Practicing Discernment with Youth

I need to quibble with Kenda Dean on this one. I'm not sure that White is "the most thoughtful scholar in youth ministry today." He is thoughtful but his innovations in terms of integrating practices of discernment into youth ministry suffer from insufficient grounding in a well reasoned normative theology. There are lots of vague references to the "Holy" (as if you could have holiness without the tension of God's grace and anger), social critique more rooted in Adorno than Amos, and a Jesus who did a lot of nice things. In the end, I struggled to place Whites insights into my context.

White clearly operates from a praxis (in the Marxist sense) methodology when it comes to culture and faith. Culture deadens adolescents with its false promises of happiness through consumption. The church must raise critical conciousness in adolescents. We do that through discernment which is a continual cycle of listening (to our true beings), understanding (to those things which deaden our true being), dreaming (connecting our true beings to Scripture and theology) and finally acting (expressing our true selves).

I can agree with most of this but I was always left with the feeling that I could read someone like Naomi Klein and get this. For instance, isn't discernment both horizontal and vertical? Shouldn't I care both about how social studies can explain something and how God continues to act in the world? Is there no personal God that I must attune myself to in some way? I'm not asking for a simplistic Jesus-is-my-boyfriend theology here. I have more than a passing knowledge of St. Ignatius of Loyola for instance, and he clearly had a concept of God's providential activity in the world. Given that White cites Loyola on more than one occasion, where is an Ignatian sense of discernment which recognizes both feelings and the Spirit?

I will use this book in my own ministry but am sad that its audience is so limited. I teach at an evangelical school and we use many different sources for theological reflection. Sadly, Whites animosity towards evangelicals and/or any traditional orthodoxy will make it difficult for me to assign this book. It isn't that I don't want students to get exposure to other theological traditions. This book however has such a narrow focus that I think that to ask students to persevere through the whole thing would not be worth the time investment. What is even sadder may be that I don't get the sense that White cares about this which is a pity because his thoughtful innovations are worthwhile for more than just his small part of the youth ministry world.