Becoming “People of Faith:” Personal Moral Authenticity in the Cultural Practices of a Faith-Based Social Justice Movement

Interactive cultural practices such as songs and storytelling are key to contemporary social movement organizing because they can attenuate the challenges of social difference by expanding participants’ understandings of self and community. Yet the precise cultural dynamics through which such practices become effective are not well understood. Using the case of a large faith-based community organizing coalition, I show that practices focused on personal moral authenticity are especially effective in fostering alignment between social movement goals and individuals’ pre-existing moral commitments. I define personal moral authenticity as the ambition to develop, enact, and perform a moral identity that is “true” to an enduring internal self, and validate that identity through interactions with others. This is an effective basis for organizing practices because it spans the various cultures of commitment that prevail in different racial and religious subgroups and gives individuals a personal stake in social change projects. In highlighting how it animates practices in faith-based community organizing, one of the most robust fields of grassroots civic activity in the United States, this article illuminates an important part of the cultural dynamics underlying much contemporary social change work, and specifies how religion contributes to progressive social change efforts amid ongoing religious disaffiliation.     

Trauma and the Clinician: Therapeutic Implications in Clinical Work with Clients

This article explores clinical issues related to self-disclosure to clients following a traumatic event in clinicians' lives. In particular, special attention is paid to the role of self-disclosure in clinical work when clinicians are conflicted about whether or not to share personal information or how to communicate it to clients due to the nature of the trauma. Therapeutic implications, both short and long term, associated with such self-disclosure are discussed.     

Population and Progress in the Middle Ages: A Review Essay*

Book reviewed in this Article: Julian L. Simon, The Great Breakthrough and Its Cause, edited by Timur Kuran Angela Hattery, Women, Work, and Family: Balancing and Weaving John I. Clarke, The Human Dichotomy: The Changing Numbers of Males and Females Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Renato Paniccia (Eds.), The Mortality Crisis in Transitional Economies Caleb E. Finch, James W. Vaupel, and Kevin Kinsella (Eds.), Cells and Surveys: Should Biological Measures Be Included in Social Science Research?     

Climate shocks and the timing of migration from Mexico

Although evidence is increasing that climate shocks influence human migration, it is unclear exactly when people migrate after a climate shock. A climate shock might be followed by an immediate migration response. Alternatively, migration, as an adaptive strategy of last resort, might be delayed and employed only after available in situ (in-place) adaptive strategies are exhausted. In this paper, we explore the temporally lagged association between a climate shock and future migration. Using multilevel event-history models, we analyze the risk of Mexico-US migration over a seven-year period after a climate shock. Consistent with a delayed response pattern, we find that the risk of migration is low immediately after a climate shock and increases as households pursue and cycle through in situ adaptive strategies available to them. However, about 3 years after the climate shock, the risk of migration decreases, suggesting that households are eventually successful in adapting in situ.     

A theorem relating minque and unweighted means estimators of variance components in the one-way design

The unweighted means estimators of variance components in the one-way design are shown to equal the limit of the weighted MINQUE estimators as the ratio of the treatment variance weight to the error variance weight approaches infinity