Christian Institutions Research Articles

Supporting Healthy Affect and Coping After Perceived Failure in College Students in Christian Higher Education

Perceived failure in academic performance can lead to differing outcomes for students. Depending on the coping strategies that they choose, students may improve or worsen their performance. This study examined the relationship between affective components and coping strategies in college students’ responses to perceived academic failure and their subsequent academic performance. Data was collected from 122 undergraduate students in 200-level micro and macroeconomics classes at a four-year Christian university in Texas. Participants completed a battery of questionnaires, including the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) to measure positive and negative affect in response to their first exam grade and the Brief COPE Inventory to determine the strategies that participants used to cope with their perceptions of failure on their exam. The results showed that maladaptive coping strategies mediated the relationship between post-test negative affect and subsequent improvement in standardized test scores. This article serves as a call to Christian institutions of higher education to consider how to best support students in developing effective coping strategies when faced with failure.

The China Historical Christian Database: A Dataset Quantifying Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950

The era of digitization is revolutionizing traditional humanities research, presenting both novel methodologies and challenges. This field harnesses quantitative techniques to yield groundbreaking insights, contingent upon comprehensive datasets on historical subjects. The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) exemplifies this trend, furnishing researchers with a rich repository of historical, relational, and geographical data about Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950. The study of Christianity in China confronts formidable obstacles, including the mobility of historical agents, fluctuating relational networks, and linguistic disparities among scattered sources. The CHCD addresses these challenges by curating an open-access database built in neo4j that records information about Christian institutions in China and those that worked inside of them. Drawing on historical sources, the CHCD contains temporal, relational, and geographic data. The database currently has over 40,000 nodes and 200,000 relationships, and continues to grow. Beyond its utility for religious studies, the CHCD encompasses broader interdisciplinary inquiries including social network analysis, geospatial visualization, and economic modeling. This article introduces the CHCD’s structure, and explains the data collection and curation process.

The Hungarian State’s Good Catholic Pastor: Reading Foucault’s Provocations on Christian Institutions and Governmentality

ABSTRACT Given Michel Foucault’s immense influence on anthropology, assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on this Special Issue’s theme by returning to Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay, ‘The Subject and Power’ to consider what Foucault had to say about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to Foucault’s provocative claims about the declining vitality of pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian government-funded effort to canonise ‘Transylvania’s good pastor’, the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania, Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault’s work, a lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major twentieth-century political trends.

The Recent Emergence of Australian Christian Higher Education Institutions: How They Operationalize Their Christian Identity

Historically, Australian higher education has been statist, uniform, and secular. Indeed, up until 1989, even communist Poland had more Christian universities than Australia. Only in the last 3½ decades have eight different Christian universities and colleges emerged. This article first explores the origins of these new institutions and the historical factors that allowed for the emergence of Australian Christian higher education (CHE). It then employs the recently developed Operationalizing Christian Identity Guide (OCIG) to determine the extent to which these new Australian institutions use their Christian identity to guide administrative decisions. The OCIG identifies the number of publicly expressed markers that indicate whether and how Christian identity makes a difference in key administrative decisions regarding the life of the institution. These markers include things such as membership requirements for the board, president, faculty, and students; the institution’s official rhetoric and mission; the number of required Christian courses; and the nature of co-curricular programming. An analysis of these institutions using the OCIG reveals that Australia’s Christian institutions are observably distinct from their secular Australian counterparts in key areas such as mission, hiring practices, curricular requirements, co-curricular opportunities, and student conduct codes. All of these Christian institutions require core courses that extend beyond professional education. Within the Christian sector, significant diversity also exists regarding religious symbols, funding, and governance. A comparison of these Australian institutions to Christian institutions in the United States and Canada, however, finds that Australian institutions operationalize their Christian identities less than institutions in these countries.

