Hood to Offer Fall 2024 Messinger-Williams Community Education Initiative

The Messinger-Williams Community Education Initiative is an extension of the Hood Theological Seminary’s Messinger and Williams Family Chair in Theology and Ethics. Courses are offered at various times throughout the year. Course topics vary but will consistently deal with issues of faith, ethics, and community. The courses are free and open to the public.  

The Fall 2024 Messinger-Williams Community Education Initiative will look at the reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024) by Jonathan Haidt.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes the answer has to do with what he calls “the great rewiring of childhood,” which took place right under our noses when we placed smartphones in the hands of our children and left them to navigate the online world on their own, without guidance or guardrails.

In his latest book The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, 2024), Haidt examines how this “great rewiring” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

The Fall 2024 Messinger-Williams Community Education Initiative will be devoted to a six-week study of The Anxious Generation starting October 6 – November 14, 2024.

Facilitator: Trevor Eppehimer, Ph.D. Messinger-Williams Family Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at Hood Theological Seminary (Salisbury, NC). Please contact Dr. Eppehimer for any questions at teppehimer@hoodseminary.edu. 

The Messinger-Williams Community Education Initiative at Hood Theological Seminary is an extension of the Hood Theological Seminary’s Messinger and Williams Family Chair in Theology and Ethics. Its mission is to facilitate explorations of topics related to ethics, community, faith, and meaning-in-life for the general public. Courses are free and open to all.

For more information including participation options, schedule, and registration, please go here: https://www.hoodseminary.edu/Initiatives/community-education-initiative/current-course-offering