Book Review: Wrestling With Rest
My review of Wrestling with Rest: Inviting Youth to Discover the Gift of Sabbath by Nathan T. Stucky was recently published in Theology Today.
As a practice of the church and especially as a field of theological inquiry, youth ministry is largely characterized by a paroxysm of anxiety over the apparent decline of the church and the rise of the “nones” in our secular age. Therefore, it is both exciting and refreshing to discover a book that tends not to institutional trepidation in the youth ministry industrial complex but to the concrete and lived experience of actual young people. In Wrestling with Rest, Nathan T. Stucky fixes attention, as only a skilled practical theologian can, on how our age of anxiety has affected the lives of young people. Utilizing the tools of qualitative research, Stucky investigates young people's experience of rest (or lack thereof) in the midst of a society that frenetically pursues productivity. He then offers a theological anthropology that invites young people (and the reader as well) to discover their humanity and value not in development, productivity, or anxiety but in the grace of God disclosed in the gift of sabbath rest.
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