Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
Sharon Daloz Parks provides a very useful contribution to the literature on faith development. Her 1986 book, The Critical Years:
Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment, is now out of print and has been rewritten by Sharon and published as Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, by Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 2000.
Sharon is an Associate Director at the Whidbey Institute for Earth, Spirit, and the Human Future, and teaches at Seattle University. She’s just published her new book, Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World.
Introduction
Parks explains that when invited to rewrite Critical Years she found that with all the changes made she’d written a new book. She cites the changes since 1988: economic changes affecting young adults, extension of life span making the 20s decade more significant, and religious pluralism. She says that it has become even more important to understand faith in its broadest most inclusive form as the activity of making meaning that all human beings share. She explains that the first book was aimed at people involved in higher/tertiary education. She expands that context in the new book, particularly in chapter 9.
Sharon has worked and researched at Whitworth College, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Business School, Kennedy School of Government and in a study published as Common Fire : Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World.
1. Young Adulthood in a Changing World: Promise and Vulnerability
Sharon helps us think about the threshold into adulthood by asking about the the key marker that defines the task of the young adult era. She writes that the central task is found in the experience of the birth of critical awareness and the dissolution and recomposition of the meaning of self, other, world and ‘God’. Between the ages of 17 to 30 a distinctive mode of meaning making can emerge:
- Becoming critically aware of one’s own composing of reality
- Self-consciously participating in an ongoing dialogue toward truth
- Cultivating a capacity to respond in ways that are satisfying and just.
2. Meaning and Faith
Sharon considers the various ways in which people approach the concept of faith.
Religion - association with a particular practice or dogma. Problematic in a multi-faith community. Spirituality - faith connected with faithfulness - trust, loyalty, connection. A human universal - something everybody develops. Belief. Parks traces the shift of meaning in the words ‘belief’ from holding something dear, to a more impersonal assent to dogma.
Truth and Skepticism. For faith to become mature it must be able to doubt itself.
Sharon goes on to explore faith as a primal force of promise and a centre of power, value and affection. She looks into the realities of everyday polytheism - juggling many gods - and what Niebuhr called ‘henotheism’ - the elevation of a single cause or centre such as career. With Niehbuhr she calls us to radical monotheism as the One embracing the many. Parks explores the realities of suffering and faith, working on the metaphors of shipwreck, gladness and amazement.
3. Becoming at Home in the Universe
Here Parks draws together her learnings from a number of academic theorists. This is best read as a journey of synthesis for Parks, rather than just an academic summary.
Sharon begins with the contributions of Erik Erikson. She considers the ways in which Jean Piaget work is expressed in Robert Fulgham’s essay, “All I ever need to learn I learned at kindergarten”. She looks at the work of Robert Kegan’s theory of self in motion, seeing our human development in relationship to our environment over time. Carol Gilligan’s perspective focuses not on differentiation of subject from object, but on the relation that orients subect to object, self to other, self to truth, self to possibility. James Fowler’s work is explored in relation to faith and psychological development. Bill Perry’s work at Harvard provides the final link in Sharon’s development of an approach to young adult faith formation. Keniston’s work on the development of the ‘twenty something’ stage helped confirm Parks’ hunch that there are two separate identifiable stages in fourth stage of Kegan and Fowler. She writes about a paper written by her then-future husband, Larry Daloz, that helped her realise that our metaphors of growth and development shape our approach to real people.
Parks challenges the fixation we have with the metaphor of journey. She says that perhaps for males the central task in becoming self may be separation or differentiation, going forth and heading out. In contrast, for females, the task of becoming a self requires identification with, attachment, and connection. She thus identifies to great yearnings that can be held within the same person: one of autonomy, the other of relation.
The remaining chapters I’ll cover in other posts…
4. It Matters How We Think
5. It all depends…
6. … On Belonging
7. Imagination: The Power of Adult Faith
8. The Gifts of a Mentoring Environment
9. Mentoring Communities
10. Culture as Mentor
Tags: Faith Development, Sharon Daloz Parks
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Monday, December 5th, 2005
After talking through James Fowler’s theories on faith development last month, I undertook to explore the literature that’s been written in response.
One very helpful source I’ve found is an article written by Fowler himself in Religious Education, volume 99, no. 4, Fall 2004. The article is available as a pdf (80k) from Religious Education’s archive of featured articles. This is a follow up to the first article on faith development theory, entitled, Agenda Toward a Developmental Perspective on Faith, published in Religious Education in volume LXIX, March - April 1974, pp. 209 - 219.
Influences
James starts with an account of the early influences on his life. He talks about the effect of his father, a Methodist preacher. At the ages of five, eleven and sixteen he had experiences of emotional awakening and of dedicating his life to God in Christ.
His theological formation was tied together with experience in youth ministry and Christian education. His thoughts on faith development were being formed as his first child was growing up at the same time as his engagement with the work of Richard Niebuhr’s Faith On Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith and Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith.
