As you can see by this blog, my plans for research — and life — can be a little scattered. Last summer, I started research on missionaries, and how they consider the ethics involved in “creative access” work. Hopefully I’ll write more on it at some point. Anyhow, in…
In Doing Virtuous Business,* Theodore Roosevelt Malloch argues for the importance of classical virtues in the lives of business leaders, suggesting that an individual’s ethical self can resonate in the “soul” of a business itself. He discusses virtues such as faith, honesty, gratitude, compassion, humility, courage, respect, discipline, generosity,…
I’ve been on a reading spree recently… and so as someone in my mid-twenties, I recently read Dannah Gresh’s What are you waiting for? The one thing no one ever tells you about sex, because I was curious to see what Gresh, a noted Christian abstinence-and-purity speaker, is telling teens…
I was going to post this on facebook, but my commentary got a bit out of hand. As a side note, I’m trying to find ways to come out and be more open about my own perspectives on current events, religion, and anthropology. We’ll see. First off, you have…
In this quote from Frederica Mathewes-Green, a noted Orthodox writer, she meditates on the results of her experience in a European church as a young agnostic tourist, in which God spoke to her directly, saying, “I am your life. You think that your life is your name, your personality,…
…They don’t even know that they’re a foreign country. ~~~~~ I met with an academic award committee today to discuss my application to study religious change and conversion in Central Asia. I’d like to go be with people, to move slowly, share life, and learn what matters to them….
Back in the day they used to call it the “missionary barrel.” Some frontier church in New England would gather up everything they couldn’t really use anymore – little boy’s breeches, navy blue; old candlestick holders, slightly tarnished; fifty embroidered handkerchiefs, a little yellowed; the pieces-parts of a phonograph,…
An extended essay processing on fieldwork from summer 2010, started while tired and reflecting, and posted a year later. 1. The Single Eye When I was a homeschooled and rural child, one of my favorite books was Richard Foster’s Freedom of Simplicity. Over and over, I read the yellow-paged…
What is culture? I’ve been reading some of those old anthropology books that try to define people, and places, and why we are, and whether we can choose who we are, and where we come from, and whether culture is in our bodies or our minds, whether it is…
Below is one of my favorite sets of interview notes from the summer, in which Professor Sarah* took notes and I wrote about the context. We were assisted by two local women, “Sunlight” and “Flower.” We are sitting in the side room of the mosque interviewing a man. There…