New Publication: Youth and Prayer in a Secular Age

I'm happy to announce that my most recent journal article has been published by Brill in Journal of Youth and Theology. It should be in Volume 23, Issue 2. 

The article is called "Youth and Prayer in a Secular Age." Of course, I owe Andrew Root for the title, since I pretty much ripped off the title of his most recent series. The article is about prayer and why it's extra difficult for young people in a secular society. Utilizing the insights of Andrew Root, Byung Chul Han, Hartmut Rosa, and others, I try to not only diagnose difficulties with prayer, but also offer a theology that I hope will help us. 

Here's the Abstract of the article: 

This article diagnoses the difficulty of prayer for young people inhabiting a secular society and offers the beginnings of a theology of prayer for this context. For young people in the United States, our secular age is defined by immanence, excessive positivity, and dynamic stabilization that constitute anxiety as a primary motivator that leads to burnout and exhaustion. Prayer as communion with God offers a corrective that can relieve anxiety and offer renewal. For this, prayer must not be thought primarily as a human action, but a divine action. In prayer, we do not grasp God, we are grasped by God. As such, prayer is a grace young people need, and its teaching must become the primary pastoral vocation in a secular age.

Click here to access the article.