Protestant Universities Research Articles

Psychological Adjustment and Religiousness: The Multivariate Belief-Motivation Theory of Religiousness

In this paper, the Multivariate Belief-Motivation Theory of Religiousness is presented. This theory integrates the religious domains of motivation, belief, and problem-solving style within one framework for the prediction of psychological adjustment. Religious problem-solving style is incorporated in a mediating role. Motivation, belief, and problem-solving style are operationalized respectively in terms of intrinsic/extrinsic religiousness, concept of God, and religious coping style. Trait anxiety is used as the criterion variable. The theory was evaluated for 161 students attending four Christian Protestant colleges. The results supported the necessity of differentiating religiousness into both motivation and belief in order to predict and understand religious coping style and anxiety. Religious problem-solving style mediated the relationship between belief and anxiety. However, both motivation and problem-solving style contributed unique portions of the variance in anxiety, which suggested that motivation was not entirely mediated by problem-solving style.

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

Six Hundred Years: Heidelberg University - Crisis and Achievements

Throughout its 600 years, Heidelberg University has endured the social and political upheavals of history, repeatedly rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a series of disasters to fulfill its mission as a center of learning and research. Founded in 1386, and buffeted by wars, plaques, and diverse political and social systems ever since, the university has developed along lines determined as much by regional, European, and world politics as by the dynamics inherent in its disciplines. Its history may be divided into the following six historical phases: (1) the scholastic university of the late Middle Ages (1386-1556); (2) the Protestant university (1556-1685); (3) the Catholic university (1685-1807); (4) the university in the age of liberalism and nationalism (1803-1933); (5) the university during National Socialism (1933-1945); and (6) the contemporary university and its efforts to cope with the explosion of knowledge, steadily growing student numbers, and other problems related to growth, expansion, and diversification in all disciplines (1945 to the present).

Scholasticism Protestant and Catholic: Francis Turretin on the Object and Principles of Theology

During the past two decades scholars have become more appreciatively aware of the medieval scholastic roots of Protestantism and have begun to gain some appreciation, albeit halting, of the scholastic form of Protestantism which dominated the Protestant universities in the seventeenth century. This awareness implies, in the first place, a development beyond the thesis advanced by Lortz and Bouyer that Protestantism was the effect of the decadent nominalist theology of the later Middle Ages. Scholars like Oberman, Hägglund, and Steinmetz have acknowledged much of the continuity but have emphasized the positive character of late medieval thought.

The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

Education and Evangelism: A Profile of Protestant Colleges

A Dating-Marriage Scale of Religious Social Distance

horizontal social distance are conceptualized to show that both are feasible concepts in relation to religion. A scale, based on work by Prince (1956), ranges from complete rejection of other religions (would neither date nor marry) through various conditions making marriage feasible, to assimilation through conversion into another religion to make marriage possible. The scale was used with Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant university students. The results are analyzed in the light of historical and current policies and experiences to demonstrate the validity of the scale. Choice of dating partners reflected the attitudes shown on the social distance scale. When choices outside the student's own religion were distributed according to the social distance scale they tended to be selected by students at the tolerant or low social distance end of the scale, showing some consistency between attitudes and behavior.

“Sectarian” Higher Education and the Public Interest

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsLloyd J. AverillLloyd J. Averill is professor of sociology at Ottawa University. He was president of the Council of Protestant Colleges and Universities when he presented the paper of which this article is a revision at the Twenty-third National Conference on Higher Education in Chicago in March, 1968, in a session on “Changing Patterns of Governance in Church-Related Institutions.” Much of the first half of the article originally appeared in the October 9, 1968, issue of the “Christian Century.”

Journalism Education in Small Protestant Colleges

Journalism Education in Small Protestant Colleges

Overseas Protestant Colleges and Universities: A Check List

Overseas Protestant Colleges and Universities: A Check List

The New England Frontier

NEW ENGLAND is a striking example of that corollary of the theory of the influence of the frontier according to which the characteristics of the new society may owe more to the cultural importations of the settlers than to the new environment. Pre-revolutionary New England stood out among the societies of the world for three characteristics: its relative democracy and political liberty; its relative toleration in religion; and its system of public education. The first two of these had not been a part of the original conception of the City upon a Hill, but they were inherent in the broader Puritanism of the majority of the settlers, and they became incorporated in the ideal for which the later generations struggled. It was this struggle to maintain the social ideals of the English Puritans, rendered easier by certain economic conditions not present on other frontiers, which made the states they set up in New England different from those created by the same type of people in Barbados and Virginia. The Puritans who went to the southern colonies (there was a process of selection) surrendered almost at once to the joys of the new world around them, but those who came out to New England for a full century remembered, they and their children, that they were a part of the great intellectual movement which included Cromwell's commonwealth, the Dutch republic, the Huguenots of France, and the Protestant universities of Germany. The first generation in New England felt themselves perched precariously on the edge of the unknown, and compared their sojourn here with the Israelites' forty years in the wilderness.1 King Philip's War showed the second generation that they could hold their bit of the

The Introductory Course in Sociology in the Protestant and Nonsectarian Colleges of the West, Middle West, and South

The Introductory Course in Sociology in the Protestant and Nonsectarian Colleges of the West, Middle West, and South