This article explores religious and spiritual influences that motivate adolescents to show kindness toward their peers who are outside their friend group. Findings from semi-structured interviews with 21 students from eight Christian high schools show the importance of presence, modeling, resources, and education for supporting adolescent…

Clergy sexual abuse is happening in faith communities. Particularly, Korean immigrant churches, though playing crucial roles in empowering immigrants' agency and providing support networks, often fail to support survivors because of both a dysfunction of culture and a fragmented educational ministry. Along with the #ChurchToo movement, young women…

An expansive understanding of ancestors is integral to the opening of imaginative spaces for religious education--particularly in university and adult faith formation settings--to grapple deeply with contexts of precarity and the hopelessness such contexts breed. More specifically, this essay considers how hauntings by one's past selves…

Sacred teaching takes many forms across religious traditions, focusing on creation and sacramentality in Christianity, God's nature and creation of human beings in Judaism, and spiritual and social practices in both. At the heart of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions are accents on the sacredness of life, creation in the image of God, and…

This article is concerned with the role of encounter in the development of identities of compassion in the communities of l'Arche. The relational practices of compassionate care and the welcoming of vulnerability, learned by newcomers to l'Arche communities through encounter with long-term members of the communities, especially those with…

To live is to be vulnerable. The fact of our fragility has been laid bare in some of the crises we face in public life in the United States: an uncontained pandemic, relentless racist violence, and persistent and worsening ecological loss. This essay argues that although education has sometimes promised (even obliquely) an economic, political, or…

This paper highlights two emerging models for how religious education is evolving in new venues to reach new audiences today. The first is an online course that equips a new generation of chaplains to accompany community organizers and activists on the front lines of social change by providing spiritual and emotional support. The second is…

Decety et al. posited that family religiosity has a negative effect on children's altruism. However, a constructive reading of developmental psychologists suggests that religious nurture can enhance young children's moral development. Bloom and Harris offered evidence that infants and toddlers exhibit moral sensibilities and preschoolers engage…

True freedom and true peace are cousins, but they can only work together if the freedom of one people is seen in relation to the freedom of another. Struggles for freedom and peace can only enhance each other if the peace people seek is a robust harmony in which conflict is embraced and people are encouraged to imagine a far stronger freedom and…

This article responds to sociologist Christian Smith's claim that many teenagers today have lost traditional religious faith and instead espouse a new and erroneous faith in God the "Cosmic Therapist." The author challenges this claim by comparing two of Smith's chief complaints vis-a-vis teen faith to established portraits of adolescent faith.…

This article will briefly review resources in youth ministry--two groundbreaking classics and a recent surge of good work--that can guide the footsteps of those who work with teens within faith communities. The best resources for ministry with teens engage mind, body, and spirit--always moving toward the practical step of inviting new action in…

The Enlightenment rejection of the Cartesian mechanistic understanding of animals was accompanied by a (re)new(ed) anti-cruelty sentiment. Compassion, however, fell victim to the triumph of reason leading Western culture toward an era of cruelty to animals on an unprecedented scale. What was absent in Enlightenment thought, even among proponents…

Empirical research exploring the spiritual lives of young children in Australia is a field in which scholarship is beginning to emerge. This article reports on one particular finding that emerged from an Australian study seeking to identify some characteristics of children's spirituality in Catholic primary schools. The characteristic has been…