Affectional and gender minority student experiences in CACREP‐accredited counseling programs at conservative Christian institutions: A call for change

AbstractThis study explored the experiences of affectional and gender minority students at CACREP accredited counseling programs housed within conservative Christian institutions (CCIs) and the damage caused by the discriminatory environments there. The results highlight the opportunity and responsibility that CCIs have to both protect these vulnerable student populations and provide models for them as well as the need for the counseling field to align the expectations of practitioners with the expectations placed upon training programs.

Religious Moderation in Indonesia: Implementation by National Christian Institution to Strengthen National Resilience

Religious moderation is a program introduced by the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs to promote unity and harmony as a response to frequent intolerance incidents in the country that risks national resilience. This research begins by identifying how religious moderation is poured into a nationwide strategy through a presidential regulation and Ministry of Religious Affairs’ roadmap, which then progresses to how PGI as a Christian organisation implements religious moderation into their own strategy. The results of this research suggest that PGI has contributed to religious moderation for decades by initiating interfaith networks, launching tolerance programs and advocating vulnerable groups. These measures are considered as coping and adaptive strategies in strengthening national resilience but have yet to touch on a transformative level that would be deemed more effective as intolerance incidents are still recurring in the present.

Средневековый московский миф о государстве и его смысловые актуализации в современности

The medieval state in Rus’ was constituted and symbolized as a Christian institution, and its quintessence was the image of the sovereign. To fill the significant image with meaning, the mythological motif of serpent fighting, the struggle of the Hero with the Enemy, was used. This was demonstrated both by visual representations (icons, seals, coat of arms) and by the official nomination “tsar”, which acquired a special Orthodox mystical meaning. The sacralization of the image of the Russian sovereign and state was based on the Byzantine model of a universal empire, in which the tsar was the vicar of Christ on earth, being his “living” incarnation. As a result, the role of Moscow, this already transcendental state, called by virtue of symbolic continuity the “Third Rome”, and the tsar were associated with the extension of the life of the fourth world Christian kingdom in the context of the coming end of the world. This last kingdom, it was believed in medieval Moscow, was already an established Orthodox power, united in the universe, headed by a truly Orthodox tsar, hence the main political function of the tsar was to protect Orthodoxy from enemies. Thus, on the basis of the construction of the heroic myth, a complete and all-encompassing world of meaning was built, and the political order was legitimized in its ultimate meaning, in its correlation with the divine cosmic order. The ideas of Russian Orthodox theology of the 18th–20th centuries concerning what should be done in the construction of Russian statehood are based on ideas about the God’s chosenness of the Russian people, the religious mission of Rus’ and its tsar, formed during the period of the Principality of Moscow. Meanwhile, the theology of this period also has its own specifics. The new political reality, characterized by the fact that Russia, with the beginning of the church reform of Peter the Great, took the path of state secularization, gives a special tone to discussions about the nature of Russian statehood. The theological thought of this period is distinguished by an attempt to substantiate the need for a return to traditional values, which, according to the authors, constitute the basis of Russian statehood. Particular hope for a return to the “old models” rests with the Russian people, who are assigned a heroic role – to be the savior of the state. Ideas about the mystical nature of the Russian state are updated today through speeches and statements of political and religious leaders, in which political power is represented in mythical-heroic motifs, and Russia appears as a defender of traditional values and world Orthodoxy, a state with a messianic role in the modern world.

Christian education and sexual immorality in Pauline treaties

The Nation is saturated with infidelity, secularism, materialism and a general lack of respect for the sanctity of the home. Sexual pervasion is on the increase on daily basis, display of sexual contents pervades the society. Pornography defiles the mind of both adults and the youths by polluting their minds with impure and unholy thoughts; the sanctity and sacredness of sex is eroding in Africa where men desire to have sex with other men, a woman desire to lay with a fellow woman and humans even desires to copulate with animals. One of the greatest challenges is that the role of the Church as an agent of moral education and transformation in Nigeria socio-religious and political system is undermined. The aforementioned issues demonstrate the need for church intervention through Christian education. This paper looks at the role of the church through the agency of education to curb and provides lasting solutions to sexual immoral behaviours that have permeates the fabric system of the African society (especially, Nigeria). The writer adopts historical, descriptive and analytical methods of research for effective achievement of his goal. This paper discovers that, one, Nigeria is bedevilled with blatantly moral corrupt leaders who have nothing to offer in curbing the menace of immoral acts in the country; and secondly, the present situation in Nigeria with regards to fashion and the flaunting of flesh is but one more manifestation of the decay of this country. Therefore, religion plays a vital role in bringing sanity and sanctity to family moral values in the African society. From Christian education perspective, Christian institutions should design courses that will impact the society positively: spiritually, socially, economically and politically.

