Second, “Hurt” focuses more on the development of adolescents into adulthood, not adolescent spirituality. Can you find Chap actually saying “Teenagers are abandoned and hurting and find little solace in religion” in the book? If so, let me know.

I’m not sure your assessment of “Hurt” is fair in light of these two things.

While all three might represent a different kind/swath/end result for different kids, it all stems from the fact that youth do not understand what Christianity should be. The Postmodern searching crowd seems to be searching, partly because they don’t understand what they have grown up in. The Soul Searching crowd, while conventional in practice, is not really Christian but what he calls “Moralistic, Therapeutic, Diest”. And the Hurt crowd has been flat out burned by the Church.

One could simply assume that the inarticulateness, the political co-opting, and flat out laziness of many Churches is to blame for this misinforming of the youth. It’s also worth noting, however, that there is often a difference between what the church says and what a person (regardless of age) wants to hear, or not hear .

People are just generally kind of messed up. There’s probably no easy answer for understanding youth and the church, but we’ve got to keep trying. Good work Tony.

Furthermore, my hunch is that each author is biased – not in a bad way, but in a way that reflects their experience, training, hunches, and on and on.

One struggle I have with the quantitative methods and data collection methods used by Smith is that it is very hard to get any sense of depth in phone interviews asking multiple choice questions. However, the strength of his methods is that he got a nationally representative sample of 3000 plus teens and parents.

One struggle I have with qualitative data is that it alomst impossible to get a representative sample. Qualitative samples are generally non-representative (often on purpose) such that there is no way to draw any meaningful conclusion to anyone outside the sample.

So, as to the bell curve – not sure. My guess is that Smith’s data covers at least as much as Tony says, if not more, but not in enough depth. There are probably lots of hurting and seeking kids in his sample, but he just could not get at that hurt or seeking due to the limits of the methods of data collection.

Also, postmodern youth may not be full on postmodern. There are more than likely degrees of postmodernity and it may vary frm one topic to the next, from one area in their life to the next, on just how postmodern their beliefs are. And, are some youth with a postmodern vocabulary who, in a inch, fall back to something more conventional? Not sure.

Finally, it is hard for me to buy the bell curve metaphor as it seems to make these groups mutually exclusive, when they are most likely not. There is probably some overlap in postmodern youth and hurting youth, but this metaphor of the Bell Curve makes them not only mutually exclusive, but somewhat opposites. Does more postmodernity mean less hurt (and viceversa)? Probably not that clean.

But, I do like how Tony presses the conversation forward. What I take from these different views of youth and religion from the three books is that there is a complexity in all this that cannot be narrated one way.