STATEMENT OF THESIS: The purpose of this Thesis is to present a study of the organizations and program developed by the Baptists of the Northern States for the religious education of the youth. That the program of the past has not been adequate to meet the need of the denomination seems to be the opinion of the leaders. The sources of this information are the history of the Baptists, the recorded answers to a questionaire sent to the leaders of the denomination, and finally, tracts and reports of the directors of religious education in the states that comprise the Northern Baptist Convention. A survey of the entire program of the Northern Baptists as presented by the Board of Education furnishes material showing the needs, ideals, and ambitions of their leaders.

Religious education involves learning about religion and the possibility of having religious experiences. Although measuring religious knowledge can be fairly straightforward, assessing whether students are having religious experiences can be more difficult. The purpose of this self-study is to develop clearer understanding of the interactions that might enable my students' religious experiences and how I might recognize when such experiences are occurring. I have written 10 narratives describing situations in which I believed students in my seminary had religious experiences. I interviewed those students to better understand their side of the narrative, and then used the Listening Guide to analyze the narratives and find whether and in what ways I was able to tell when a student was having religious experiences in my classroom. Four plotlines emerged from the data, which centered on what the student was doing to prepare for religious experiences. These ranged from simple attendance and participation to extensive outside seeking and preparation. Regarding my involvement in these experiences as a teacher, I found that common elements across the plotlines included taking time to know students and attending to intuitions about their needs. Implications of the present study are explored for both religious educators and teachers in other content areas who might be interested in helping students move beyond content knowledge toward meaningful engagement with a discipline.

The following study and the compilation of the accompanying syllabus have been prompted by the fact that Music Appreciation opens up large fields of knowledge and social cooperations for the teen-ager, and the curriculum of the Seventh-day Adventist secondary schools does not yet take proper advantage of it as an educational means.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / L. Harold DeWolf's participation in the Cooperative Curriculum Project is examined in order to set forth the mutual relationship between theology and religious education described in DeWolf's thoughts. DeWolf's emphasis on experience and relationships in both educational and theological questions offsets the programmatic curriculum approach characteristic of the project. [TRUNCATED] / 2031-01-01

This study serves two aims: (1) to evaluate the results of role playing on relevant criteria, and (2) to evaluate these same results from the standpoint of a particular frame of reference, namely that of religious education.

Against the backdrop of religious disaffiliation and social fragmentation in the United States, the future of both practices and venues for American religious education is uncertain. In this study of Tapestry, a church-run foster youth mentoring network, and St. Sebastian’s Summer Camp, a predominantly Latinx church-run community day camp, I develop and document one promising pairing in response to this quandary: an adapted form of Digital Storytelling (Lambert, 2012) as a communal spiritual practice appropriate to what I call faith-adjacent spaces. Such spaces are convened by modes of activity separate from formal institutional programs and rituals but still connected to religion in meaningful, visible ways. In this participatory multimodal ethnography, I draw on socio-spatial and narrative analytic frameworks to reveal and explore (1) organizational practices of belonging that already exist at Tapestry, (2) the function of new collaboratively designed Digital Storytelling practices at Tapestry and St. Sebastian’s, and (3) the role of my various researcher-facilitator identities in this work. I present these findings in the form of a four-part audio documentary that interweaves recordings from my ethnographic fieldwork, excerpts from the artifacts that participants and I co-created, audio engagements with academic and practitioner literature, and researcher narrative and analysis. The annotated production scripts for Becoming Tapestry comprise both the bulk of this manuscript and, together with the four podcast episodes themselves, the dissertation proper.

Thesis advisor: Hosffman Ospino / The Catholic Church’s formal documents throughout the centuries have celebrated and affirmed the role of parents educating their children on faith matters in the context of the home. Nevertheless, the Church offers parents very little practical guidance as to how they can make their home a domestic church or what they can do to organically and consistently incorporate the faith into daily life. As the Church analyzes why presently 6 Catholics are disaffiliating for every new member that joins, it must reconsider the lack of attention the home has received as an authoritative space for religious transmission. The home, as a sacramental space, has the potential to call attention to the divinity that surrounds us and invites us to action and awakening. It is also the haven where we nurture our most important and loving relationships that initiate us into the faith. The home is also a space for negotiation, that is, where we learn to wrestle with mystery and ambiguity. Critical dialogues within the home are imperative to engaging the present world from a Catholic perspective. This dissertation conducted an ethnographic study of a group of Miami-based Cuban American Catholic women across two generations. The women were chosen based on their active involvement within the Catholic Church. The study found that 100% of the women were successful in transmitting their Catholic faith to their daughters due to four socialization practices. Faith modeling by extended kin, engagement in social justice vocations across the community, explicitly affirming the personalization of daily rituals such as prayer, and finally, ongoing intergenerational dialogues were found in the stories of all the women participants. Religious imagination is the glue that holds all of the moving pieces (home, women and socializing praxis) in this dissertation. I provide herein a midrash of Matthew 27:57-61 to illustrate how the physical and relational components of the Cuban-American home serve to negotiate a hermeneutic that is matriarchal, bottom-up, and interdisciplinary. The hermeneutic echoes the message of the women studied herein; namely, that a community working together in the midst of dislocation is already being liberated. Noting the psycho-social importance of a cohesive narrative identity and its impact on authentic faith transmission calls into question whether the pedestrian nature of the home has led to mistaken notions of this pedagogy being too simplistic. Nevertheless, in telling stories and (de/re)constructing life narratives, individuals are placed within the larger scheme of history, redemptive sequences are analyzed and building resilience, and the stories themselves become a safe space from which to discern larger questions. This dissertation proposes communal, home-based activities as an effective method for faith transmission as it fosters the necessary intimacy to share relevant and passionate stories that powerfully answer why being Catholic truly matters now and to our next generation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

This paper deals with how eight Syriac adolescents and young adults have experienced Swedish religious education (RE) in secondary and upper secondary school about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The study reveals that four of the eight respondents experienced tensions and conflicts between Syriac and Muslims students. Two of these respondents revealed experiences of witnessing Syriac students ostracising and subjecting Muslim students to offensive treatment (kränkande behandling). These tensions and conflicts must be understood in the light of the historical and yet ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Turkey. For the Syriacs, these tensions culminated in Seyfo (the Assyrian genocide) in the midst of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, four respondents experienced a frustration that Seyfo was not addressed in neither RE nor history, while the Holocaust is an obligatory part of the Swedish syllabus. Seemingly, this fact furthered these respondents’ frustration. Therefore the respondents argued that Seyfo must be addressed in Swedish RE. The experiences of RE that adressed Judaism in part tell stories of how it triggered anti-Semitic speech, on part of Muslim students and one teacher. The RE on Christianity was partly experienced as having a liberal secular post-Christian perspective as its vantage point. The way Islam was taught was experienced as romanticised, and also proved at times to be essentialist in regards to its perspective.

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