Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

A pastor’s dream is having an infinite amount of information available to craft a sermon on the go. While most trained pastors understand and have been exposed to traditional resources, time and convenience hamper the writing experience of sermons on a weekly basis. During my time at Waldorf College in Iowa I held a workshop with area pastors on how to find information for sermon preparation. They indicated to me during the workshop that this infinite resource was available to them called Google. Google was fast, convenient, and even had prepared ‘open source’ sermons for use. Biblical texts were exegetically broken down in many viewpoints which made inclusiveness even easier.

This paper is a report from a series of three workshops working with pastors on finding resources for sermons. Included is a pre-workshop survey in which they explained their research methodology and knowledge of both academic and spiritual based sermon aids, and general knowledge of computer skills. From this survey the workshops took on the question; “Is ‘Googling the scriptures’ the way to write a sermon?” The paper also explores the conversations and results of the workshops. By the third workshop we constructed a sermon aid user guide and I revealed how ‘pastors’ can use an academic library in sermon preparation.

The purpose of this study is to examine the conventional wisdom, particularly worries that the online communication paradigm may not be in the best interest of the church because of its tendency toward individualism instead of communalism. This concern will be compared with recent research that shows how people appear to actually use online communication tools, and how disseminating information online can extend the reach of the local church.

In creating an appraisal policy to support the documentation of a church, synagogue or other religious movement, an archives must decide whether to gloss over the religious aspect of its mission and seek to document itself as an organization which happens to be religious, or to attempt to engage the messy question of belief to document the faith group itself. This paper will examine the problems and possibilities of appraisal in religious archives. I will first discuss the development of the last forty years of appraisal theory regarding religious archives, and then examine how that literature has been applied at the Archives of the Episcopal Church, a religious repository in Austin, Texas. Finally, I will discuss how a repository could combine the implications of both the literature and its application at the two repositories to create or update an appraisal policy that would support the full and faithful documentation of a religious group, using the newly-established archives of the Austin’s Congregation Agudas Achim as an example.

Traditional literature reviews (TLR) are found in all disciplines including religion. In TLR a research question is chosen, resources are identified that have information relevant to the question, and one uses information from the resources to address the TLR question. Such reviews give writers and readers background knowledge, help them get up to speed, or help to set the stage for further research. In academia, projects supported by TLR include student papers, theses and dissertations, grants, and articles. In a religious community, sermons and religious instruction might be served by TLR. The information explosion is ongoing, and so TLR clearly have value. In addition, however, in the health and social sciences the "systematic review" (SR) is now widely viewed as an important alternative for those doing and reading literature reviews. Two reasons are frequently given for why the conclusions in SR receive special attention: 1. comprehensive literature searching is used (important for limiting bias), and 2. detailed/transparent reporting of methods are used (making replication and evaluation of methods possible). SR can increase confidence in conclusions of reviews.

A part of the first author’s research on SR, philosophy, and religion involves exploring the possibilities of SR for research in religion. A “scoping review” (type of SR) examined the literature on TLR and SR methods in and for religion. Although TLR were found in the religion literature, SR were not. Drawing on significant SR methods literature, a SR model was developed that could provide a more rigorous framework for literature reviews in religion.