Accelerated Christian Education: a case study of the use of race in voucher-funded private Christian schools

President Donald Trump has promised an expansion of voucher programs for private schools in the United States. Private Christian schools are likely beneficiaries of such an expansion, but little research has been conducted about the curricula they use or their suitability for public funds. This article describes and critiques the depiction of race in Accelerated Christian Education, a curriculum used in some voucher-funded schools in the USA, as well as in private schools in 140 countries. It employs content analysis and qualitative documentary analysis of the curriculum workbooks, and builds on Christian Smith and Michael Emerson’s theoretical framework of white evangelicals’ ‘cultural toolkit’ to explain the ideas about race in the curriculum. The paper finds that in addition to some overt racism, the system promulgates a worldview which does not have the capacity to recognize or oppose systemic injustice. It is argued that such a curriculum is not a suitable recipient of federal funding

Aggression and spirituality among veterans with chronic combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder

Spirituality negatively correlates with aggression among the general population, but few studies have examined this relationship in the high-risk population of veterans with combat-related PTSD. Those that have found that incorporating spirituality into treatment may inversely relate to aggression; yet, most studies utilize single-item measures of spirituality. This project expands current research by using a multidimensional measure of spirituality to evaluate which dimensions best predict aggression. Scales were Daily Spiritual Experiences, Forgiveness, and Religious Support from the BMMRS. Participants were 472 male combat veterans in residential PTSD treatment. Aggression was best predicted by Forgiveness, with higher levels less likely to be aggressive; marital status, with marrieds more likely to be aggressive; and depression, with higher levels more likely to be aggressive

I Decide when You Die: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Prior Reporting of Physical Violence for Intimate Partner Homicides by Heterosexual Spouses in Florida

It is generally believed that a victim of an intimate partner homicide, who faced ongoing physical violence prior to the killing, would have contacted authorities for assistance or protection some time prior to their death. However, the results of this study show that this notion that a victim of ongoing abuse will, more than likely, request help is a misconception. Through qualitative and quantitative methods analysis, this study reveals the dearth of prior reporting of physical violence to law enforcement or the court when an intimate partner homicide takes place between heterosexual spouses in Florida between 2006 and 2016. Additionally, coercive control, a term that is not nearly as recognizable as domestic violence or intimate partner violence but that should be understood and regulated, was conceptualized and operationalized using NVivo Pro 12, a qualitative social sciences software package. By constructing an original data set from secondary data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Uniform Crime Report Supplemental Homicide Report, multiple law enforcement agencies from throughout the state of Florida, and many Florida county courthouses, variables of intimate partner homicide were analyzed in unique quantitative models using IBM SPSS, an advanced statistical software analysis program. Also, as part of the content analysis process, Petitions for Injunction for Protection against Domestic Violence were organized, coded, and analyzed to provide insight into the role coercive control takes prior to an intimate partner homicide. This study sheds light on the fact that the emphasis on physical violence in intimate partner abuse, rather than the non-violent tactics of coercive control, for lethality risk assessments for intimate partner violence victims is misplaced and warrants reconsideration

The Elephant in the Room: Towards an integrated, feminist analysis of mass murder

This paper argues for a new approach to making sense of mass murder, emphasizing the urgency of recognizing the proliferation and significance of misogyny and domestic violence among perpetrators of this type of homicide. It is vital that scholarship recognizes the political-economy of neoliberal patriarchy and seeks to better understand how harmful subjectivity develops in this context. We propose a new multi-level framework for the analysis of mass murder and issue a call to action for a global programme of independent qualitative research and activism to tackle its drivers, prevent further harm and save lives

The religion of Tarot

While Tarot cards are widely known as a fortune-telling tool, the practice of reading Tarot can also be understood as a spiritual practice. Tarot cards have undergone significant reinterpretations since their origins as a secular parlour game in the fifteenth century. Largely due to the influence of occult and alchemical thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, today Tarot has emerged as a mystical tool for divination, enlightenment, and spiritual self-help. This study seeks to understand the religious dimensions of Tarot for Tarot readers. Drawing upon the five dimensions of religiosity model developed by Rodney Stark and Charles Glock, this thesis reveals the inherent religiosity of Tarot reading for practitioners. However, this thesis also reveals the need for a more nuanced model of religion than that offered by Stark and Glock. The thesis argues that while the Stark and Glock model of religiosity can help reveal some of the spiritual dimensions of Tarot practice, its institutional bias fails to account for other important spiritual dimensions of Tarot religiosity

