Young Adult American Catholics: Explaining Vocation in Their Own Words

In anticipation of World Youth Day and the Synod on Young Adults, this book collects the various perspectives of young Catholic adults to help parishes, seminaries, and other Catholic leaders make sense of the pastoral needs and understanding of vocation among young adults. This edited collection provides both research findings from the latest data as well as first-hand experiences spoken from the populations under study. In using both scholarship and first-person stories, this book provides keen insight on a variety of young adult groups in a language that is accessible and engaging to a variety of readers.

The three parts of the book-life cycle, identity and practice, and ecclesial leadership-provide three lenses with which to view vocation. Life-course, the first part, follows Catholics over time, allowing a window to view the changing needs of young adults as they enter college, forge their own path as single adults, and raise children. In examining identity and practice within the second part, the reader will discover the ways various commitments and aspects of identity- such as political ideology or ethnicity-shape understandings of religious vocation. The final part examines understandings of vocation among those directly working the the church as priests, sisters, and lay ecclesial ministers. These three parts together will get at vocation from a variety of angles, collectively offering a complete picture of vocation among young adult Catholics today.