name a few. By defining these themes, the authors place their study firmly in the sociocultural context of America today. In Chapter six, the authors offer a religious typology of the emerging adult—six religious types: the committed traditionalist; the selective adherents; the spiritually open; the religiously indifferent; the religiously disconnected; the irreligious. Each of these types is illustrated with a narrative example. The authors conclude with a chapter which attempts to make ‘some sense of it all.’ The reader is offered a ‘variety of trends, tendencies, conditions, casual mechanisms, and forces.’ What they have to say on a number of the topics is valuable—on the emerging adult; the role of parents and the importance of socialization; the sovereignty of the individual and cultural relativism over an understanding of the place of knowledge in the lives of the emerging adult; the uncoupling of the spiritual from the religious. These are all topics which are as relevant to the Christian Churches in Ireland as they are in the United States. The book is dense, as one should expect from a study of this quality, and a basic understanding of statistics would be a help. However, the analysis is comprehensive, insightful and thought-provoking. The real treasure of the book is the narratives of various participants. It is a detailed and rich description and deserves a great deal of consideration and contemplation. I look forward to hearing their stories when they move
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out of home, settle down and begin the task of passing on their religious identity, affiliation and practice to the next generation.
Religion and Science Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History. By Don O’Leary. London: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 356. Price £30 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-82641868-5. Reviewed by: Terence Kennedy, CSsR, Alphonsian Academy, Rome
Given Don O’Leary’s professional expertise in science and history, the decision to publish this history is felicitous. Since the Galileo affair Protestants have dominated this field, portraying the Catholic Church’s teaching authority as hostile to science’s advancement. This study is long overdue in view of the current fascination with this conflict. The author starts by observing that history leads us to moderate both the opinion that sets the Church against science and the apologists’ insistence on their harmony. No facile account of their relationship is possible. This book seeks to weigh all the factors involved: philosophical, theological, economic and political, as well as academic rivalries and the organization of research. The author noted that his conclusions are limited by incomplete knowledge of archives and especially a scarcity of sociological information on the reception of scientific theories in the wider community. O’Leary aims to be as comprehensive, balanced and even-handed in his judgments as this allows. He focuses on events from roughly 1800 to the beginning of the new millennium, a period characterized first by strife over Darwinism and evolution and now by bioethics. No doubt a passion to understand science’s growth and its impact on religion and community mores motivated him as a believing scientist to attempt to untangle the Church’s criss-crossed relationship with science in the contemporary world. Other important themes that emerge forcefully are summarized in these words: ‘developments in geology, the philosophy of science, the professionalization of science, agnosticism, the association of anti-Catholicism and science, the historical criticism of the Bible, intellectual freedom in relation in relation to faith and ecclesiastical authority, the conflict between ultraconservative and progressive thinking in Roman Catholicism, the nature of Catholic dogmas vis-à-vis science, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, what science had to say about the existence of God, and Catholic bioethics’ (p. xvi). O’Leary approaches his subject basically as a story by narrating decisive events in this chronicle to lay bare its complexity. He starts each chapter with a swift impressionistic sketch of the period’s intellectual atmosphere, both ecclesiastical and cultural. When confronted with a classic such as Origin of Species or ecclesiastical declarations he examines their principal theses in detail, usually in the form of a list followed by a brief commentary. Most of his effort goes into analyzing the key events that form turningpoints in the drama. His style is at once pleasing, clear and effective and makes a mass of research findings accessible to an informed public. The index and the 80-plus pages of notes and rich bibliography at the back of the book demonstrate the breadth of this study. The chapter headings highlight the contours in the historical landscape: the sources of conflict from Galileo to Darwin; the religion–science tension in Victorian Britain that
