Sharon Daloz Parks - Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith

More Praise for Big Questions, Worthy Dreams

Making meaning is a challenge at all stages of life, but perhaps most of all during the emerging adult years, when most young people leave their family home and then have to find a new place in the world. In this book, Sharon Daloz Parks explores with insight and empathy the many ways that todays emerging adults struggle to answer their big questions and reach their dreams and how, as mentors, we can help them get there. This book will be a valuable resource for parents, professors, administrators, employers, and all others who care about emerging adults and want to see them thrive.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Clark University; author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties

Big Questions, Worthy Dreams is welcome relief from recent portrayals of university students as character-flawed consumers. Parkss skillful presentation of developing consciousness, conscience, and competence in emerging adults challenges university colleagues to reclaim their shared project of higher education with enlarged imaginations and renewed purpose.

Patricia OConnell Killen, academic vice president, Gonzaga University

In this book, Sharon Daloz Parks has given us a rare and precious gem that shines a deeply sensitive and profoundly sweet light into the core meaning of higher education. With an intellectual edge honed by experience, she writes with her characteristic compassion and brilliant reflections on the big questions of our time. Her search and explorations reignite the spirit, purpose, and calling of our common work as mentors and educators seeking to understand how to help form more responsible global citizens. Give this book to yourself and as a gift to a friend.

Manuel N. Gomez, vice chancellor, emeritus, University of California, Irvine

I read Big Questions, Worthy Dreams when I first became a rabbi on campus. The copy is well worn and overflowing with underlined passages. Sharon Daloz Parkss wisdom and insight continue to enlighten and inspire all who work with emerging adults across lines of profession, discipline, and faith.

Rabbi Josh Feigelson, educational director, AskBigQuestions, an initiative of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life

From todays vantage point, the things at stake in this tenth anniversary edition are even more profound and urgent than they were the first time around. This is not a little story about young people. It is a big story about humanity and the persistent quest for meaning and purpose. Parks begs us to get young people on the mat and wrestling with lifes big questions, and to help them build authentic lives that do right by those questions. The moment is now, the responsibility is ours, the key is mentorship, and the payoff should be bigfor all of us.

Richard A. Settersten Jr., author, Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why Its Good for Everyone

This is the classic work on emerging adulthood, now updated to reckon with the bewildering and very big questions the past decade has delivered up: think 9/11, Facebook, global recession, climate change. Scholarly, wise, elegant, and deeply insightful, the book is an indispensable resource for all who work with people in the awe- and angst-filled years between 18 and 32, all who interact with them, and all who care about their safe passage into mature and compassionate adults. And, as Sharon Parks helps us see, all of us should care, because the stakes are high. Mentoring from hospitable adults can make all the difference in how high they set their sights and now, more than ever, upcoming generations have fateful choices to make about their lives and our common future that we need them to take up faithfully and fully awake. Parks, a master teacher, lights the waytheirs and ours.

Diana Chapman Walsh, president emerita, Wellesley College; board chair, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

No one who cares deeply about people in their twenties should be without this book. In Sharon Daloz Parkss lyrical company we learn so much more about their biggest possibilitiesand our own.

Robert Kegan, author, In Over Our Heads; professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Parkss clear voice in Big Questions, Worthy Dreams is simultaneously that of a scholar, clinician, ethicist, and priestthat of a rare and capable generalist who can nurture both teachers and students... [and] reveal the architecture of the process by which we merge the questions of ultimate reality with the immediate needs and duties of our generation. Stunningly transparent. Essential insight.

Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain of the university, Brown University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parks, Sharon Daloz, date

Big questions, worthy dreams : mentoring emerging adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith / Sharon Daloz Parks.2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.