Dissertation Acknowledgements

February 7, 2011 By 3 Comments

In the next couple days, I’m wrapping up Draft No. 3, the penultimate version of my dissertation.  Kenda Dean, my advisor, will look it over, and early next week she’ll distribute it to the other three members of my dissertation committee.  How this works is, Kenda tells them which page numbers of the dissertation will most interest them — usually, the sections where I deal directly with their work.  While they, of course, can read the whole thing, professors’ schedules being what they are, they may not get to it.

Kenda will then funnel their observations back to me, later this month, and then I’ve got until March 15 to make those revisions, format the thing to very exacting specifications, and get it in hard copy to the PhD Studies Office at Princeton (Theological Seminary).

Among the finishing touches I’ve had to put on is the acknowledgements section.  While I won’t disclose the entirety just yet, here’s what I wrote about Kenda, [Read more...]

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On Finishing a Dissertation

November 16, 2010 By 15 Comments

My sojourn to Philadelphia last week took me close enough to the gravitational center of my doctoral studies that could not help but be sucked into the tractor beam of Princeton Theological Seminary.  While there, I had a wonderful lunch with my primary advisor, Kenda Dean, during which we mapped out a schedule by which I can complete my dissertation during this academic year.

What that means, in short, is that I have to revise my first four chapters and write the fifth and final chapter by the time that she boards a plane for South Africa on January 2, 2011.  Thereby, she can read my tome on the flight (what better way to kill 20 hours?!?) and return it to me for more revisions upon her return.  Thereafter, the dissertation will be distributed to the other three members of my dissertation committee, and I will subsequently make the changes that they suggest.

Then I will take on the tedious and arduous task of formatting the dissertation, about which Princeton will truck no deviance.  To wit:

The main body is to be consecutive Arabic numbering from “1.” The page containing a chapter heading is to have the page number centered and greater than or equal to ¾in from bottom of page. The remaining pages in a chapter have the page number at the top right corner at least ½in from any edge.

On or before March 15, the dissertation must be printed and presented to the PhD Studies Office at Princeton, at which time an oral defense will be scheduled, to take place no later than the last day of April.  After the oral defense takes place, two more copies of the dissertation, printed on “high-quality, non-erasable, acid-free paper” must be submitted to the PhD Studies Office, whereupon I will be awarded the degree of philosophiae doctoris.

I write all of this for the sole purpose of informing the readers of this blog that, holy shit, I have a lot of work to do by January 2!

Thanks for your ongoing support.

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Almost Christian: Final Thoughts and Links

September 10, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, Almost Christian, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

To end the series on Kenda’s book, a few links for further reading.  First, CNN posted an article with the title, “Author: More Teens Becoming ‘Fake’ Christians“:

No matter their background, Dean says committed Christian teens share four traits: They have a personal story about God they can share, a deep connection to a faith community, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope about their future.

“There are countless studies that show that religious teenagers do better in school, have better relationships with their parents and engage in less high-risk behavior,” she says. “They do a lot of things that parents pray for.”

Dean, a United Methodist Church minister who says parents are the most important influence on their children’s faith, places the ultimate blame for teens’ religious apathy on adults.

[Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Make No Small Plans

September 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, Almost Christian, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

Kenda’s final chapter and conclusion is called, “Make No Small Plans: A Case for Hope,” and in it she attempts to find the good news in the otherwise rather dreary conclusions of the NSYR and the finding that most American teens practice a version of Christianity called, “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism.”

She recounts the five years of reflecting on the findings as full of sleepless nights.  And she told CNN that her time on the NSYR interview team was “one of the most depressing summers of her life.”  Five years later, she has drawn two conclusions:

  1. When it comes to vapid Christianity, teenagers are not the problem — the church is.
  2. The church is also the solution.

Kenda is tough on the church in this chapter, and throughout the book, arguing that “the contemporary church has strayed, often badly, from the course set before us by the earliest followers of Jesus…”  But, she hasn’t lost hope, and she round out the book with these five encouragements/challenges:

  1. [Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Hanging Loose

September 6, 2010 By 7 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, Almost Christian, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

In chapter 8, “Hanging Loose: The Art of Detachment,” Kenda uses the youth group short-term mission trips as the backbone of chapter.  She writes,

Every year, youth ministers immerse teenagers in cross-cultural encounters, cajole them into unasked for leadership roles, and confront them with Bible studies on cultural and theological sticking points.  In doing the daily work of ministry, these church leaders eject young people from their comfort zones and catapult them into disorienting dilemmas–thereby introducing them to a larger story in which God has given them a part to play.

She primarily relies upon the journal of a just-returned teenager to exemplify just how discombobulating a short-term mission experience can be.

It all reminds me of a story that was popular among Southern California youth pastors when I was one, in the early 1990s.  A girl steps out of the church van, having just arrived back in the church parking lot from a week in Tijuana, when she sees her dad drive up in a BMW.  Upon experiencing the dramatic juxtaposition, she pukes.

[Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Going Viral for Jesus

August 19, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, Almost Christian, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

In chapter 7, “Going Viral for Jesus: The Art of Testimony,” Kenda begins by tackling three of the questions that I heard voiced after Soul Searching came out.

First: Maybe the teens interviewed by the NYSR were just uncomfortable talking to adults about their faith.

Second: Maybe teens are deeply religious but just talk about it differently than the adult researchers wanted them to.

And third: Maybe teens are just generally inarticulate, but still deeply religious.

Kenda acknowledges that any of these is potentially valid (even devastating) criticism of the NSYR.  However, she counters that there were, in fact, many teens in the NSYR who could clearly articulate what they believed and why.  So, she writes, it is possible for a teen to be deeply religious and articulate about religious matters.

[Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Parents Matter Most

August 15, 2010 By 5 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

Kenda begins Part Three, “Cultivating Consequential Faith” of Almost Christian, with chapter six, “Parents Matter Most: The Art of Translation.”  Here, Kenda takes a bit of a turn, into the neo-liberal world of theologians like Hans Frei and George Lindbeck.  This is particularly interesting to me because it is territory that I know well.  I wrote extensively in defense of this line of thinking in my first book, and I have since retreated a bit from that position.

In short, Frei and Lindbeck and me, and now Kenda Dean, argue that a incumbent to Christian catechism and formation is a language that is unique to Christianity.  But before Kenda gets to that, she emphasizes what every youth pastor knows and what the NYSR reported conclusively:

[Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Missional Imaginations

July 30, 2010 By 4 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

In chapter five, Kenda continues a theme that she’s already introduced: cultivating missional imaginations in teens is a strong antidote to moralistic, therapeutic deism.  But what, exactly, is a missional imagination?

Well, what it’s not is a week-long summer mission trip to an Indian reservation.  In fact, Kenda argues that the fact that we’ve had to find an adjective — basically, to invent the word, “missional” — “testifies to the American church’s frayed ecclesiology.”  Be that as it may, missional is here to stay, and she finds it a helpful term.

Kenda’s definition of a missional youth ministry parallels her understanding of the gospel, and she uses some of the same characterizations: messy, indecorous, risky.  “Missional churches,” she writes, “rachet up expectations by consciously striving to point out, interpret, and embody the excessive nature of God’s love.”

A ministry that exemplifies missionality for Kenda is Outreach Red Bank, a one-time youth ministry that has “blossomed into a multigenerational church.”  ORB and other missional ministries fashion their life on the cruciform pattern of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection:

[Read more...]

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Almost Christian: Generative Faith

July 27, 2010 By 11 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me. Find all the posts here.

In chapter four, Kenda turns explicitly theological, arguing that “Catechesis shapes missional imaginations, which help us recognize God’s activity in Jesus Christ and in us, as Christ calls us to participate in his redemptive work in the world.”  She writes that the gospel in ineluctably missional, and that teens who are formed by a gospel imagination should also be missional.  This happens by,

  1. Claiming a Creed: Teens need not only to have a general, warm feeling about Jesus, but must be able to articulate what, exactly, is special and unique about Jesus.
  2. Belonging to a Community: Teens need the “connectedness” that is fostered exclusively in “authoritative communities.”
  3. Pursuing a Purpose: Teens need to live in a “morally significant universe” in which their good decisions have good consequences and their bad decisions have bad consequences.
  4. Harboring Hope: Teens are pulled out of moralistic, therapeutic deism by hope (that God controls the future), which provides “highly devoted teenagers with a resource for getting through the present.”

Kenda goes on to explicate that “highly devoted teenagers” live out their faith and show that outwardly.  She then points to the results of the Exemplary Youth Ministry Study at Luther Seminary for a list of attributes that can be found in these highly devoted teens.

For me, I come back to the question I asked earlier: Is it even developmentally possible for adolescents to articulate a creed, commit to an authoritative community, pursue a purpose, and harbor hope? My gut and experience tell me that they can do 3 and 4, but most probably cannot pull off 1 and 2.

What do you think?

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Almost Christian: Mormon Envy

July 20, 2010 By 24 Comments

I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me.  Find all the posts here.

In chapter three, Kenda’s provocative chapter title is, “Mormon Envy.”  Those of us who read Soul Searching remember how Mormon teens religiously outperform their peers by every measure, from behavior (later to lose their virginity; less use of alcohol and drugs) to belief (higher attendance at church functions; better able to articulate what they believe).

In this chapter, Kenda introduces and relies upon the “cultural toolkit” theory developed by UC-Berkeley sociologist Ann Swidler (co-author of the sociological blockbuster Habits of the Heart).  Swidler published an article in 1986 in which she spells out this theory, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” (PDF), the abstract of which reads,

[Read more...]

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