Big Questions, Worthy Dreams
Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith
- Discipleship & Christian Education
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2019
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Publisher's Description
Mentoring Emerging Adults Sharon Daloz Parks has written Big Questions, Worthy Dreams to inform and inspire renewed commitment by educators, church leaders, and others to consider the institutional and cultural patterns that affect emerging adults. It serves to bridge the divide between generations and to encourage more adequate recognition of what is at stake in the response of all who interact with emerging young adult lives. Our economic and political life has become more brittle, volatile, and global, which both enlarges and constrains young adult aspirations. Today's emerging adults are both more connected and more distracted. And religion and faith have become both problematized and polarized. Parks defines faith as meaning-making in its most comprehensive dimensions, whether expressed in secular or religious terms. Over time, our meaning-making orients our sense of purpose, moral stance, and competence. The book describes the potential vulnerability of emerging adults and shows how mentors and mentoring environments can provide access to big-enough questions and inspire dreams worthy of engaging with our challenging and complex world. Parks addresses important issues of the day, including violence in our culture, social media and networking, economic challenges, changing racial identity, cultural shifts, and other forces shaping the narrative of emerging adulthood today.
Endorsements (9)
“From today’s vantage point, the things at stake in Big Questions, Worthy Dreams are even more profound and urgent than they were the first time around. This is not a little story about young people. It is a big story about humanity and the persistent quest for meaning and purpose. Parks begs us to get young people on the mat and wrestling with life’s big questions, and to help them build authentic lives that do right by those questions. The moment is now, the responsibility is ours, the key is mentorship, and the payoff should be big—for all of us.”
“This is the classic work on emerging adulthood, now updated to reckon with the bewildering and very big questions the past decades have delivered up: think 9/11, Facebook, global recession, climate change. Scholarly, wise, elegant, and deeply insightful, the book is an indispensable resource for all who work with people in the awe- and angst-filled years between eighteen and thirty-two, all who interact with them, and all who care about their safe passage into mature and compassionate adults. And, as Sharon Parks helps us see, all of us should care, because the stakes are high. Mentoring from “hospitable” adults can make all the difference in how high they set their sights and how, more than ever, upcoming generations have fateful choices to make about their lives and our common future that we need them to take up faithfully and fully awake. Parks, a master teacher, lights the way—theirs and ours.”
“I have used Big Questions, Worthy Dreams for eight years as a key text in two graduate courses preparing students for licensure in the field of psychotherapy. Not only does it provide essential insight they will need in their professional lives and work with others, but it also provides confirmation and ways of understanding their own experience in more adequate ways.”
“No one who cares deeply about people in their twenties should be without this book. In Sharon Daloz Parks’s lyrical company we learn so much more about their biggest possibilities—and our own.”
“Parks’s clear voice in Big Questions, Worthy Dreams is simultaneously that of a scholar, clinician, ethicist, and priest—that of a rare and capable generalist who can nurture both teachers and students . . . [and] reveal the architecture of the process by which we merge the questions of ultimate reality with the immediate needs and duties of our generation. Stunningly transparent. Essential insight.”
“I read Big Questions, Worthy Dreams when I first became a rabbi on campus. My copy is well worn and overflowing with underlined passages. Sharon Daloz Parks’s wisdom and insight continue to enlighten and inspire all who work with emerging adults across lines of profession, discipline, and faith.”
“In this book, Sharon Daloz Parks has given us a rare and precious gem that shines a deeply sensitive and profoundly sweet light into the core meaning of higher education. With an intellectual edge honed by experience, she writes with her characteristic compassion and brilliant reflections on the big questions of our time. Her search and explorations reignite the spirit, purpose, and calling of our common work as mentors and educators seeking to understand how to help form more responsible global citizens. Give this book to yourself and as a gift to a friend.”
“Big Questions, Worthy Dreams is welcome relief from recent portrayals of university students as character-flawed consumers. Parks’s skillful presentation of developing ‘consciousness, conscience, and competence’ in emerging adults challenges university colleagues to reclaim their shared project of higher education with enlarged imaginations and renewed purpose.”
“Making meaning is a challenge at all stages of life, but perhaps most of all during the emerging adult years, when most young people leave their family home and then have to find a new place in the world. In this book, Sharon Daloz Parks explores with insight and empathy the many ways that today’s emerging adults struggle to answer their big questions and reach their dreams—and how, as mentors, we can help them get there. This book will be a valuable resource for parents, professors, professors, administrators, employers, and all others who care about emerging adults and want to see them thrive.”
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