Adult Faith: Growing in Wisdom and Understanding

While popular writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins denounce religion as immature and infantile and mobilize evidence in the process we witness all around us another development that has received little scholarly attention: namely, adult people seeking more informed and enlightened ways to live out their faith in the world.

This relatively new culture of the adult faith-seeker originated in the closing decades of the twentieth century as developmental psychology highlighted the changing nature of
growth and maturity at different life-stages. Accompanied by the information explosion, adult people particularly began to ask questions for which they sought adult answers. The co-dependency of earlier times, expecting adults to simply accept what religious authorities taught, is alien to adult religious maturity. Adult faith has arrived at a new threshold, requiring novel approaches and strategies in the religious development of adult people.