Understanding Your Critics: An Outsider’s Analysis of a Core Criticism of the Church Growth Movement

A call to proclamation evangelism rather than persuasion evangelism

Understanding Your Critics: An Outsider’s Analysis of a Core Criticism of the Church Growth Movement

A call to proclamation evangelism rather than persuasion evangelism

Dordt Convocation Address: Spring 2007

This address was presented by Dr. Duane Litfin at the 2007 Spring Convocation of Dordt College

Religious faith in education: enemy or asset?

In this article I hope to cast some light on the relationship between religious faith and education by a preliminary mapping of the field. There are three parts to the article. First, I lay out the assumptions from which the rest of the article builds. Second, I seek to identify possible links between religion and education. As a sub-set of this, I explore a range of ways that theology might relate to education. Third, as a step towards a more healthy relationship between education and religious faith, I offer reasons why the church needs the academy and the academy needs the church. In the light of a convergence of the concerns that I show are shared by religious believers and educators, it is suggested that religious faith in the context of education should be considered an asset rather than an enemy

Endogenous networks and international cooperation

The rise of social network analyses in the social sciences has allowed empirical work to better account for interdependencies among actors and among their actions. However, this work has been, to a large extent, descriptive: it has treated these actions as exogenous and immutable. In many cases these networks describe actions like alliance formation or trade phenomena that are the outcome variables for programs of social scientific research. In this paper, I attempt to account for both interdependencies and the endogenous nature of networks by incorporating formal theory; helping answer the question of how these networks arise by looking at the incentives of actors to form links with each other. I discuss the appropriate solution concept for a network formation game, and present an algorithm for finding the equilibrium of these networks computationally as well as ways to compare the theoretical networks to observed ones in order to evaluate the fit of the theory. I apply these methods to the study of international cooperation a subject where both the interdependencies and purposive nature of actors must be accounted for. The theoretical network is able to reproduce a number of important observed characteristics. Still, there are more factors that must be accounted for if we want to understand how the network of international cooperation is formed

The Effects of Gender Grouping on Female Students’ Participation in Physical Education

The purpose of this action research was to determine if female participation would increase in a single-gendered versus a co-educational (co-ed) setting during seventh and eighth grade physical education. The action research project was completed in the Barnum Secondary School with 70 seventh and eighth grade females during competitive contact activities. All 70 females were given a participation questionnaire and 40 random females were observed during four weeks of activity. Data was collected using a participation questionnaire, a participation tally sheet, a video observation checklist, and a participation rubric. The results showed female participation increased in the single-gendered setting in competitive contact activities. Competitive contact activities should be offered in a single-gendered setting to allow females in seventh and eighth grade the opportunity to enhance their participation in a physical education setting. We will continue to monitor both co-ed and single-gendered activities to gauge participation outcomes

The Choice of Color, Topic and Toys: An Empirical Study of Gender Roles

Typically, toy manufacturers use the color pink for girls’ toys and the color blue for boys. They also design gender-related theme worlds for girls and boys based on gender-based stereotypes, justified by different playing preferences of the two sexes. Socially-oriented toys such as dolls are meant for girls and non-social toys such as trucks are attributed to boys. In toy shops, early-stage shaping of the gender profile is thus achieved by color and theme design. This early-stage reinforcement and reproduction of gender stereotypes has been criticized because stereotyping can limit further child development and learning. The goal of this article is to examine the contribution of the color-setting and theme design to the perception of toys, the gender-related assignment as well as the preferences for playing with toys. For this purpose, the use of the eye-tracking technology is combined with a questionnaire. In an experiment six pairs of “LEGO®” models, which have been systematically varied in color and theme, are shown to 74 four- and five-year-old children. The results reveal that the original gender-stereotyped “LEGO®” models attract more attention among children than the varied gender-incongruent models. The original “LEGO®” models are clearly assigned to gender. In the case of the varied models, the color is more distinctive than the theme for gender classification and the interest in playing with the models. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p