Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults In Their Search For Meaning, Purpose, And Faith, Revised Edition

Building on the foundation she established with her ground-breaking book, The Critical Years, Parks invites us to take up responsibility for providing thoughtful mentorship and mentoring environments during the wilderness years of young adulthood. In this updated edition she addresses recent current events: violence in our culture, smart phones, mixed spirituality/religious identities, social media/networking, the economic crisis, changing racial identity, cultural shifts and other forces shaping the narrative of young adulthood today. She provides concrete ways of employing the theory in different types of mentoring communities, more on the relationship between meaning-making (faith/religion/spirituality) and disciplinary learning and includes new (and more timely) stories and illustrations.

Sharon Daloz Parks has been described as a keen observer, a probing listener, and a rich and subtle theorist. She is principal of Leadership for the New Commons, a senior fellow at the Whidbey Institute, and has held faculty and senior research positions at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Weston School of Theology.

Preface.

1. Emerging Adulthood in a Changing World: Potential and Vulnerability.

2. The Deep Motion of Life: Composing Meaning, Purpose, and Faith.

3. Becoming at Home in the Universe: A Developmental Process.

4. It Matters How We Think.

5. It All Depends.

6. On Belonging.

7. Imagination: The Core of Learning and the Heart of Leadership.

8. The Gifts of Mentorship and a Mentoring Environment.

9. Higher Education as Mentor.

10. Culture as Mentor.

Coda: Mentoring Communities.

Professional Education and the Professions.

The Workplace.

Travel.

Families.

Religious Faith Communities.

Media.

Social Movements.

Appendix: Faith Development from Adolescence to Mature Adulthood.

Notes.

The Author.

Index.