The relationship between baptismal status and spiritual practices among committed Baptist youth

The empirical correlates of baptismal status raise intriguing questions for empirical theologians (does baptism make a measurable difference) and for social scientists (how does baptismal status function as an indictor of religiosity). The present study investigates these problems among a sample of 674 highly committed Christian adolescents participating in a weeklong youth mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches in Eastern Canada. In this sample, 72% had been baptised as an older child or adolescent, 13% had been baptised only as a baby before they were old enough to make a decision for themselves, and 15% had never been baptised. Multivariate analyses, controlling for sex and age differences and for maternal and paternal church attendance, found significant associations between baptismal status and spiritual practices. The status of never having been baptised is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance, personal Bible reading, and personal prayer. The status of having been baptised only as a baby is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance

The teenage religion and values survey in England and Wales : an overview

The Teenage Religion and Values Survey was conducted throughout the 1990s among young people between the ages of 13 and 15 years. A total of 33,982 young people took part in the survey. As the next phase of this research begins for the twenty-first century this paper looks back at the survey conducted in the 1990s and considers two aspects of the research. First, this paper considers the methodology behind designing such a survey. Second, this paper considers some of the insights generated by the survey under five headings: personality, spiritual health, religious affiliation, belonging without believing, and church leaving

Developing conceptual glossaries for the Latin vulgate bible.

A conceptual glossary is a textual reference work that combines the features of a thesaurus and an index verborum. In it, the word occurrences within a given text are classified, disambiguated, and indexed according to their membership of a set of conceptual (i.e. semantic) fields. Since 1994, we have been working towards building a set of conceptual glossaries for the Latin Vulgate Bible. So far, we have published a conceptual glossary to the Gospel according to John and are at present completing the analysis of the Gospel according to Mark and the minor epistles. This paper describes the background to our project and outlines the steps by which the glossaries are developed within a relational database framework

Religiosity and music copyright theft among Canadian Baptist youth

This study examines the views of 706 Canadian Baptist youth (between the ages of 14 and 18 years) on the moral issue of music copyright theft, and explores the influence on these views of age, sex, Sunday church attendance, personal prayer, personal Bible reading, and conservative Bible believing. The participants were attending Springforth 2005 (a major Canadian Baptist Youth Conference). The data demonstrate a high level of acceptance of music copyright theft, with only 26% of the participants agreeing that downloading copyright music from the Internet without paying is always wrong. Employing multiple regression modelling, the data demonstrated that, as Canadian Baptist youth mature (grew older), as they became more familiar with Bible teaching (through frequent reading of the scriptures), and as they became more integrated within the community of faith (through frequent Sunday church attendance), so they take a tougher line against music copyright theft

Non-believing Students at a Christian Tertiary Institution: What Drew Them, What They Expected, and What They Found

Many Christian tertiary educators share a passion to see holistic transformation in students’ lives. This qualitative study grew out of the desire to explore whether students who are not Christ-followers, but who apply to study within an overtly Christian context, experience such change. It investigated why they chose to apply, their initial expectations, the positives and challenges of their lived experiences, and self-perceptions of any holistic change. While geographical proximity appeared to be the strongest motivator, many did experience holistic change during their time of study. The most daunting challenge appeared to be the biblical critique required in assignment and class work, the time required for that, and the stress involved. My hope is that this study might add to our understanding, and highlight ways in which educators can work more fruitfully with students who do not share our Christian faith

Evaluating prose style transfer with the Bible

In the prose style transfer task a system, provided with text input and a target prose style, produces output which preserves the meaning of the input text but alters the style. These systems require parallel data for evaluation of results and usually make use of parallel data for training. Currently, there are few publicly available corpora for this task. In this work, we identify a high-quality source of aligned, stylistically distinct text in different versions of the Bible. We provide a standardized split, into training, development and testing data, of the public domain versions in our corpus. This corpus is highly parallel since many Bible versions are included. Sentences are aligned due to the presence of chapter and verse numbers within all versions of the text. In addition to the corpus, we present the results, as measured by the BLEU and PINC metrics, of several models trained on our data which can serve as baselines for future research. While we present these data as a style transfer corpus, we believe that it is of unmatched quality and may be useful for other natural language tasks as well

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

Professional Preparation in a Caring Christian Institution: Experiences of Holistic Change in the Lives of Students who do not Profess Christian Faith

Many Christian tertiary educators deeply long to see holistic transformation in students\u27 lives. This qualitative study grew out of the desire to discover whether students who are not Christ-followers, but who apply to study within an overtly Christian context, experience such change. This second of two articles investigates what specific changes respondents observed in relationship to God, Christian faith, others, and self, linking to the institutional vision of being transformational and relational, as well as when in relation to their program, and through what means any changes occurred. It also discusses recommendations from the participants on how to enable non-Christ-followers to participate more meaningfully in a Christ-centered educational context, facilitating a study experience that is more enriching, positive, and transformative