Editor's page.

Boyatzis, Chris J.

The organization of this special issue commenced some time ago, with the hope of amassing papers that focused on religion and spirituality in childhood, an age group often neglected in the psychology of religion and spirituality. As papers began to come in for review, I realized the benefits of presenting work on a wider age range that would include adolescents and emerging adults. This search netted many more submissions than I could include in the issue, and the six articles published here survived rigorous peer-review with a 60% rejection rate, close to the journal's regular rejection rate.

This issue presents a set of six articles that investigate religion and spirituality from childhood through adolescence and into emerging adulthood. There are several aspects of these papers that are especially satisfying. First, the authors of these papers include many senior and recognized scholars but also younger authors at the ranks of graduate student and early career professional. Second, while the topics of the articles are not tightly wound a particular theme, several of the articles explore the family as a crucial locus of religious socialization. For example, the first paper, by Renaud, Engarhos, Schleifer, and Tarwar investigated the role of parents' religiosity and spirituality in how parents communicate with their children about death and the afterlife. The second paper, by McMurdie, Dollahite, and Hardy, addresses a very basic but overlooked question: how do parents and adolescents believe that religion affects them? The third paper, by Barry, Prenoveau, and Diehl, tested how emerging adults' memories of faith activities in the home when growing up predicted their religious practices and beliefs later on. The fourth paper, by Kimball, Cook, Boyatzis, and Leonard, assessed the links between emerging adults' qualitative descriptions of meaning making and faith turning points in relation to their attachment to parents, among other variables. Thus, a clear theme running through many of the papers is the focus on the family.

The two other papers in this issue examine how religion and spirituality play a role in some challenging circumstances in young people's lives. Hall and Flanagan study how early adolescents' coping strategies may mediate the link between religiosity and psychosocial adjustment. Hawley and Mahoney explore how college students deal with romantic break-ups and whether a sense of sacred loss and desecration have a role in the students' well-being after the break-ups.

Several features of these papers deserve mention. The samples represent a rich breadth in terms of age, religious background, and geographic setting. In terms of design and methodology, readers will be pleased to see that none of the papers here rely on simple or single measures of religiosity and spirituality. These scholars recognize the multidimensionality of these constructs and use sophisticated measures to assess them. Some papers feature longitudinal design and some emphasize qualitative data. When scholars are assessing outcomes, multiple measures are used. Thus, these papers represent sophisticated approaches to important questions in our field. I trust these papers will be valuable to scholars and practitioners and will be cited for years to come.

Chris J. Boyatzis, Guest Editor

Bucknell University