About the Project

First of all, you should know that this is a Nerdfighters project. Nerdfighters fight to increase awesome and decrease world suck. If you want to know more about the organization, check out the website: http://nerdfighters.ning.com/. This is an attempt to help with the fight against religious intolerance and to encourage diversity in YA literature.

Also, as I mentioned in my "About Paige" page that this Nerdfighters project is an Honors Contract for my Adolescent Literature class. I go to Gallaudet University (www.gallaudet.edu), and I am in the Honors Program there. In order to get Honors credit for a class, students have to do an Honors Contract. An Honors Contract is not about simply doing extra work, it's about depth. For this project, I am not just doing a project about adolescent literature in general, I am narrowing my focus to religion in YA literature. For my Honors capstone, which is basically a big project that you take on your senior year, I plan to write a novel that involves religion somehow, so this project also helps me prepare for my capstone.

In YA literature, you can find books that deal with race, LGBTQ issues, drug addiction, suicide...the list goes on. However, there are a startlingly low amount of quality YA books that deal with religion. Some YA books have religious characters in them, and often they are portrayed in a negative way or they don't contribute much to the plot. Religion is almost never a central theme either.

For the project, I will read five books:

• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume 
• The Chosen by Chaim Potok 
• Godless by Pete Hautman 
• Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
• Looking for Alaska by fellow Nerdfighter, John Green

For each of the five books, I will write a review discussing how the books included and handled religion.

I will also write five other posts on more general topics relating to religion in YA fiction and nonfiction.

After reading the books and doing some research, I will write a guide to religion in YA literature for librarians and teachers. A PDF of the guide will be posted on this blog.

Any questions about the project? Comment away on any of the posts and pages on the blog!