Pastoral counseling with alcoholics and their families

The pastor is often in contact with the alcoholic and his or her family. Providing help to alcoholics and their families is a spiritual, humanistic, and therapeutic challenge. Recent developments have favored a family systems orientation to working with alcoholic families. This orientation acknowledges the family as contributor to maintaining alcoholic behavior and includes the family in treatment. Specific family systems concepts are discussed and how they relate to the dysfunctional unit which houses an alcoholic. Implications for pastors and specific role definitions are explored. Krebs' therapeutic model is expanded to: 1) evaluate, 2) support, 3) refer, and 4) support, as appropriate for the pastor working with alcoholics and their families.     

Alpha and evangelical conversion

A semi-structured interview study was conducted among 11 ‘Born Again’ Christians eliciting their conversion narratives. Informants emphasised the importance of embodying the Holy Spirit and developing a personal relationship with Christ in the process of conversion. The Alpha Course played an important role in this process.     

My evangelical conviction

There are three things that may serve to disrupt the casual habits of intellect operative within a majority of studies that address American religion: (1) poesis must be practiced as a challenge to flat-footed analyses invested in common-sense literacy; (2) there must be an open and honest discussion of how scholars conceive of the characters they study and how they represent those subjects in print or other media; and (3) subtle attention must be paid to issues of discourse, that is, to issues of how people make themselves up even as they are made up by ideas, concepts, and words that have nothing essentially to do with them.     

珍惜生命 呵护生命 基督教的生命观

因为生命是宝贵的,所以应该珍惜生命、呵护生命。面对生命,人必须要有敬畏之心,必须要忏悔,这才是人类文明成熟的标志。基督教认为,生命是人类永恒的主题,人类的生命是上帝在人身上的行动以及人在听命中的回应。     

Queerly evangelical: the rhetoric of inverted belonging as a challenge to heteronormativity in evangelical theology

ABSTRACT

As a small but growing number of evangelical congregations, organizations, and individuals have adopted certain pro-LGBTQ beliefs in recent years, an intriguing rhetorical strategy has emerged: these evangelicals are claiming in various ways that their newfound beliefs, far from being an impediment to their evangelical identity, actually render them more faithful evangelicals than their anti-LGBTQ counterparts. Through what I call a rhetoric of inverted belonging, those who have long been regarded as irrevocable outsiders of evangelicalism are portraying themselves as more rightful insiders than those who exteriorize them from their religious tradition. In this paper, I illustrate the rhetoric of inverted belonging through a variety of examples from the theological discourse of pro-LGBTQ evangelical individuals and institutions. Analyzing this discourse through the lens of a prevalent definition of an evangelical, I demonstrate how the rhetoric of inverted belonging poses a unique challenge to heteronormative theologies within evangelicalism today.     

Predicting protestant work ethic beliefs

Two correlational studies attempt to determine the aetiology of Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) beliefs by looking at the relationship between it and various theoretically related variables. In the first study, three demographic and seven psychographic variables were regressed onto the PWE using step-wise multiple regression. Five of the ten predictors were significant indicating that people with high internal and powerful other locus of control beliefs, limited educaztion, conservativel free-enterprise economic beliefs, and strong postponement of gratification beliefs and practices were most likely to endorse the PWE. In the second study parents and college-age children completed the same questionnaire to indicate family resemblances in PWE beliefs. Using a within-family analysis it was found that there were family resemblances in PWE, economic and voting beliefs and that sons were less similar to their parents than were daughters. Results provide partial support for both McClelland's and Weber's theses, and underline other results suggesting the role of psychological conservatism in the development of PWE beliefs.     

A fairy tale with a twist: pastoral counseling with adoptive families

Adoption counseling often focuses primarily on the enigmatic issues faced by adoptees. Very little attention, however, is pointed in the direction of the adoptive parents and their unique struggles. This article begins by providing some current information on adoption in the United States and ensuing implications for pastoral caregiving. Some of the unique challenges associated with the adoption experience are delineated, primarily focusing on systemic and personal issues faced by many adoptive families. Several practical interventions are suggested for pastoral caregivers working with adoptive families. Finally, the entire adoption experience is framed within a theological perspective offering hope to adoptive parents and adoptees.     

The protestant eruption into modern Brazilian politics

Brazil's fast‐growing Protestantism has contributed to a resacralisation of national politics in recent years. This is largely due to the politics practised by some of the large Pentecostal churches since 1986, using their corporate political power to strengthen internal leaderships and structure Brazil's huge popular Protestant field, as well as to gain resources for religious expansion and dispute space in civil religion. Corporate Protestant politics have been marked by corruption scandals and by politically motivated attempts to create representative organs capable of mediating the increasingly important relationship with the state. One new Pentecostal group (the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) has established one of the largest media empires in the country and, in the 1994 elections, considerably augmented its political power and polarised the Protestant community with respect to its project of hegemony in the religious field. Thus, while Protestant politics can be considered generally positive for Brazilian democracy, the rise of such a politically powerful hegemonic force within the Protestant field gives a more sinister character to the ever‐present corporatist and triumphalist ambitions.