Preaching Dissertation Complete

[Gabriela]

+ Hello all,

I haven't been on PM in a while because reasons. However, some of you helped me (or at least tried to help me) recruit participants for my dissertation study of Catholic preaching. I closed recruitment last Fall, spent four solid months writing like a maniac, defended last Thursday, and am now "Dr. Gabriela". I promised, back when, that I would make the dissertation available to anyone interested in reading it. It is 500+ pages and 8.1 MB in PDF. If you would like a copy, please PM me your email address and I will be happy to provide it. For what it's worth, I tend to write much more readably than most academics, so if you're interested in it and have reasonably good literacy skills, don't be afraid to give it a try.

I paste the abstract in below to give you an idea of what it's about, but this abstract is an absolutely terrible reflection of the real readability and priorities of the dissertation in general. I actually spend a great deal less time in this paper on theory than most academics would have me do, because I am primarily concerned with practical matters of good/bad preaching.

Hoping all are well and wishing the whole pham a very blessed Holy Week,

Gabriela

ABSTRACT:

The Catholic Church is a unique blend of charismatic, patrimonial, and bureaucratic structures developed over different periods of the Church’s history. Given the typically divergent “rationalities” (Weber, 1978/1922) of such structures, it is expected that such a combination may create structurational divergence (SD). SD is “a widespread organizational problem, manifesting as recurrent cycles of unresolved conflict rooted in incompatible meaning structures” (Nicotera, Mahon, & Zhao, 2010, p. 362) and divisible into two primary components: (1) an “SD nexus” (p. 362), created by the conflicting structures themselves, and (2) an “SD cycle,” which is a “downward communication spiral stemming from the SD nexus” (p. 363). Signs of SD in the Catholic Church—such as low job satisfaction of Church workers, high turnover, high stress among clerics, etc.—have been reported in scholarly literature for decades. This study argues that preaching in particular is an especially likely site for the Church’s SD cycle to play out, because preaching is particularly prone to pressures from the Church’s various structures.

To explore whether this is in fact the case, the study asks three research questions: (1) How are priests’ experiences of preaching work shaped by—and how do they themselves shape—the Church’s patrimonial–bureaucratic structure? (2) How are priests’ experiences of preaching work shaped by—and how do they themselves shape—the Church’s charismatic structure? And (3) how do priests identify, frame, and negotiate tensions between the Church’s patrimonial–bureaucratic and charismatic structures in their preaching work? It presents answers to these questions derived from interviews with 39 Catholic priests, analyzed using thematic analysis and yielding nine major themes, twenty-two categories, and four cross-theme and cross-category “threads.” It concludes that priests’ experience of preaching work is shaped largely by the patrimonial–bureaucratic structure of the Church via strong pressures from rationalistic patrimonial teaching and bureaucratic work conditions. And although it finds the influence of patrimony somewhat “adulterated” by the powerful influence of an informal culture of preaching in the Church, the dominance of the patrimonial–bureaucratic structure is nonetheless powerful enough to cause serious tensions with the charismatic structures that surround preaching. Results indicate that how priests frame these potential tensions largely determines how well they negotiate them, and thence also to what extent they both suffer from and contribute to the perpetuation of the Church’s SD cycle.

As such, this study concludes that personal frames or orientations to divergent structures may be as critical to resolving cases of SD as dialogic communication (Nicotera et al., 2010). Additionally, it complicates the relationships between agency and SD and between boundary-spanning (Aldrich & Herker, 1977; Keller & Holland, 1975; Leichty & Springston, 1996) and SD, at least as these have been presented in the SD literature thus far. Finally, it provides a series of empirically grounded recommendations to various stakeholders in the Church with interest in improving Catholic preaching.

[truthfinder]

Congratulations! It must be such a relief to be finished.

I'll be sending a request for a copy.

[Amppax]

Congrats! So will we be seeing more of you again?  

[Luigi]

Congratulations on completing your doctorate!

[Gabriela]

4 hours ago, truthfinder said:

Congratulations! It must be such a relief to be finished.

I'll be sending a request for a copy.

Thank you! "Relief" is an enormous understatement.

 

1 hour ago, Amppax said:

Congrats! So will we be seeing more of you again?  

Thank you! I'm not sure about returning. Right now I'm... going through some stuff?

 

1 hour ago, Luigi said:

Congratulations on completing your doctorate!

Thank you!

[Makarioi]

Congratulations!  That's quite an accomplishment!  

[Guest]

Congratulations, Gabriela.

[Era Might]

Congratulations. ☺

You might like the chapter on Savonarola in Ralph Roeder's literary biography "The Man of the Renaissance: Four Lawgivers, Savanarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino." Roeder paints Savonarola as a frustrated mystic, jealous of other priests who knew how to reach the people through preaching. Savonarola was slowly dying of pious mediocrity, despite his prophetic genius, and only when he learned the natural art of preaching could he break out of his isolated mysticism and break through eternity into time. Of course, he also discovered that holy fame is fickle, and once the eternal moment passed, the people of Florence turned on him, as did the "patrimonial-bureaucratic structure" of church and state. Savonarola was burned at the stake, a good illustration of what Pope Francis has noted, that "the prophetic function and the hierarchical structure do not coincide."

Edited April 13, 2017 by Era Might

[BG45]

Congrats fellow Gabriela, my fellow doctor person!

[Gabriela]

1 hour ago, Era Might said:

Congratulations. ☺

You might like the chapter on Savonarola in Ralph Roeder's literary biography "The Man of the Renaissance: Four Lawgivers, Savanarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino." Roeder paints Savonarola as a frustrated mystic, jealous of other priests who knew how to reach the people through preaching. Savonarola was slowly dying of pious mediocrity, despite his prophetic genius, and only when he learned the natural art of preaching could he break out of his isolated mysticism and break through eternity into time. Of course, he also discovered that holy fame is fickle, and once the eternal moment passed, the people of Florence turned on him, as did the "patrimonial-bureaucratic structure" of church and state. Savonarola was burned at the stake, a good illustration of what Pope Francis has noted, that "the prophetic function and the hierarchical structure do not coincide."

You lost me at the list of Italian names.

No, seriously, that sounds intense, but I do like the Francis quote. He's right.

1 hour ago, BG45 said:

Congrats fellow Gabriela, my fellow doctor person!

You have a doctorate, too, BG45? In what?

 

 

BTW: Thank you to all for your congrats and good wishes!  

Edited April 14, 2017 by Gabriela

[KnightofChrist]

Congratulations!!! Woot woot!!

[BG45]

On 4/13/2017 at 7:49 PM, Gabriela said:

 

You have a doctorate, too, BG45? In what?

 

Criminology.   (Sorry for slow reply, it's been the height of our advising season.)