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Love for Allah and love for self: exploring the connection between religious affect and self-esteem among Muslim adolescents in England
No full textThe connection between religious affect and self-esteem has been supported by a series of studies conducted among Christian or post-Christian samples. The present study extends this research tradition among a sample of 919 self-identified Muslim adolescents (between the ages of 11 and 14 years) attending schools in England. The data demonstrated that, after controlling for personal factors (age and sex) and for psychological factors (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism), there was a significant positive association between the two core variables (religious affect and self-esteem). From the perspective of the empirical psychology of religion this study confirms among a Muslim sample a finding previously recorded among Christian or post-Christian samples
The Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTS): Factor structure, internal consistency reliability, and concurrent validity with the MBTI
No full textThe Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTS) were developed to operationalise psychological type theory in a way appropriate for and accessible to survey-style research, administered either online or offline. For the present study two samples of adults participating in short courses relevant for Christian ministry (N = 185 and 392) completed the FPTS
at least one day after completing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®). The data: confirmed the basic factor structure of the FPTS; demonstrated the satisfactory internal consistency reliability of the indices of introversion and extraversion, sensing and intuition, feeling and thinking, judging and perceiving; and supported the concurrent validity of this measure against the MBTI® in terms of both correlations between continuous scale scores and allocation to type categories
At home in Southern Egypt: Lucie Duff Gordon’s life on the nile
No full textBrought up in Germany, France, and England, Lucie Duff Gordon was a distinguished English translator of literary and scholarly texts with an atypical but rigorous education. Her intellectual and linguistic talents found a renewed purpose in Southern Egypt, where she spent the last seven years of her life. In search of a warmer, dry climate to improve her serious health conditions, she created a meaningful Egyptian life in Luxor where she connected with the community, learnt Arabic, practised as an amateur doctor, and studied the local culture, traditions, and religions. Her perceptive letters also bear witness to the controversial rule of the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, to the poverty of the working classes, and to those forced to work on the Suez Canal.
Published during her life as Letters from Egypt, 1863-65 (1865), her epistolary travel literature remains an original contribution to travel writing because it is distinguished by her gendered, multilingual, and intercultural perspective that does not suffer of what Duff Gordon herself claims to be “the usual defect – the people are not real people” (2021, 92) of nineteenth-century travel books. Her correspondence focuses on human interactions and interconnecting the local with the global. Moreover, her letters bring to light her transnational subjectivity, her abilities as a cultural mediator and compelling storyteller, as well as her inquisitiveness and intercultural knowledge. An acute and perceptive translator, this article posits Duff Gordon established a multilingual and intercultural home on the river Nile that challenged both nineteenth-century British and Egyptian expectations
Hiring labourers for the vineyard and making sense of God’s grace at work: An empirical investigation in hermeneutical theory and ordinary theology
No full textThe Matthean parable of the labourers in the vineyard is open to multiple interpretations. For some, the parable may speak of God’s unlimited grace and generosity; for others the parable may speak of God’s unfairness. The present study is set within the context of an emerging interest in the concept of grace as a topic for empirical enquiry. The study draws on the theoretical framework provided by the notion of ordinary theology, and employs the SIFT (Sensing, Intuition, Feeling, Thinking) approach to biblical hermeneutics, which is rooted in Jungian psychological type theory. Data were drawn from two one-day workshops with Church of England Readers (lay ministers). On each occasion the participants were divided into three separate groups according to their preferences for thinking or feeling (the two judging functions proposed by psychological type theory) and within these groups they were invited to explore the messages about grace in Matthew 20: 1-15 (Jesus’ parable of the labourers in the vineyard). The rich data gathered from these workshops generated insights into contemporary theologies of grace and also confirmed the hypothesis that a biblical interpretation of grace is shaped by the reader’s psychological type preference for thinking or feeling. While feeling types tended to empathize, thinking types pondered motives and unfairness.
