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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Short-Term Missions: Reinforcing Beliefs And Legitimating Poverty, William Vaughan Taylor
Short-Term Missions: Reinforcing Beliefs And Legitimating Poverty, William Vaughan Taylor
Masters Theses
Every year more than a million short-term missionaries travel abroad. Many encounter intense poverty. Popular discourse suggests short-term missionaries return home radically changed. Social movement theory shows collective experiences can transform participants. In this thesis I explore the narratives of short-term missionaries to understand how they understand the poverty they encounter abroad. I have found short-term mission participants think about encounters with the poor in ways that produce contradictory beliefs and legitimate poverty. Interviewees consistently employed deficiency and fatalistic theories of poverty that provide little moral or practical justification for helping the poor. However, these beliefs conflicted with religious convictions. …
Gender, Religiosity, And The Telling Of Christian Conversion Narratives, Jenell Paris, Ines Jindra, Robert Woods, Diane Badzinski
Gender, Religiosity, And The Telling Of Christian Conversion Narratives, Jenell Paris, Ines Jindra, Robert Woods, Diane Badzinski
Sociology Educator Scholarship
Conversion is one important element of religion, the ways in which people shift from one religion (or none) to another, or deepen their commitment within a religion. This study explores the way Christian conversion narratives are told by college students. It considers whether factors such as gender, age, religious denomination, time passed since conversion, and measures of religiosity and orthodoxy influence conversion testimonies. Fifty-nine subjects gave in-depth interviews and completed several surveys, and research was gathered and analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Deborah Tannen’s genderlect styles theory and a social constructivist perspective on Christianity’s overarching story line are …
Mediating Christianity In Asia, Francis Khek Gee Lim
Mediating Christianity In Asia, Francis Khek Gee Lim
Francis Khek Gee Lim
No abstract provided.