Anna
Halsall, University of Wales, Bangor
Empowerment or Marginalisation? The Identity of Christian Girls.
The interface
between Christianity and 13 to 15 year old girls in the United Kingdom
is explored through a sample of girls' expressions of values. The
values of 9,447 Christian affiliated girls and 7,185 girls of no religious
affiliation are explored over the six value areas of: myself; my worries;
school; religion and society; moral issues; and societal and world
concerns. The data demonstrate that the Christian affiliated girls
are more positive in their outlook on life, yet also generally more
anxious, and more conservative in their values than the girls of no
religious affiliation. The findings are interpreted with reference
to the question of whether Christian affiliation is empowering or
marginalising for girls in the United Kingdom at such a formative
stage in their lives.
Greg
Smith, Centre for Institutional Studies in University of East London
Marginalisation of Religious Minority Children in Multi-Faith Church
Primary Schools.
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This paper is
a preliminary report based on recent research on children's perspectives
on belonging to a faith community funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
It explores the experience of Muslim, Hindu and other religious minority
children in the top years of Catholic and Anglican primary schools
in a city in the North of England.
Ethnographic
observation and social network analysis is used to show how certain
groups of children, most clearly those from a strictly observant Muslim
background tend to be maginalised from many aspects of mainstream
playground, school and out of school social life. Comparisons will
be made between the experience of children from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh,Catholic,
Evangelical Christian and Pagan backgrounds. The Christian ethos of
these
schools still makes certain assumptions about the norms of participation
which may implicitly exclude, or cause tension for, children from
minority faiths.
Data gathered
in indepth qualitative interviews will be used to sketch the key features
of children's life experience, to illustrate patterns of marginalisation
linked with faith and the dynamics of ethnicity, and to allow the
children's voices to offer their own interpretation of the processes
of marginalisation in school.
John Walliss
Millenarian Violence and Persecution: a Critique of the Hall Thesis
The closing decades
of the last century saw several instances of violence connected with
millenarian religious groups, such as the collective suicide of the
Peoples Temple in Guyana in 1978, the fiery deaths of the Branch Davidians
in Waco in 1993, the collective suicides of members of the Order of
the Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate in 1994 and 1997, and Aum Shinrikyo's
poison gas attack on the Tokyo Underground. One explain for such phenomena
has been proposed by John Hall, who locates the causes of such dramatic
denouements in the struggle between millenarian groups and their cultural
opponents. In this paper i will critique Hall's thesis and, drawing
on the work of Catherine Wessinger and Thomas Robbins, argue for a
more nuanced approach to such incidents.
