CPYU President Walt Mueller's critically acclaimed book, Understanding Today's Youth Culture, is widely recognized as one of the most thorough and comprehensive overviews of youth culture today. This Gold Medallion Book Award winner is used as a seminal text in colleges, universities, and seminaries around the world, but is especially noted for its honest and easy to read style. The book approaches youth culture from a distinctively Christian perspective and contains chapters on a variety of topics including: music, media, sexuality, materialism, drugs and alcohol, and spirituality. A great resource for parents, educators, youth workers, and pastors.

Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the USA and mainland Europe, this fascinating new volume addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's identities and lifestyles.

What are the components of youth cultures today? This encyclopedia examines the facets of youth cultures and brings them to the forefront. Although issues of youth culture are frequently cited in classrooms and public forums, most encyclopedias of childhood and youth are devoted to history, human development, and society. A limitation on the reference bookshelf is the restriction of youth to pre-adolescence, although issues of youth continue into young adulthood. This encyclopedia addresses an academic audience of professors and students in childhood studies, American studies, and culture studies. The authors span disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and folklore. The Encyclopedia of Youth Cultures in America addresses a need for historical, social, and cultural information on a wide array of youth groups. Such a reference work serves as a corrective to the narrow public view that young people are part of an amalgamated youth group or occupy malicious gangs and satanic cults. Widespread reports of bullying, school violence, dominance of athletics over academics, and changing demographics in the United States has drawn renewed attention to the changing cultural landscape of youth in and out of school to explain social and psychological problems.

‘On-road’ is a complex term used by young people to describe street-based subculture and a general way of being. Featuring the voices of young people, this collection explores how race, class and gender dynamics shape this aspect of youth culture. With young people on-road often becoming criminalised due to interlocking structural inequalities, this book looks beyond concerns about gangs and presents empirical research from scholars and activists who work with and study the social lives of young people. It addresses the concerns of practitioners, policy makers and scholars by analysing aspects and misinterpretations of the shifting realities of young people’s urban life.

Same-sex marriage is here. So what do pastors and church leaders do now? Churches are now faced with ministry dilemmas unknown to any previous generation. Hoping the problem goes away isn’t a reasonable strategy. Christians must answer difficult questions about ministering both to couples in same-sex marriages and all the people impacted by those unions. Jeff Iorg, a seminary president and experienced pastor, has assembled some of the leading voices on a range of topics from children’s ministry to preaching to legal issues in the new marriage culture. Readers will be equipped, perhaps for the first time, with practical answers to some of these complex questions.

Tim Sudworth presents an overview of innovative and dynamic ways of reaching out to young people. The book includes examples of work with schools, youth congregations, engaging young people in more traditional services and outreach projects.

Models and Methods for Youth and Young Adult Ministry is a rare book on young adult and youth ministry in that it weaves sound theology and solid pastoral practice. It invites pastoral practitioners, scholars in the field, and university-ministry students to envision various models and methods for doing youth and young adult ministry in a collaborative and ecumenical way. Through rich, concrete examples and strategies, the reader will grasp the significance of each model and the various methods to integrate and implement these robust approaches. The result is this book will empower readers toward a more meaningful understanding of youth and young adult ministry, which will in turn engage the young church of Christ.

The teenage years are a unique life stage—one that fills even the calmest parents with confusion and dread as they begin to feel like helpless bystanders to the rapidly changing lives of their teens. If you're struggling as a parent, you're not alone. Raising children is difficult work, and it gets more difficult as they reach adolescence. But you don't need to feel alone or paralyzed by these feelings. With deep encouragement and practical advice born from long study and first-hand experience, Walt Mueller has written a guide for parents with children who are going through the tumultuous years of adolescence. The Space Between will walk you through how your teen is developing physically, socially, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually as you learn: How you can make the adolescent period smoother for your teen. How you can begin to break through the walls of confusion, fear, frustration, and misunderstanding. How you can be a positive and proactive bridgebuilder into the life and world of your teenager. Finally, you'll discover how you can approach the task of parenting teenagers as an opportunity to depend on God while teaching your impressionable teen to do the same.

You may have noticed them—the kids who are hiding their pain under long sleeves or wristbands. Or you might never notice them—the ones who seem to have life together except for the deep secret that they keep hidden beneath their clothes. This is no longer a fringe issue that occurs only in the most extreme cases. The truth is that many teens today are dealing with their emotional pain by inflicting physical pain upon themselves, whether we can see it on the surface or not.While we may never fully understand the motives behind self-mutilation and cutting, we can begin to understand why some teens cut, and more importantly, we can learn how to help. Hope and Healing for Kids Who Cut will take you into the world of self-injury, defining what it is—and what it is not. You’ll hear stories from teens and young adults who struggle with the urge to hurt themselves, and you’ll learn to recognize the signs of self-injury. In addition, counselor and professor, Marv Penner will help you understand the cycle of addiction, that has become everyday life for so many hurting teens, and he’ll give you the tools and wisdom to help a self-injurer find hope and healing.Whether you know someone who is cutting, or you are struggling with this addiction yourself, Hope and Healing for Kids Who Cut is something you want to have in your “first-aid” kit.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Edited Book Award From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market,Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. With its capacity to frighten and warn, dystopian writing powerfully engages with our pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and justice, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self. When directed at young readers, these dystopian warnings are distilled into exciting adventures with gripping plots and accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood. This collection enacts a lively debate about the goals and efficacy of YA dystopias, with three major areas of contention: do these texts reinscribe an old didacticism or offer an exciting new frontier in children's literature? Do their political critiques represent conservative or radical ideologies? And finally, are these novels high-minded attempts to educate the young or simply bids to cash in on a formula for commercial success? This collection represents a prismatic and evolving understanding of the genre, illuminating its relevance to children's literature and our wider culture.