David F White – författare

Dreamcare: A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation helps parents, youth workers, and congregations cultivate purpose and vocation in youth and young adults. Recent findings disclose a pervasive sense of purposelessness that threatens young adults'' health and well-being, and also the common good. The good news is that research shows all young people also have an often hidden sense of purpose that can be noticed, named, and nurtured by parents and communities. This volume supplements research with findings from Emory''s Youth Theological Initiative (YTI), which identifies four pathways--desire, joy, compassion, and responsibility--by which young people discover a sense of purpose. Growing from research at YTI, this volume provides concrete suggestions for how Christian communities might engage young people in practices to cultivate a sense of purpose, including narrative resources by which to make theological sense of their impulses of desire, joy, compassion, and responsibility.

Youth ministry has increasingly lost touch with its origins in the way of Jesus and the social practices intrinsic to Christian discipleship, and has instead substituted layers of Jesus talk, middle class values, fun and games, and doses of warm fellow-feeling. Awakening Youth Discipleship articulates the history of this domestication of youth and ministry. Mahan, Warren, and White tell a story of the ways in which our society has colluded to shape a domesticated adolescence. The authors believe a Christian response to this challenge must be multilevel, addressing the problem at three levels--society, church, and individual. The authors propose reclaiming practices of discernment that both engage congregations in social awareness and involve individuals in discerning fuller vocational opportunities than those allowed by popular cultural norms.

Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World engages the central question of Christian formation, that is, what kind of knowing is most likely to awaken and sustain Christian faith? This book seeks to reclaim aesthetics--beauty and creativity--as the church''s most native theological way of knowing and being, which participates with God''s own glory and creativity. This book traces the prominence of aesthetics up until the dawn of the Enlightenment, including recent theologians who reclaim aesthetics for theology and formation. The book elaborates the aims and techniques of aesthetic approaches to teaching and learning in the church. Finally, this book cautions against overly determined rationalisms and moralisms that do not retain a sense of wonder, delight, and openness in the church''s teaching, liturgy, and proclamation. In this view, the church does not simply regurgitate familiar texts, political tropes, or flattened doctrines but breaks into the world as Christ''s body, a parable, a song, a flash mob, interrupting business as usual, giving new expression to acts of care, repentance, forgiveness, joy, and communion, awake to the beauty of God''s gifts and inviting our worship.