Babeling Nationalism

This article engages critically with Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022) and the Christian nationalist movement more broadly. It specifically examines Wolfe’s dual assertions that rightly ordered church communities (such as nations) cannot be composed of “two or more ethnicities” and that furthermore this tenet is rooted in “the Reformed theological tradition.” This article argues, to the contrary, that an ethnocentric ecclesiology runs directly counter to the best insights of the Protestant Reformers. In particular, Luther and Calvin offer rich interpretations of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11, which narrate a rather different account of humanity’s present divisions than that of Wolfe. This conclusion is intended to serve as a launching point for a more far-ranging discussion of Christian nationalism’s present challenge to Christian institutions—including many classical schools.

Looking Back on its Fiftieth Year - Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis of the Articles Published in the Journal of Psychology and Theology from 1996 to 2022

The Journal of Psychology and Theology was started in 1973 when the growth of psychology encroached into the arena of Theology, thereby aiming to integrate the two. OBJECTIVE AND APPROACH: As the journal completes its 50th year, this study reviews its journey through a bibliometric and scientometric analysis of the articles available in the Scopus database (26 years) using four analyses – publication, citation, network, and thematic. RESULT AND DISCUSSION: The results show that 70% of the top contributing institutions were Christian institutions, and the USA contributed to 90% of the articles. The top three keywords were ‘Virtues’, ‘Positive Psychology’, and ‘Integration’, showing how positive psychology bridged the two fields. Factorial analysis segregated the topics into two main groups: Values and Beliefs. Keywords co-occurrence network generated 5 clusters – Subject Integration, Theoretical Integration, Positive Psychology, Spirituality, and Clergy and its Issues. RECOMMENDATION: To increase author networking and articles featuring theological perspectives from other continents and other faiths.

Proselytising and pastoral care: chaplains in Australian government schools

ABSTRACT School chaplaincy in Australia is highly contentious. The federal government funds a chaplaincy programme in Australia’s secular public schools, which, combined with the declining influence of institutional Christianity, places Christian chaplains at the nexus of debates on the public role of religion. Yet little is known about how these chaplains integrate their religious convictions with their role. This article draws on 12 interviews with Christian chaplains, and asks: (1) how do these chaplains understand their faith within their role?; (2) how do they practice their faith through their role; and (3) how do they negotiate the ban on ‘proselytising’? This article finds that chaplains see their work as a call from God that enables a deep sense of purpose, and is also aimed at young people’s empowerment. They practically express their faith through care, bridging school and Christian communities, and prayer. Last, they practice conversations about faith, described as ‘dialogical evangelism’. Given the lack of studies of chaplaincy practice in secular contexts, this article is significant for its empirical depth, and discussion of controversial topics. It concludes by examining the significance of these findings for policy makers, and for wider debates about the interaction between religious people and secular institutions.

Mooring Christian Nationalism: How Religious Institutions, Participation, and Beliefs Inform Christian Nationalism

ABSTRACT Christian nationalism has been linked to a variety of political and social outcomes in the contemporary United States, however little research has investigated factors that give rise to it. Most scholars examining Christian nationalism contend that it is unmoored from extant social institutions, and even oppositional to institutional Christianity. This claim is associated with earlier research arguing for the declining influence of denominations, and particularly mainline Protestantism. In contrast, social movement theory views Christian nationalism as an ideological outgrowth of religious organizations, structured by exclusivist religious beliefs, and reenforced through religious participation. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) this investigation examines how religious and political factors inform subscription to Christian nationalism and explores how religious and political commitments are connected. In general, the findings support the expectations of the social movement perspective. Christian nationalism is strongly predicted by ties to sectarian Protestantism, religious participation, and fundamentalist beliefs, and it is not embraced by secular and non-Christian Americans.

