scholarly journals Library Services from the Outside-In

2021 ◽  
pp. 279-294
Author(s):  
Cindy Lu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Information Practices ◽  
Theological Students ◽  
Theological Seminaries

The purpose is to inform the seminary libraries to design library services based on an outside-in strategy to meet the information intents of the theological students from clandestine, unregistered Christian churches in China. Specifically, the goals of this research are to: 1. Examine how the previous tactic information practices—walking, poaching, reading, and deception—exercised routinely in the unregistered Christian communities in China were shaped by the information-impoverished situations. 2. Stratify how information intents could change their tactic practices in finding religious information, when members from these information-impoverished communities come to study at theological seminaries in the United States, where information is rich and freely accessible.  The study applies Todd’s extended six categories of information intents to analyze de Certeau’s four types of tactic information practices in walking, poaching, reading, and deception/disguise, as demonstrated in the interviews and information world maps of the seventeen theological students from China.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prema A. Kurien
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global South ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
American Society

The conclusion provides an overview of what the Mar Thoma case teaches us regarding the types of changes globalization is bringing about in Christian immigrant communities in the United States, and in Christian churches in the Global South. It examines the impact of transnationalism on the Mar Thoma American denomination and community, specifically how the Kerala background of the community and the history of the church in Kerala impact the immigrant church. It also looks at how contemporary shifts in the understanding and practice of religion and ethnicity in Western societies impact immigrant communities and churches in the United States, the incorporation of immigrants of Christian backgrounds into American society, and evangelical Christianity in America. Finally, it discusses how large-scale out-migration and the global networks facilitated by international migrants affect Christianity in the Global South. The chapter concludes with an overview of how religious traditions are changed through global movement.

scholarly journals Reaching and Teaching Millennials: Designing the Future of Student Services

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-226
Author(s):  
Brian Detweiler ◽  
Kimberly Mattioli ◽  
Mike Martinez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Student Services ◽  
Strategic Plan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Positive Relationships ◽  
The Future ◽  
Successes And Failures

AbstractToday's students have come to expect library services that are quite different from their predecessors and law librarians must evolve to meet their needs. As law libraries in the United States face the realities of declining enrolment and decreasing budgets, it is imperative that we find new and creative ways to build positive relationships with our students while also preparing them for the realities of practicing law in an environment driven by rapid technological change. Three law librarians from the United States, Brian Detweiler, Kimberly Mattioli, and Mike Martinez, Jr., discuss their successes and failures in reaching out to their student populations, creating and evaluating various student-centred instructional programmes, and in establishing a strategic plan to meet the needs of millennial law students.

Christianity in Hawaiʻi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Williams Jr.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Hawaiian Kingdom

On January 17, 1893, Her Majesty Queen Liliʻuokalani, sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown in a coup de main led by a faction of business leaders comprised largely of descendants of the 1820 American Protestant mission to the “Sandwich Islands.” Rev. Charles Hyde, an officer of the ecclesiastic Papa Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Board) declared, “Hawaii is the first Country in which the American missionaries have labored, whose political relations to the United States have been changed as a result of missionary labors.” The actions of these “Sons of the Mission” were enabled by U.S. naval forces landed from the USS Boston the evening prior. Despite blatant and significant connections between early Christian missionaries to Hawaiʻi and their entrepreneurial progeny, the 1893 usurpation of native rule was not the result of a teleological seventy-year presence in the Hawaiian Kingdom by the American Protestant Church. An 1863 transfer of authority over the Hawaiian mission from the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to the local ʻAhahui ʻEuanelio o Hawaiʻi (AEH) (Hawaiian Evangelical Association) served as a pivotal inflection point that decidedly altered the original mission, driving a political and economic agenda masked only by the professed goals of the ecclesiastic institution. Christianity, conveyed to the Hawaiian Islands initially by representatives of the ABCFM, became a contested tool of religio-political significance amidst competing foreign and native claims on leadership in both church and state. In the immediate aftermath of the January 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom government, this introduced religion became a central tool of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) struggle for a return of their queen and the continued independence of their nation. Native Christian patriots organized and conducted a broad array of political actions from within the churches of the AEH using claims on Ke Akua (God) and Christianity as a foundation for their vision of continued native rule. These efforts were instrumental in the defeat of two proposed treaties of annexation of their country—1893 and 1897—before the United States, declaring control of the archipelago a strategic necessity in fighting the Spanish/Filipino–American War, took possession of Hawaiʻi in late 1898. Widespread Americanization efforts in the islands during the early 20th century filtered into Hawaiʻi’s Christian churches, transforming many of these previous focal points of relative radicalism into conservative defenders of the American way. A late-20th-century resurgence of cultural and political activism among Kanaka Maoli, fostered by a “Hawaiian Renaissance” begun in the 1970s, has driven a public and academic reexamination of the past and present role of Christianity in this current-day American outpost in the center of the Pacific.

