The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People's Spirituality in a Changing Australia

"The Spirit of Generation Y extends current understanding of young people's inner lives in a rapidly changing world. Targeting a group more often associated with cyberspace than the church pew, it offers an important and innovative reading of the impact of dramatic socio-cultural changes on young people's spiritual lives in late modernity. Drawing on data from a national survey and over one hundred in-depth interviews, The Spirit of Generation Y explores the worldviews and values of those born after 1980, now in their teens and early twenties. It describes in detail the three major types of spirituality found among them: Traditional, New Age and Secular. Despite the prominence in the mass media of alternative spiritualities, this book argues that for the most part, young people are not active spiritual seekers, but instead have a highly individualistic and relativistic approach to life and spirituality, and are hardly familiar with religious traditions. The authors show that spirituality is strongly associated with many other aspects of young people's lives: their sense of meaning, their search for happiness, and particularly their social concern and civic engagement. The study's findings and conclusions are compared with other relevant research and theory, and implications are suggested for understanding and communicating with Generation Y, and for pastoral care and youth ministry, especially in schools."--Publisher.