Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Building An Ecological Church: Laudato Si’, Climate Change, And Clergy In The Roman Catholic Diocese Of Syracuse, Dominic Wilkins

Theses - ALL

Interest in the relationships between the Catholic Church and the environment has grown in recent years, especially following Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, or On the Care for Our Common Home. His letter was widely praised by many Catholic and non-Catholic scholars, journalists, and activists who suggested that this encyclical marked a massive shift in Catholic views about the environment, particularly the climate crisis. Yet despite this early hope, policies around the world remain generally unchanged and the promise early commentators saw in Laudato Si’ lies unfulfilled.

This thesis investigates whether the Catholic Church has attempted to act on …

Pocket Full Of Jesus: Evangelical Christians' Use Of Religious Iphone Applications, Wendi R. Bellar

Media Studies - Theses

Mobile phone applications are providing users many different choices in how they go about their everyday lives, including their spiritual lives. This research explores the factors Evangelical Christians consider when choosing an app, how they actually use the app, and how their app expectations compare with their app experience. Modified diary reports, using the iPhone Voice Memo app, and in-depth interviews were used in order to examine the research questions. The Uses and Gratifications theory, as well as the Religious Social Shaping of Technology theory, were used as lenses for the study. After navigating the process of finding an appropriate …

Exploring Policies Of Spirituality Among College Students, Afton N. Kapuscinski

Psychology - Dissertations

Though psychologists' interest in the empirical study of spirituality has resurfaced, diverging opinions regarding the meaning of the construct among both researchers and the general public pose a serious challenge to research. To expand knowledge regarding how individuals implicitly define the term, an idiographic, experimental approach called policy-capturing was utilized to determine what factors college students take into consideration when making determinations about others' spirituality. Participants were exposed to a series of 50 profiles describing hypothetical people, each of which contained a unique combination of different levels of five factors believed to characterize spirituality by researchers. Participants rated each profile …

"Women With No One": Community And Christianity In A Secular South Indian Homeless Shelter, Connie Etter

Anthropology - Dissertations

This dissertation examines daily life and social service practices in a secular homeless shelter for women in Tamil Nadu, south India. The residents of the shelter have diverse backgrounds but local staff members and volunteers describe them collectively as "women with no one": unwed mothers, orphans, widows, women abandoned or abused by husbands and lovers, former sex workers, prisoners' wives, and women deemed mentally or physically unfit for marriage. Daily negotiations of belonging take place among this transient and diverse group of marginalized women and equally diverse and transnational care providers. The closed shelter campus provides an opportunity to query …

Desecrating Scriptures, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

Desecrations of books of scripture appear regularly in media coverage of religious and political conflicts. Twenty-first century news media have reported scripture desecrations in various Western, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian countries. Though political tensions also arise from the desecration of sacred sites, objects, and persons, books of scripture have emerged as particularly potent objects of contestation. That is because, as a (very) old form of media themselves, scriptures encapsulate the religious experiences of many people who are used to handling the physical book with veneration. News of such a book’s desecration thus inverts a common religious experience and …