From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906–2006

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Spiritual Healing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Attractive Alternative ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The World

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.

‘Gimme de kneebone bent’: Liturgics, Dance, Resistance and a Hermeneutics of the Knees

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cláudio Carvalhaes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Worship Service ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Brothers And Sisters

Shall we all dance to the Lord? But what Lord? To whose Lord shall we bend our knees in prayer, honour, dance and praise? Can our knees be naked? Can we open our legs? How much skin can we show without apologizing? Are we allowed to get the sensuous fever while dancing a tango, a salsa, or a samba? How should our knees behave in the house of the Lord? And whose house is God's house? Is there a proper way to dance in a worship service? What parts of our bodies can we move without distressing the proper liturgical order rooted in respect, faith, rationality, tradition and good manners? Our knees connect liturgy with ecclesiology, theology, colonialisation, dance and bodies. I was asked to write about dance in Brazil/Latin America, perhaps because Brazil is well known for its dancing spirit, as one can see in our carnival, samba, joy and beautiful women. All of that is true. But the task for this article was more specific. I had to write about dance within Christian communities. Then, the whole aspect of dance was turned upside down in my head. In truth, we do not dance in historic Protestant churches in Brazil and in that regard, we do not differ one inch from many of our brothers and sisters in Edinburgh, Rome, Geneva or the United States – at least when dance is concerned. We just do not dance. Only our Pentecostal brothers and sisters can dance.

scholarly journals Craft Christianity : Christianity and craft beer America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Bedsaul
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Craft Beer

The recent advent of American Christian communities incorporating craft beer into their lives stands in curious defiance to the ways in which religion and drinking have often interacted in American culture. In this thesis, I attempt to explain why craft beer, why now, and how this phenomenon has come about. By looking at issues of class, gender, and how these two categories work within America's cultural religion, I locate Craft Christianity within a larger story of alcohol in the United States.

The Battle for the Soul of Islam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Dorsey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Interfaith Dialogue ◽  
Christian Communities

The battle for the soul of Islam is about much more than countering political violence and suppressing political Islam. It is a long-drawn-out, decades-long battle for religious soft power in which multiple Middle Eastern and Asian states compete for recognition as leader of the Muslim world and to be drivers of a largely undefined “moderate,” tolerant, and pluralistic interpretation of an Islam that at a minimum engages in interfaith dialogue. The rivals employ religion to garner favor, empathy, and goodwill in the corridors of power in the United States and Europe as well as among influential Jewish and Christian communities. At the same time, the battle for the soul of Islam is also a struggle to redefine what Islam represents in a 21st-century world.

Public Libraries

2018 ◽  
pp. 1040-1070
Author(s):  
Laura Karbach
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Parental Involvement ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Public Library ◽  
The United States ◽  
Library Services ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Library Use ◽  
Master Thesis ◽  
The Impact

The author, as part of a Master Thesis study, analyzes the impact public library services and programs have in the lives of local Mexican mothers with children attending school in the United States and provides suggestions on ways to improve outreach of services and support. Results related to library use, parental involvement, service and programs, challenges including funding, Spanish-speaking staff, pre-conceived ideas, and awareness issues, as well as the largest issue of outreach are all discussed. In addition, outreach solutions are offered and the overall benefits of the study are assessed.

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