Latin American literature has a rich tradition of translating recreated realities and social commentaries into fictional works. In Central America, especially in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, these commentaries often speak to the plight of the people and the unjust actions of many governments during and after their still fresh civil wars. One Guatemalan author, Maurice Echeverría, stays within the broader trajectory of Central American literature with his novel Diccionario esotérico by creating a fictional work that speaks to a reality and asserts social commentary. This text differs from the corpus, though, by moving beyond the war and the postwar eras to a very current and prominent reality. This novel, which presents a critique of abuses of power in all of their manifestations, gives way to a striking commentary on evangelical organizations. This study will focus on extrapolating this critique to an actual evangelical organization working in Central America, thereby drawing connections between Echeverría’s critical/theological stance and real systems of power. / Master of Arts

This thesis explores the ways in which Christian faith ‘adds value’ to the ‘carescape’ and ‘caringscapes’ of statutory hostels for people experiencing homelessness in the United Kingdom. The ways that a distinctively Christian organisational ethos is created and experienced through the material, regulatory and performative dimensions of space, place and subjectivity, are explored through a case study of the Salvation Army’s contemporary statutory accommodation services for single homeless people. Drawing upon Cloke’s notions of ‘theo-ethics’ and Conradson’s concept of ‘therapeutic landscape experience’, the links between spirituality, care and ‘value added’ are examined from the perspective of staff, volunteers and service users. This analysis extends the debate on the potential for faith-based organisations to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to care for people experiencing homelessness, by foregrounding the spiritual and emotional dimensions that texture these organisational landscapes of care. A feminist epistemological approach is taken to illuminate the nuances of care-giving and care-receiving, with particular attention paid to the emotional and spiritual sensitivities underpinning social interactions, and how these dimensions are perceived, narrated and experienced from a variety of perspectives. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study involved the undertaking of 91 semi-structured interviews, a six-week period of participant observation in a specific Salvation Army Lifehouse, and attendance at four professional social service and chaplaincy conferences run by the Salvation Army UK. The research findings suggest that Christianity adds value to these institutional spaces of care in a highly nuanced way, dependent on one’s subjectivity. A second observation is that the potential for faith to add value within statutory arenas of care for the homeless is being compromised due to the pressures associated with the incumbent neoliberal contract culture within which Lifehouses are embedded. A third contribution concerns the potential for a faith-based organisation to act as a crucible for the emergence of postsecular rapprochement: it is suggested that an intersectional approach to analysing this socio-spatial process is necessary, due to the strategic role that gender, age, sexuality and race were revealed to play in fostering, or dissipating, the affective relationships that underpinned fragile moments of rapprochement.

As the debate intensifies regarding developing remedies to meet the needs of America’s homeless, one solution is for governmental agencies to collaborate with and employ organizations from the nonprofit sector to assist with the needs of the homeless population. Included in the nonprofit sector, faith-based organizations (FBOs) have historically been a source of debate and contention in terms of collaborations with the government. However, Presidents Reagan, George H. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama have embraced the idea of including FBOs in the pool of service providers offering human services. In the Richmond, Virginia region, FBOs and nonreligious nonprofit organizations provide a range of human services to a substantial population of homeless clients. Yet, whether the homeless population prefers services offered by FBOs versus nonreligious nonprofits in general and for specific categories of service is unknown. These specific categories of service include alcohol treatment and recovery, counseling, drug treatment and recovery, food pantries, health care, job training and placement, short-term and long-term shelter, and meal sites. In addition, this study seeks to identify models using variables from this study that predict the preference for each category of service. Since homeless clients overall and specific human service preferences are an unknown, the importance of this study is to inform policymakers, those in the nonprofit sector, researchers, and other interested parties of these preferences. A study of this nature is also important to compare policy implementation to the preferences of the homeless to ensure the implementation accounts for principles of social equity. In addition, a study of this nature seeks to fill a literature gap by examining and understanding the intersections of demographic characteristics and preferences. Using the cohort and the rational choice theories, this study examines the preferences of homeless individuals for particular types of service providers.

Religion has played a central part in human history and is still a foundation in many societies. Faith-based organizations are in some countries the largest providers of social services and were pioneers in the humanitarian aid sector. There is in academia a growing interest in faith-based organizations and a perception that they have an advantage over their secular counterparts. This study has identified those established theories and provided a comprehensive overview of the research field. It has been argued that faith-based organizations for one should be more cost-effective than their secular counterparts. The faith of their staff members is a significant part of their motivation. They, therefore, accept lower salaries or volunteer to a higher degree. It has also been argued that projects implemented by faith-based organizations could be more rooted in local communities due to a long history of cooperation and collaboration. The claims have been mostly theoretical or supported by qualitative studies. This study contributed to filling the quantitative research gap by analyzing key differences between projects implemented by faith-based and secular organizations that were financed by the United Nations Country-Based Pooled Funds. The data selection provided a scenario where the institutional pressure from strict processes, monitoring, and evaluation theoretically minimizes differences between implementers and therefore tested the study’s hypotheses in a least-likely scenario. The analysis found that there was no significant difference between how many beneficiaries the projects reached. Faith-based organizations did however implement projects that with 95 % certainty costed between 2.20 to 7.87 % less compared to their secular counterparts. Their projects with 95 % certainty also had a four percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. This provides support for the theoretical claims and contributed to building a foundation for future research in this emerging field. The study surprisingly also found a significant and large difference in project cost between national and international implementers. Projects implemented by national organizations with 95 % certainty cost between 27.98 and 31.50 % less than projects implemented by international organizations. They with 95 % certainty also had a six percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. It was not in the scope of this paper to determine what these results depended on but they give further fuel to the current localization debate in both academia and public administration.