Lost Lutherans: Perspectives on American Religious Decline

Lost Lutherans: Perspectives on American Religious Decline offers a straightforward look at change in American religion. Chris Suehr presents the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) as an example of religious change in a way that is welcoming to interested readers and fulfilling to social scientists. By amplifying real voices, this book presents the social science, but also explores the stories behind its statistics—the people who have left, their reasons, their beliefs, and their quests. Lost Lutherans is a useful resource on specific areas of American religion—from the history of the Mainline to the voices of modern people who have left it. This book examines the gradual changes in society, culture, and institutions that have led to this religious transformation.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1208/thumbnail.jp

The Page 99 Test for Indigenous Ecocinema

The Page 99 Test asks authors to open their books to page 99 and assess if the page provides a good sense of the book\u27s overarching themes. In this blog post, Monani conducts this test on her own book, Indigenous Ecocinema, providing interested readers with a snapshot review of the book as a whole

APPC Minutes – March 25, 2025

Minutes of the Academic Policy and Program Committee Meeting, March 25, 2025

APPC Minutes – February 4, 2025

Minutes of the Academic Policy and Program Committee Meeting, February 4, 2025

Foreword for Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship

This foreword introduces readers to the revisionary ethics of the collection of essays in the book that explore the world of cinema in a time of rapid planetary ecological change

The Use and Impacts of an Ethanol Cooking Fuel Promotion Pilot in Dar es Salaam

Ensuring access to affordable and clean energy resources (as articulated in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7) is critical to achieving a range of human development outcomes. Numerous studies have examined how clean cooking technology can, under the right circumstances, reduce household air pollution and shift household time use. Yet, empirical research on the adoption and impacts of bioethanol, an emerging clean cooking fuel that is frequently promoted in policy dialogues, remains limited and largely descriptive. Thus, this paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale, UNIDO/GEF-sponsored ethanol promotion program implemented in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. To mitigate against bias from non-random selection into ethanol stove ownership and confounding by observable factors that may influence the outcomes of ethanol stove adoption, we apply multiple regression and matching methods to analyze survey data collected from 844 households. We document increases in cooking time with ethanol fuel and primary use of ethanol stoves, indicating that this technology was taken up by targeted households. Yet, no clear health improvements or net time savings result among these households. This is likely due to the continued use of charcoal stoves and insufficiently robust stoves, which dampen cooking time savings and air pollution reductions, and a weak ethanol fuel supply chain to convenient retail outlets, with implications for fuel collection time. Improvement in technology and program design and implementation, focusing on user experiences and convenience aspects, is necessary to achieve better outcomes and deliver tangible economic benefits to households

Selectivity Effects of Hydrogen Acceptors and Catalyst Structures in Alcohol Oxidations Using (Cyclopentadienone)iron Tricarbonyl Compounds

Oppenauer-type oxidations are catalyzed by air- and moisture-stable, sustainable, (cyclopentadienone)iron carbonyl compounds, but the substrate scope is limited due to the low reduction potential of acetone, which is the most commonly used hydrogen acceptor. We discovered that furfural, an aldehyde derived from cellulosic biomass, is an effective hydrogen acceptor with this class of catalysts. In general, reactions using furfural as the hydrogen acceptor led to higher isolated yields of ketones and aldehydes compared to those using acetone. Importantly, primary benzylic and allylic alcohols─typically a challenging class of alcohols to oxidize with these catalysts─could be oxidized. The selectivity for primary vs secondary alcohol oxidation with (cyclopentadienone)iron carbonyl catalysts was also explored using acetone and furfural as the hydrogen acceptors. Most of the catalysts tested preferentially oxidized unhindered secondary alcohols, but catalysts with trialkylsilyl groups in the 2- and 5-positions of the cyclopentadienone preferentially oxidized primary alcohols. A combination of substrate scope experiments and kinetic studies concluded that the selectivity with the trialkylsilyl-based catalysts was kinetically derived─primary alcohols were oxidized more quickly than secondary─and the selectivity for secondary alcohol oxidation with the other catalysts arose from the equilibrium-driven nature of the Oppenauer-type oxidation

The Art of Travel

Under the direction of Professor Yan Sun, student curators examine the theme of travel in both Eastern and Western works of art. Exploring topics such as artists’ trips, the imagined landscape, pilgrimages, tourism, and modes of travel, the exhibition features prints, paintings, carvings, photography and material culture.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1046/thumbnail.jp

APPC Minutes – February 18, 2025

Minutes of the Academic Policy and Program Committee Meeting, February 18, 2025

The Wheel is Turning (And You Can\u27t Slow Down): Financial Hardships as Gendered Experiences and Financial Insecurity Trajectories

We propose that Conservation of Resources theory can be applied through a gendered lens to understand how individual and socio-structural forces explain experiences of workers\u27 financial hardships over a six-month period (N = 455). Using latent growth curve analysis, we analyzed how energy resources (income), personal resources (money management skills), gender, and the community\u27s gender inequality predicted workers\u27 financial insecurity during a financial hardship. We also analyzed how the change trajectories of financial insecurity related to change trajectories in their health, work-family balance, and job attitudes over time. Results demonstrated that one\u27s income, money management skills, and gender predicted the initial perceptions of financial insecurity. Furthermore, participants living in communities with greater gender inequality in earnings and full-time employment had higher initial levels of financial insecurity than individuals living in communities with greater gender equality. Finally, changes in financial insecurity levels predicted changes in worker health, work-family balance, and job attitudes over time. This work provides a test of Corollary 1 and Corollary 2 of Conservation of Resources theory, advancing the theory to specifically integrate gender at both individual and community levels