Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities

Abstract

Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the lives of students. This article discusses findings from the three-year project “Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England”, including a nation-wide survey of undergraduate students, in examining how the experience of university shapes on-campus expressions of Christian identity. We argue that a sizeable constituency of undergraduates self-identify as ‘Christian’, but evangelicals emerge not as the dominant majority, but as a vocal minority. The emerging internal complexity is masked by a public discourse that conceives of religion in terms of propositional belief and presents evangelicalism as its pre-eminent form.     

Use of Out-of-Home Care Among a Statewide Population of Children and Youth Enrolled in Medicaid

System-wide research on the use of out-of-home care among children and youth is needed to inform the development of policies and services. We used Medicaid claims from North Carolina to examine patterns of out-of-home care, identify demographic and diagnostic differences between those who received care in residential treatment, psychiatric hospitals, or general hospitals, and determine whether demographic or diagnostic characteristics were associated with having more than one out-of-home stay during the year. Among those who received out-of-home care during a 1 year period, 36% received care in residential treatment only, 32.4% in general hospitals only, and 17.6% in psychiatric hospitals only, while 14.0% used more than one sector of out-of-home care. Boys, teenagers, and youth in foster care or diagnosed with emotional disturbance or hyperkinetic syndrome had higher odds of receiving care in residential treatment only whereas girls, youth age 19–21, and those with depressive and stress and adjustment disorders had higher odds of receiving care from hospitals only. Teenagers and youth in foster care had higher odds of having more than one stay. Among those with more than one stay, there were 300 patterns of care and nearly half received care from more than one service sector. The implications for services and policy are discussed. Further research is needed to understand patterns of out-of-home care and the factors that influence placement decisions.     

When Festinger Fails: Prophecy and the Watch Tower

Within its history, the Watch Tower has often set dates for the coming of Christ's millennial reign. The ability of Jehovah's Witnesses to endure the failure of these interpretations of Biblical prophecy reveals the power of the Watch Tower to withstand what would seem to be fatal challenges to its system of belief. In what has become a classic study, the social psychologist Leon Festinger has argued that such disconfirmations of prophecy lead only to deepened conviction and increased proselytism to persuade others that the original belief was correct. Applying Festinger's hypothesis to the prophetic speculation of the Watch Tower, 1 argue that his model fails to recognize how complex organizations and systems of belief shape responses to disconfirmed prophecy. Indeed, the history of Jehovah's Witnesses demonstrates that organizational structure and ideology constitute crucial variables for any analysis of reaction to prophetic failure. It is the very power of the Watch Tower as a millenarian movement that allows not only the rationalization of disconfirmation but the retrospective denial of the prophecy itself.     

Test of a Dynamic Stress Model for Organisational Change: Do Males and Females Require Different Models?

Cette étude a opérationnalisé et mis à l’épreuve un modèle dynamique du stress adapté au changement organisationnel en tenant compte de l’impact du sexe sur le modèle. L’échantillon était composé de 804 employés de cinq centres médicaux pour anciens combattants. Le modèle, inspiré de celui de Mack, Nelson & Quick (1998) comprenait: l’importance des retombées du changement organisationnel sur le rôle professionnel, les relations et l’environnement de travail, les opportunités, la carrière, l’incertitude et l’évaluation des problèmes à résoudre, le stress perçu et les réactions de contrôle‐évitement. On est parti de l’idée que l’évaluation jouerait un rôle de médiateur entre l’importance du changement et le stress perçu et que les réactions agiraient directement sur les évaluations et le stress perçu. L’analyse en pistes causales confirma le modèle de changement proposé sous réserve de quelques modifications, mais montra que les hommes et les femmes pouvaient revendiquer leur propre modèle. Les différences dues au sexe apparaissent dans la relation entre la perception et l’évaluation du changement; et chaque sexe présente des sources spécifiques de stress. L’évaluation jouait un rôle partiel de médiateur entre l’importance du changement et le stress perçu. Le contrôle de la situation était une stratégie plus pertinente que l’évitement aussi bien pour les hommes que pour les femmes. On réfléchit aux conséquences de ce travail pour les chercheurs et les organisations. The present study operationalised and tested a dynamic stress model for organisational change, including the interaction effect of sex on the model, on 804 employees at five VA medical centers. The model, an adaptation of Mack, Nelson, and Quick's (1998 ) model included: the amount of organisational change within job role, work relationships, job context, facility, and career; uncertainty and challenge appraisal; perceived stress; and control and avoidance coping. It was proposed that appraisal would act as a mediator between amount of change and perceived stress and that coping would have direct effects on appraisals and perceived stress. Path analyses supported the proposed change model with some modification, but indicated that males and females may require unique models. Sex differences emerged in relationships between perceptions and appraisal of change, and males and females had unique sources of stress. Appraisal acted as a partial mediator between amount of change and perceived stress. Control coping emerged as a more adaptive strategy than avoidance coping for both males and females. Implications for researchers and organisations are discussed.     

Implicit memory for phonological processes in visual stem completion

Four experiments were conducted investigating the role of phonology in repetition priming. Experiment 1 used a cross-modal priming paradigm in which participants made semantic judgments about spoken words and then performed a visual stem completion task. In Experiments 2–4, both the primes and the test stems were presented visually. The results of the first three experiments revealed that priming transfers across interpretations of a homophone. That is, seeing or hearingweek primes bothweek andweak. The results of Experiment 4 showed that homophone priming cannot be attributed to the orthographic similarity of homophonic words. Together, these results indicate that repetition priming on a visual word completion task includes a phonological component.     

The Feminist Pacifism of William James and Mary Whiton Calkins

In this paper, I accompany William James (1842–1910) and Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) in the steps each takes toward his or her respective proposal of a moral equivalent of war. I demonstrate the influence of James upon Calkins, suggesting that the two share overlapping formulations of the problem and offer closely related—but significantly different—solutions. I suggest that Calkins's pacifistic proposal is an extension of that of her teacher—a feminist interpretation of his psychological and moral thought as brought to bear on the problem of war. Calkins's brand of pacifism widens the scope of James's “moral equivalent of war” in a way that is consonant with feminist ideals of inclusiveness and social justice. I conclude by commenting on how James's and Calkins's pacifism can continue to be extended fruitfully in contemporary feminist pacifist theory and practice.