NCLA Review - A few years ago Christian Smith published a seminal work summarizing his research into the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. All the research for that book derived from the National Study of Youth and Religion. His findings changed dramatically our understanding of teen religion. He emphasized that teens are more traditional than we had thought, adopting, for the most part, the religion and spirituality of their parents, a vague, self-defined spirituality Smith titled Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Souls in Transition is the follow-up study to Soul-Searching, analyzing data on the teenagers who are now emerging adults. Smith is a sociologist of religion, so the book reads like a work of sociology, with a heavy emphasis on statistics and data-analysis from interviews. However, it is not a dry read. Librarians will want to acquire Soul-Searching and Souls in Transition as a set. Together, they will give readers a better picture of the spiritual lives of teenagers and emerging adults than any other book on the market today. Rating: 4 —CS ( )

agreed with other reviews that the book got too bogged down in information to read - if I needed some statistics for a project or something like that, it would be a very good resource, but as a book to read on the topic, it just wasn't a good fit for me. (I have so many books I want to read that I have determined that I just need to allow myself not to finish any books that aren't "good enough" - thus my new DNF (did not finish) "shelf") ( )