Summer Bridge Programs for First-Generation Students in the Christian College Context: Strengths and Challenges

Universities nationwide have sought ways to support the retention of students on their campuses, particularly first-generation students. One such method is through summer bridge programs designed to offer academic and social support to new incoming students in the months before their first year begins. Christian institutions’ faith-based mission statements are integral to developing programming to support first-generation students, as the cultural habitus that emerges from the school’s Christian identity creates a unique cultural landscape that first-generation students navigate. This study is a phenomenological analysis of the experiences of six first-generation college students (FGCS) enrolled in a pilot bridge program on a Christian campus in the Pacific Northwest. The program was created to support the unique needs of FGCS by beginning with a summer orientation and a two-week course and program on campus. Students reported dynamics congruent with the literature on first-generation students, such as academic and financial challenges, mental and personal health issues, and for Latinx students in particular, difficulties navigating dual roles as a student and family member. Unique to our sample is how these challenges are embedded within a Christian college context: Feelings of belonging are inevitably intertwined with this identity, posing unique advantages and disadvantages to their retention. Overall, we argue that the Christian higher education environment is well positioned to enhance the high impact of the bridge programs for their students, although challenges remain.

The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

One merit of this extraordinary book is its method. Like few scholars working today, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton combines a mastery of codicological and palaeographical skills with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the books in which Middle English writings survive, a deep understanding of ecclesiastical structures and politics in the institutional Christian church, and a keen eye for poetic similarities across a huge variety of genres, periods and styles. The book’s defining merit is, however, to have discovered both a class position and a vocation that not only defines, for the first time, a particularly important kind of medieval English writer (the ‘clerical proletariat’), but also details the tendencies of all the work such writers produced. To see those tendencies as clearly as this book helps us to do is also to draw a through-line from literature in early Middle English to the late fifteenth century (no easy feat), and to show, convincingly, that what we might otherwise regard as an eclectic group of poems and poets (The Owl and the Nightingale, Wynner and Waster, Layamon, Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, John Audelay, ‘The Chorister’s Lament’, ‘A Satire on the Consistory Court’, the York Realist, and St Erkenwald) is in fact a unity: the characteristic work of a large body of unbeneficed clergy, that is, the jobbing clerics whose vocational ‘precarity’ (as Kerby-Fulton precisely puts it) fully shaped their thought.

Jüdische Spenden und Stiftungen im fraktalen Raum des Heiligen Römischen Reichs

Abstract The essay deals with the donation activities of Jewish people in the Franconian area during the 18th century. Helping those in need was an integral part of religious practice. Donations to co-religionists as well as to Christian institutions and individuals can be proven regularly. The five charitable foundations, which were set up by wealthy members of the Bamberg rural Jewish community, also served the purpose of maintaining the memory of the founder and his family in the long term. With the proceeds from the foundation capital, scholarships were financed and needy relatives supported. They represented important references for the family members, who often lived scattered. Thus had an effect of forming a Common identity. The case of Meyer Levi, who at the same time established religious foundations in the Franconian rural community of Zeckendorf and the suburban community of Pfersee beyond the gates of the imperial city of Augsburg, documents that the supra-regional and cross-territorial interdependencies of Jewish society can be seen within the Zedaka.

