Abstract

Common sense tells us that youth is a natural and inevitable marker of a biologically determined age, an organically founded classification of people who as a consequence of their age hold specific social positions. However, as documented by many sociologists, youth is not a universal category of biology but a changing social construct which appears at a particular moment of time under definitive conditions. While adults may view youth as merely a state of transition, young people have invested in it as a privileged site in which to foreground their own sense of difference. This includes a refusal to receive religions as “other people” usually do. It is important to make an accommodative dialogue to unite the “goodwill” from the two sides. Hopefully religion will be a pure and sacred thing but have a transformative, contextually-authentic value, and hopefully it can respond to the social problems of our daily reality. The idea of dialogue often comes from youth. However, elders usually ignore the invitation. This article discusses that phenomenon in many perspectives, specifically focusing on how young people interpret holy texts as a way of life and build a dialogue in to the experience of Indonesian society.