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Using Sermon Text Archives To Investigate The Construction Of Social Values: A Proposal For A Collaborative Research Agenda In Social Epistemology, Daniel Roland

Daniel Roland

This article presents a detailed description of a research agenda and methodology inspired by Jesse Shera’s notion of social epistemology as the study of “the ways in which society generates new knowledge, disseminates it, and uses it to contribute to the values the society seeks.”1 The research agenda is ambitious and echoes the call that Shera put forth with Margaret Egan that librarianship be a discipline “for the effective investigation of the whole complex problem of the intellectual processes of society.”2 The research agenda focuses on sermons as a communication medium that significantly influences the social construction of knowledge. With …