A Sense of Call: How Parents Support the Vocational Quests of Adolescent Girls

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-52
Author(s):  
Joyce Ann Mercer

Interview research with adolescent girls in the U.S. demonstrates that parents have a significant impact on their religious lives. This essay explores girls' experiences of how parents support their searches for vocation and meaning in a variety of ways. Viewing adolescence as a time when girls renegotiate their relationships with parents rather than separate from them, the author calls for youth ministry workers to reconsider the dominant pattern of youth ministry in the U.S. which positions youth apart from adults in the church.

Author(s):  
Elisa Eastwood Pulido

A spiritual biography, this book chronicles the journey of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961) from Mormonism to the Third Convention, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) splinter group he fomented in 1935–1936, to Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalén, a polygamist utopia Bautista founded in 1947. It argues that Bautista embraced Mormon belief in indigenous exceptionalism in 1901 and rapidly rose through the ranks of Mormon priesthood until convinced that the Mormon hierarchy was not invested in the development of native American peoples, as promoted in the Church’s canon. This realization resulted in tensions over indigenous self-governance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) and Bautista’s 1937 excommunication. The book contextualizes Bautista’s thought with a chapter on the spiritual conquest of Mexico in 1513 and another on the arrival of Mormons in Mexico. In addition to accounts of Bautista’s congregation-building on both sides of the U.S. border, this volume includes an examination of Bautista’s magnum opus, a 564-page tome hybridizing Aztec history and Book of Mormon narratives, and his prophetic plan for the recovery of indigenous authority in the Americas. Bautista’s excommunication catapulted him into his final spiritual career, that of a utopian founder. In the establishment of his colony, Bautista found a religious home, free from Euro-American oversight, where he implemented his prophetic plan for Mexico’s redemption. His plan included obedience to early Mormonism’s most stringent practices, polygamy and communalism. Bautista nonetheless hoped his community would provide a model for Mexicans willing to prepare the world for Christ’s millennial reign.


Author(s):  
Theresa Keeley

This chapter examines the murders of the churchwomen and how Reagan officials' critiques, which revealed that intra-Catholic conflict had become an integral part of United States–Central America policy with Reagan's ascension to the White House. It looks at remarks that bolster the Salvadoran junta's reputation or diminish the murders' impact on the protest movement against U.S. policy. It also discusses that the murdered churchwomen symbolized the church's championing of the poor and a U.S. foreign policy that was morally corrupt and politically unsound for training and arming their killers. The chapter cites that two murdered Maryknollers were members of a Catholic order and represented a dangerous trajectory for U.S. foreign policy and the church. It elaborates how the U.S. government aligned with conservative U.S. and Central American Catholics and amplified their perspective.


Author(s):  
Stephen J. Fichter ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt ◽  
Catherine Hoegeman ◽  
Paul M. Perl

If you take seriously, as I do, the notions of apostolic succession and the necessity of the Church manifesting “God with us” today, alive in the world, then this account of the U.S. bishops provides wonderful food for thought. It provides cause for grounded hope. These are good men with strong habits of sacrifice, prayer, and service, while living in a “me-first” society. In fact, one of the most uplifting—and yes, surprising—aspects of the entire survey was the amount of time the vast majority of bishops spend praying. Having sat in on countless meetings with bishops wielding calendars bleeding blue ink (into two or three years hence), I was frankly surprised at this good news. But only a tad less surprised than when I learned how many of them exercise regularly. I would imagine it’s a matter of absolute necessity, again, given what I have experienced of their insane schedules....


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Klaasen

Youth within the context of faith-based organisations carry with them certain power relations and misconstrued connotations. These power relations and connotations can contribute to alienation and marginalisation. The resolutions taken at the recent synods of the three dioceses within the Western Cape reflect and identify the areas - both liturgical and governance - of marginalisation of youth within the Anglican Church in southern Africa. The resolutions also call on the church governing bodies and the leaders to create safe spaces for the youth to be a central part of the mission of the church. Areas such as liturgy, training and formation, contemporary worship and nurturing relationships are identified within the resolutions. Theological notions of personhood within the Anglican tradition are to be investigated as possible motivations for more acceptable power relations of the youth and leaders and governance structures. What implications do such theological formulations have for the space that the youth occupy within the margins of the church? A critical reflection of the synod resolutions answers such questions and points to some contours for sense making of the youth within the margins of the church from a faith-based organisational perspective.


2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wright

THE AGENDA OF Christian education and youth ministry has been dominated in recent years by a concern to relate the Gospel across cultural boundaries. Such a relational hermeneutic needs to be supplemented with a hermeneutic of resistance in situations in which the culture of those to whom the Gospel message is addressed is incompatible with the integrity of Christian faith. Contemporary dance culture is identified as just such a context. Its post-modern and new-age credentials may be traced back via romanticism to traditions of esoteric gnosticism fundamentally opposed to the Christian understanding of reality. This is especially the case in its rejection of meta-narrative, reliance on the immediacy of experiential sensibility, and failure to achieve an adequate anthropology of being-in-relationship. However, the possibility of a Christian hermeneutic of resistance is undermined by a failure of the church to hold fast to an adequate Christian stance in these areas.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Canonization, the process by which the Catholic Church names saints, may be fundamentally about holiness, but it is never only about holiness. In the United States, it was often about the ways in which Catholics defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. This book traces saint-seeking in the United States from the 1880s, the decade in which U.S. Catholics nominated their first candidates for canonization, to 2015, the year Pope Francis named the twelfth American saint in the first such ceremony held on U.S. soil. It argues that U.S. Catholics’ search for a saint of their own sprung from a desire to persuade the Vatican to recognize their country’s holy heroes. But Rome was not U.S. saint-seekers only audience. For the U.S. Catholic faithful, saints served not only as mediators between heaven and earth, but also between the faith they professed and the American culture in which they lived. This panoramic view of American sanctity, focused on figures at the nexus of holiness and U.S. history, this book explores U.S. Catholics’ understanding of themselves both as members of the church and as citizens of the nation—and reveals how those identities converged, diverged, and changed over time.


2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Keith Coats

This article explores the desire of the author to find appropriate frameworks and processes for individuals and companies to think strategically and explore models of leadership. He is concerned to use corporate models in developing such strategies in the church context generally and the youth ministry context specifically.


Author(s):  
Faith Glavey Pawl

Recent interest in philosophy of religion on religious practice more generally, and liturgical rituals in particular, opens up new avenues for thinking about the religious lives of young children. In this article I consider what it means to say that young children are part of a worshipping assembly, and in what ways they might count as exemplary religious practitioners. There is very little discussion of the religious experiences and practices of children in the philosophy of religion, and I argue that this lacuna should be addressed. Taking cues from Nicholas Wolterstorff and Terence Cuneo's work on the philosophy of liturgy, I make the case that young children can and do participate fully in the liturgical rituals of Christian communities. I draw on the work of religious educators Sofia Cavaletti and Jerome Berryman to illustrate what the religious world of the child looks like, and to make the case that there are respects in which children are at an advantage over adults in participating in the liturgical life of the church.


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