He spent weeks in intensive seminars at Interpreter’s House, participating and leading in a process of deepening personal, vocational and spiritual lives. As part of that process Fowler invited participants to engage with the eight ages of the life cycle laid out in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society.
Fowler’s students introduced him to Lawrence Kohlberg who was etablishing the Center for Moral Development, using Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Fowler was inspired to commission his students to conduct ‘faith development interviews’. James talks about the influence of Jesuit students who challenged his focus on cognitive development alone, introducing him to spiritual exercises of Ignatius. He talks also of the influence of colleagues Carol Gilligan, Robert Selman, Robert Kegan and Sharon Parks. Eventually in 1981, while teaching at Emory University, Fowler published “Stages of Faith: the Psychology of Human Development“.
Since the publication of Stages of Faith, there have been four other books by Fowler that extend faith development research and its implications for practical theology:
Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian, Harper 1984, Jossey-Bass (Revised) 2000;
Faith Development and Pastoral Care, Fortress Press, 1987
Weaving the New Creation, Harper 1991, Wipf & Stock, 2001
Faithful Change: The Personal and Public Challenges of Postmodern Life, Abingdon 1996.
Recommended Reading
Developing a Public Faith: New Directions in Practical Theology, Chalice Press, 2003
a thoughtful collection of essays by international authors honoring and critically engaging this author’s work in faith development and practical theology appeared in 2003. Edited by Richard R. Osmer and Friedrich L. Schweitzer.
Responses from religious educators
Now what is fascinating is Fowler’s outline of the responses of religious groups to faith development theory.
James writes about the adoption of the model by Catholic religious educators, made possible by a Thomistic trust in the power of reason, informed by faith, to help discipline and offest the corrosive effects of the Fall.
Protestants were certainly mixed in their response. Positive responses came from traditions that emphasise the rational potential of human persons and communities, such as Unitarian Universalists, United Methodists, liberal Baptists, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ and Reform Jews. Fowler found a more cautious response from Lutherans, Presbyterians and Orthodox Jews who were the least likely to entertain hopes of responsible selfhood associated with development in faith.
Fowler graciously doesn’t mention the people who rejected his work outright because of the word “psychology”. I’ve mixed in some circles where Fowler was held in deep suspicion because of what was perceived to be worldliness. No doubt this was matched by a Calvinist belief in total depravity in which any attempts at human improvement were regarded as almost blasphemous.
Some affirmations
1. Characterization of faith that combines phenomenological account of what faith does with a conceptual model of waht faith is.
2. Extension of structural development traditions in the research of Piaget, Kohlberg and others - beyond a dominantly cognitive perspective.
3. Offering of implications and pointing to methods that resonate with what we think we have learned about religious nurture and formation.
a. Need for a relational nurture that receives the child as God’s blessed creation.
b. Need for ways of engaging children and youth that include sacred practices and texts (including images) as sustaining resources in their imaginations, will, knowledge and moral development.
Significant Discusssions
- Toward Moral and Religious Maturity, Brusselmans, 1980
- from a 1979 conference in France.
- Faith Development and Fowler, ed. Dystra & Parks, 1986
- from a conference in 1982
- Christian Perspectives on Faith Development: A Reader,
ed. Astley and Francis, UK, 1992
- Stages of Faith and Religious Development: Implications for Church, Education, and Society,
ed. Nipkow, Schweitzer, Fowler, 1991
Critical Issue of Inclusiveness
James names the most central divider between critics and fans of faith development theory: the inclusive generic nature of the model which allows for a variety of traditions, Christian and other. Fowler responds by saying that it should never be the primary goal of religious education simply to precipitate and encourage stage advancement. Movement in stage development, properly understood, is a byproduct of teaching the substance and the practices of faith.
Faith Development Present and Future
James reflects on the context of higher education in which he first developed his model of faith development. He recognises that higher education is giving way to technical and occupational learning associated with economic survival. Charismatic and mega-style churches are thriving in many cases because their members are not hungering for complexity. He points to the success of Rick Warren’s book and program, “Purpose Driven Life”. James describes this trend as a “new and more sophisticated version of the synthetic-conventional stage of faith.”
Fowler says that we may need to evaluate faith development less in terms of how it addresses cognitive and emotional structures, and “more by its intelligence and commitment in practical engagement with the life issues that threaten to overwhelm so many among us”.
Interesting to me is James’ naming of prison as a place where faith development is needed desperately.
“Faith development, with many of them (prisoners), will have to begin at the very early stages and be accompanied by medical care, group therapy, and spiritual development, including treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. Most of all, the healing power of human love, and of the Holy Spirit’s presence are required for opening hearts hardened through abuse, and throughand the wrongful influences and actions that have shaped their lives.”
Fowler finishes with what he’d like to focus on next - meeting the moral and spiritual demands of postmodern life. His suggested title: “In With All Our Hearts: Joining Systems Understandings with Practical Faith, Justice and Hope“.
Tags: Faith Development, James Fowler
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