Publications & Presentations

Presentations

Sabbatical Project: Training Seminarians to Minister in Rural Contexts and Crises: Research in Effective Teaching Strategies

I spent fall 2003-fall 2004 interviewing 380 students, faculty, administrators and rural residents related to 35 institutions in Canada, Britain, the U.S. and India. I gathered strategies for training rural leadership, looking particularly at methods for training seminarians to be effective catalysts for rural development. I also gathered (physically or in an annotated bibliography ) preferred resources from each of the locations and have assembled them into a sortable database of rural development resource items.

[Download the Sabbatical Project Final Report]

Doctoral Dissertation: The Shame of Farm Bankruptcy: A Sociological and Theological Investigation of its Effects on Rural Communities.

This is my doctoral dissertation, from the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto, completed in 1999. Between 1994 and 1999, I conducted interviews with sixty-four people who had experience with farm bankruptcy in one role or another. Twenty-nine of them were farmers and spouses who had gone through a serious debt review or foreclosure process in the eighties or early nineties. The dissertation looks at the way in which rural "honour and shame" cultures deal with farm bankruptcy. There is a "cone of silence" that surrounds financial problems. The fear of exposure of one's weaknesses prevents rural families from seeking help and inhibits the formation of cooperative relationships with other farmers. The dissertation looks at the way in which churches and Christian beliefs reinforce, reshape or challenge the shame of farm bankruptcy. It proposes a process for "de-shaming" financial insolvency in rural communities, making it possible for those in trouble to find support.

Download the "Shame of Farm Bankruptcy" in segments (below) or compressed as a single zip file:

 

 

Publications

Below are full-text downloads of some of the articles I have written regarding rural development and other publications and presentations.

1) Contributions to the "Moral Economy" column in theWestern Producer (not in chronological order)

2) Augustana Lecture Series - Sow What? - Nov 7-9, 2004,  Augustana University College, Camrose,    AB, Canada

  • Lecture 1: The Four S's (Forces) That are Destroying Rural Community Read Lecture
  • Lecture 2: Re-faithing Rural Communities: Discovering the Trinity as Community and the Power of the Weak Read Lecture
  • Lecture 3: Rebuilding Communities from the Inside Out and the Bottom Up Read Lecture

3) Book Chapters

  •  "Beyond 'Survival of the Fittest': Pastoral Resources for Rebuilding Rural Community in Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger C. Hutchinson, eds Phyllis Airhart, Marilyn Legge, Gary Radcliffe.   Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002 .  Read chapter in .rtf  or .htm
  •  "Overcoming Cultural/Spiritual Obstacles to Rural Revitalization" in In Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments and theTransformation of Rural Communities, eds Roger Epp and Dave Whitson. University of Alberta Press, 2001.  Read chapter

4) Sermons

  • 1 Pet 2:2-10; Jn 14:1-14   Speaks of Jesus' "way" as the way through darkness and despair; the presence (not absence) of God in times of deep struggle; the gifts of smallness for small rural congregations.  Even, especially, in their struggles rural congregations are God's chosen people.   Download in .htm  Download in .pdf. 

5) Journal Articles

"How a Rural Context Affects the Shape of Field Education on the Prairies," Journal of Supervision and Training in Ministry, vol 25, 2005, 116-121.  Open