U.S. Religious Landscape on Twitter

Religiosity is a powerful force shaping human societies, affecting domains as diverse as economic growth or the ability to cope with illness. As more religious leaders and organizations as well as believers start using social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook), online activities become important extensions to traditional religious rituals and practices. However, there has been lack of research on religiosity in online social networks. This paper takes a step toward the understanding of several important aspects of religiosity on Twitter, based on the analysis of more than 250k U.S. users who self-declared their religions/belief, including Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Specifically, (i) we examine the correlation of geographic distribution of religious people between Twitter and offline surveys. (ii) We analyze users' tweets and networks to identify discriminative features of each religious group, and explore supervised methods to identify believers of different religions. (iii) We study the linkage preference of different religious groups, and observe a strong preference of Twitter users connecting to others sharing the same religion.Comment: 10 page

The Christian View Of Vocation For Librarians

Like two brothers, western civilization and Christianity grew up together. Christianity gave the civilization its virtues, its view of work, and its view of service. With the decline of Christian influence, there is an increasing separation between virtue, service and work. This has led to vocational crisis in professions which have described themselves as vocations. Nurses, doctors and teachers have noticed the problem. This paper will make some observations concerning the crisis, give historical and biblical insights into our view of vocation, discuss some errors with the viewpoints, give some proposals for improving the situation and conclude with a summary

Faith and Responsibility in the Global Village (Chapter 5 of My Place in the World

In many ways, people around the world are becoming one big community. The media are connecting us. So are business, industry, and culture. This chapter explores the character of the global village, suggesting how people of religious faith might point the way forward so that all members of the human community may enjoy greater security and a more equitable share in what the world has to offer

The Crescent Student Newspaper, April 7, 2006

Student newspaper of George Fox University.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/2303/thumbnail.jp

Rahner\u27s Primordial Words and Bernstein\u27s Metaphorical Leaps: The Affinity of Art with Religion and Theology

Karl Rahner\u27s notion of primordial words and Leonard Bernstein\u27s conception of music as intrinsically metaphorical are engaged to suggest that there is a fundamental affinity between artistic and religious imagination. The affinity is grounded, in part at least, in metaphoric process—an elemental cognitive act in which the human spirit is stretched so that its expressions can address what lies beyond them

The Source of Magic

This paper is an attempt to show that a large part of Western society no longer operates on the rationalist principles that most of us thought it did, but that it instead runs by magic more akin to that in fantasy works. The term ‘magic’ is not meant metaphorically or in science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s sense that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1962), but is meant literally in the sense that Frazer (1890, republished 2003) used the term. This means that instead of trying to understand the present and near future by looking at the works of science fiction creators who put forth a rationalist and technological view of the world, we would understand the future better by looking to the fantasy of authors such as Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock. This magic is manifested through magical thinking and irrational behaviour, where the majority of us use literal spells and incantations in our daily interactions with each other in the networked world, and where we worship capricious gods; most importantly, those spells, incantations and worship actually work, and those gods have actually come to exist. This paper will also show just how the spread of the computer technology propounded by scientists, technologists and SF writers has inevitably led to the creation of this irrational and magical world. This is partly because of limitations built-in to the formal systems on which these systems are based, leading to an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences. Finally, the paper will explain the mechanism by which magic is literally becoming real by reference to Frazer’s two laws of magic: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion

Educating in the Spirit: An Examination of the Person and Role of the Holy Spirit in Christian School Education (Part Two)

This study is the second of a two-part article that examines the Person and role of the Holy Spirit in Christian school education. Part One (ICCTE Journal, 10(1)) was an extensive literature review of the Person and role of the Holy Spirit from the two perspectives. Part Two is a cross-case study of two principals who led schools representing each perspective. The rationale for this study is that since Christian schools submit to the authority of the Bible, and Scripture recognizes the preeminence of the Holy Spirit, these schools would seek to comply with these biblical prescriptions. The employment of semi-structured interviewing in a qualitative, cross-case research design suited the study. We sought to encapsulate the in-depth experience of two principals, one from a Reformed and the other from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian school. Through a within-case analysis of each interview, important themes were identified. In the subsequent cross-case comparative analysis, the most important themes included the transmission of truth, staff matters, and goals for learners. Additional discussion raised separately by only one of the principals addresses the themes of compliance with authority and relationship with the Spirit

Strategies for Implementing Change: An Experiential Approach

An attitude survey and a role-playing case were used to identify the typical approaches people use to implement important changes in organizations. This typical strategy, suggested or used by over 90% of the subjects, was not successful in producing change in any of the fourteen role-playing trials. However, with ten minutes of instruction in the ”Delta Technique,” 86% of the subjects were successful in introducing change in another fourteen role-playing trials. The ”Delta Technique” consists of simple rules drawn from half a century of research

Spartan Daily, January 31, 1997

Volume 108, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9083/thumbnail.jp