The Complexity of Teacher Identity: Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers

Teacher identity is complex, dynamic, ongoing, and worthy of examination. This study examined the perceptions of preservice teachers’ personal identity (e.g., gender, race, religious background, etc.) and how they influence preservice teachers’ professional identity as a subject, pedagogical, and professional expert. Participants (N = 81) were preservice teachers from two different Christian-based institutions, one in Canada and one in the United States, who were completing the requirements for initial licensure. Findings from a survey measured the preservice teachers’ perceptions based on two scales examining personal and professional identity. Results suggested that preservice teachers did not perceive race as impacting their personal identity as a teacher, nor did they perceive religion as an influence on their professional identity, even though they had chosen Christian institutions. However, preservice teachers did perceive teacher preparation as impacting their understanding of professionalism as they transitioned from learner to teacher in the field.

Statements of Austrian hospices and palliative care units after the implementation of the law on assisted suicide : Aqualitative study of web-based publications.

Since January 2022, assisted suicide (AS) in Austria is legal under certain conditions. One of these conditions is informative consultations with two physicians, one of whom must be qualified in palliative medicine. Patients who are thinking about AS can approach palliative care institutions. This study aims to assess the availability and nature of Austrian palliative care institutions' web-based statements about AS. In this qualitative study, the websites of all Austrian palliative care units (n = 43) and all Austrian inpatient hospices (n = 14) were searched for possible statements on AS once in February 2022 and once in August 2022 using the three search terms "suicide", "assisted", and "euthanasia". The findings were subsequently evaluated using thematic analysis and NVivo software. Statements or texts that included positions on AS were found on the websites of 11institutions (19%). The results covered three main themes 1)demarcation: denial of involvement and judgment about AS, 2)duty: handling of requests and describing the target group of care recipients, and 3)explanation: experience, values, concerns, and demands. The results of this study indicate that people in Austria who wish to have AS and who may use the internet as their first source of information largely find no relevant information. There is no online statement of apalliative care or hospice institution that endorses AS. Positions on AS are mostly lacking, while reluctant attitudes of Christian institutions are predominant.

Christian Monastic Life in Early Islam

Christian Monastic Life in Early Islam

Designing a Supervision Training Program with Research Supervisor's Voices

The purpose of this study was to design a series of workshop events for new or novice supervisors of higher degree by research candidates using input from the novice supervisors, experienced supervisors and a panel of experts. A mixed methodology was adopted where the novice and experienced supervisors completed a Likert-style questionnaire and participated in semi-structured focus groups and interviews. Data from experts was collected from a hosted panel. The novice supervisors were most concerned about managing the supervision process and dealing with candidate issues, giving feedback, working with different methodologies they may not be familiar with, and supervising in areas outside their field of expertise. The experienced supervisors added that the workshops should include advice about relationships and the wellbeing of candidates. The outcomes of the study were pragmatic because they fed into the content of the workshops, thereby training novice supervisors with aspects of supervision they felt they needed, along with aspects recommended by experienced supervisors. This study suggests that, when institutions are designing training events for higher degree by research supervisors, key stakeholders, including the potential learners (novice supervisors), should be systematically consulted. This form of teaching in a Christian institution includes all the basics of recognised good supervision but adds the elements of Christian care and support.

Islam and Christian Perspective Toward Global Religious Education in Indonesia

Globalization challenges Muslims and Christians in developing religious education in Indonesia. The problem of globalization has attacked the spiritual values of education. The output of religious teachings has recently shifted from the primary goal, namely the goal of education, because the education system is religiously oriented. Intolerance, corruption, human rights violations and all forms of moral decay that the Indonesian nation faces are manifestations of the minimal results of the cultivation of religious education in Indonesia. To fill this gap, this study tries to analyze and solve the problem of religious education from both an Islamic and a Christian perspective. The research used in this article is a discourse analysis method by comparing Islamic religious education and Christian religious education in Indonesia. Cooperation between the government and religious education is needed to develop religious education in Indonesia's global era. It requires integration between religious values and the positive values of globalization. Inter-religious and inter-religious dialogue must be included as part of religious education. Religious and educational institutions must be separated from commercialization, and cooperation between Christian and Islamic institutions. The Ministry of religious affairs as the higher authority in religious education, have to build mutual cooperation between the Islamic institution of religious education and the Christian Institution of religious education to support dialogue and sharing in term of harmonization.