Contribution: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of sacred text. Employing this method, the present study contributes to three fields of scholarship: to the field of homiletics and hermeneutics, to the field of ordinary theology, and to the emerging field concerned with the concept of grace as a topic for empirical enquiry
Assessing the Personal Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Retired Clergy: Listening to their Experiences
No full textLike stipendiary and self-supporting clergy, retired clergy faced personal and professional challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to illuminate the personal impact of the pandemic, the project Through the eyes of retired clergy invited 30 retired Church of England clergy to document their experiences of the pandemic, and 24 accepted the invitation. The present paper analyses their responses and highlights five areas: the impact of the pandemic on physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and spiritual wellbeing; opportunities during the pandemic to exercise Christian ministry; Christian ministry received from others during the pandemic; things missed most during the pandemic; and gains during the pandemic. These findings lead to two main conclusions: concerning the significant contribution made to the ministry and mission of the Church by retired clergy during the pandemic; and concerning how retired clergy could have benefited from greater recognition and support during the pandemic
Work-Related Psychological Wellbeing and Conservative Christian Belief Among Methodist Circuit Ministers in Britain: Distinguishing Between Emotional Exhaustion and Satisfaction in Ministry
No full textDrawing on data provided by 803 Methodist circuit ministers serving in Great Britain, the present study was designed to test the association between conservative Christian belief and work-related psychological wellbeing as operationalised by the balanced affect model proposed by the Francis Burnout Inventory. After taking into account the effects of personal factors, psychological factors, contextual factors, and experience factors, holding conservative Christian belief was associated with a higher level of positive affect (satisfaction in ministry) but independent of negative affect (emotional exhaustion in ministry)
Self-identifying as Anglican within the two political jurisdictions on the island of Ireland: A study among sixth-form students in the Greer tradition
No full textThis study explores what self-assigned religious identity as Church of Ireland means to sixth-form students living on the island of Ireland. Drawing on data contributed to the 2011 Greer survey on sixth-form religion by 327 self-identified
Anglican students in Northern Ireland and by 288 in the Republic of Ireland, the salience of religious practices, religious beliefs, and moral values is compared between the two groups. The main conclusion drawn is that religious practice and religious belief is significantly more important to Anglican students in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland, suggesting that in the Republic of Ireland self-identification with the Church of Ireland may be of greater cultural significance (rather than religious significance) compared with Northern Ireland
A Conceptual Model for Teacher Trainee Well-being: Challenges and Resources in an Ecological System
No full textThis poster outlines the development of a conceptual
framework, based on the findings from initial data
collection investigating well-being in Initial Teacher
Education (ITE) (Thompson et al., 2020; Quickfall,
Clarke and Thompson, 2021). In England there are
sustained and significant issues in both teacher
recruitment and retention (Perryman and Calvert,
2020, Worth, 2022), making this research pertinent.
Studies on teachers’ well-being are growing in
number but tend to focus on factors which lead to
stress and poor well-being, rather than those that
support or promote health (Roffey, 2012). Studies
have highlighted how teacher well-being affects
teaching, student motivation and retention, and that
issues related to well-being are one of the most cited
factors for leaving the profession (Collie, Shapka,
Perry and Martin, 2015; Ofsted, 2019). Research on
supporting and developing well-being for children in
schools is growing, and government policies and
publications have more recently highlighted this as
an area of focus (DfE, 2018). However there remains
a paucity of research into well-being for trainee
teachers at a time when the recruitment crisis and
mentor capacity in schools is far from resolved
(Worth, 2022)
You must be having a laugh? Humour to transgress.
No full textThis article argues for the encouragement of incongruous humour in Education Studies (within higher education) learning environments. Examining three competing paradigms of humour, and reworking practices from second language learning, it is argued that incongruous humour may facilitate critical interrogation of concepts, policies and practices often taken as supposedly necessary, rather than necessarily contingent. Following the precepts of immanent critique, taken from the Frankfurt School of critical theory, merged with Nietzsche’s advocacy of child-like play, it is argued that incongruous humour may transgress norms in generative, as opposed to compensatory, manner. Eschewing an attempt to create a toolbox of humorous techniques to employ in the Education Studies learning environment, this article presents a philosophical enquiry into the transgressive and critical role of incongruous humour amidst the contemporary neoliberal university apparatus