Refiguring class: the precariat in contemporary writing about Britain

This thesis is about social class in post-2008 writing about Britain. Focusing on the work of several contemporary writers – including John Lanchester, Mohsin Hamid, and Ali Smith – the thesis seeks to examine the ways in which neoliberalism as an economic, cultural, social and political formation produces a new class subject: the precariat. The condition of precarity has received some attention in literary studies, but this thesis offers a theorisation of the constitutive form the character type of the precariat might take in seven main texts. The purpose of this, therefore, is to posit a revitalisation of class analyses in studies of contemporary literature. After providing a theoretical mapping of neoliberalism, class, and the precariat across several disciplines in the Introduction, Chapter One interrogates Lanchester’s Capital (2012), arguing that its formal qualities both reflect the cultural concept of the classless society and anticipate its fragmentation into the precariat. The novel’s conclusion with the financial crisis as a moment of rupture signals the necessity of the subsequent chapters, which serve as literary case studies of each character type. Chapter Two reads the protagonist of Paul Ewen’s Francis Plug: How To Be A Public Author (2014) as a millennial by tracing the text’s focus on burnout, mental health, and the false promise of meritocratic ideals to identify his exploitation. Chapter Three focuses on Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and locates the figure of the migrant-refugee as characterised by a perennial mobility. Chapter Four examines Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 (2015) and identifies its engagement with austerity as economic and cultural violence. Finally, Chapter Five offers a brief, concluding discussion that brings the threads of the thesis together by considering Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) and Ali Smith’s Spring (2019) in relation to current class temporalities. Positioning precarity as existing in a ‘hyper present’, the thesis concludes by arguing the precariat is characterised by the post-crash cultural moment. Modulating Marxist and neoMarxist discourses, these chapters offer as a starting point an account of the ways in which class formation affects the novel in the 2004-2019 period

Tradition and modernity: A sociological comparison between Sri Lankan Muslim women in Colombo and London in the late 1990s.

This thesis is a sociological comparison between Sri Lankan Muslim women in two contemporary societies, and it concentrates on the dynamic relationship between religion, culture, and gender. The theoretical aims of the thesis are to investigate the ways in which religion, principally in relation to gender relations, is perceived by its followers, and the diverse manner in which religion can manifest itself, in different cultural and social contexts, at a given time. In particular, the study focuses on the diversity of followers' world-views because of adherents' different social experiences, despite the core religious beliefs they share. Further, it explores the impact these differences can have on followers' perceptions of the roles they play and the identities they assume. These issues have been addressed primarily by means of qualitative research, conducted in Sri Lanka and Britain. Although the thesis refers to the theoretical standpoints of many sociologists, two approaches are of particular significance: the first is Robert K. Merton's role-theory, to understand religious identity in relation to individuals' multiple identities; and the second is feminist critiques, for their insight into the relationship between religion, patriarchy and gender. The results indicate that Islam is an important independent variable that has an impact upon many aspects of life, mainly because it is regarded as a source of guidance and identity for a majority of women in the study. It follows that an understanding of the traditions and beliefs based on religion is essential to recognise existing power structures and gender relations in Muslim communities. Religious traditions are often regarded as immutable, given the sources on which they are based; but, as this study indicates, traditions and beliefs based on religion can alter with transformations in the social and cultural milieu. As a source of identity, Islam gives Muslims a sense of belonging to a 'community' that transcends national and geographical boundaries, even if the members of that community follow different forms of Islam and have other identities - such as being Muslim and Sri Lankan and/or British and/or mother/wife and so on. What is of particular relevance to the sociology of religion is that, although the women in this study had multiple competing identities, their religious identity, unlike, say, their national or ethnic identities, was an exclusive characteristic

The kiss of death : a demystification of the late-nineteenth century 'femme fatale' in the works of Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy.

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