The adolescent approach to the religious takes on an unusual aspect in our world-weary time when religiosity plays out everywhere, far from dogmas and churches. Adolescent ways of broaching the ideal are also varied. They go along with a strange solitude, with regard to current heterogeneity of the religious object, but can also swing towards more rigid, even fundamentalist, positions. They are most often complex, split, doomed to an autarchic creativity. This article provides illustrations of the paradox of adolescence in the contemporary universe, where rigidity and fluidity by turns attempt to deal with a religious object that has become diffuse and elusive.

Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 801-813.