Eddie Cotter: Spiritual maintenance after the ‘mountaintop moment’

With the school year approaching, a challenge looms for Catholic teenagers across America — the dreaded post-conference spiritual crash.

After experiencing powerful spiritual moments from jampacked summers of Steubenville Conferences, LifeTeen and summer camps, or even parish pilgrimages and mission trips to far flung locales, some teenagers find the spiritual “high” of the summer doesn’t keep up with the day-to-day grind of regular life.

Youth ministers call it the “spiritual crash,” and few of them are surprised when it happens.

But what can be done to help kids develop their spiritual lives, build for the long-term from powerful “one-shot” experiences?

Eddie Cotter is familiar with the notorious spiritual crash.

For the past 35 years, he has worked as a youth minister, attending many camps and conferences along the way. (He’s also a former rock musician, member of an Irish band and the Rockefeller Center Santa Claus.) He is the assistant director of youth ministry at St. Patrick Parish in Columbus, Ohio and the executive director of the Dead Theologians Society, an international apostolate providing youth ministers with resources to host