Contact
PhD Candidate in Intercultural Studies
Fuller Theological Seminary
135 N. Oakland Ave, Pasadena CA 91182
I finished my data collection in July 2023 and defended my dissertation in 2025 (now working on revisions). See the recruiting blurb blog post below for what I was working on. A preliminary report of the research has been published (DOI: 10.1177/00918296241261735 )
My overall impression of my data was that many people in the interactions I looked at are “standing up for Truth” as they see it, a good number are “speaking out against injustice,” but none that I could find were doing anything I could clearly identify as loving their neighbor (in a way identifiable as such by the neighbor)! (There were plenty explaining why “speaking the truth” as they see it was actually the most loving thing they could do; but that was received as hate, not love, by the recipients.)
My overall impression of my data was that many people in the interactions I looked at are “standing up for Truth” as they see it, a good number are “speaking out against injustice,” but none that I could find were doing anything I could clearly identify as loving their neighbor (in a way identifiable as such by the neighbor)! (There were plenty explaining why “speaking the truth” as they see it was actually the most loving thing they could do; but that was received as hate, not love, by the recipients.)
Publications
Thomas Hale III
Missiology: An International Review, August, 2024, p. 00918296241261735
Posts
Differing Perspectives in Social Media Data for This Study
As one might expect, LGBTQIA+ perspectives in my data, and those of their family members and allies, differed sharply from those that one might call “right-leaning.” (I use that term, along with “left-leaning,” as the most suitable way I could find fo...
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Trans Day of Remembrance
November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance, as I learned recently from a podcast. It was first observed in 1999 in response to the murder of a Black trans woman in the Boston area (and others before that). It continues to be observed because tra...
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Article published
My article “Mission in polarized public social media interaction: Speaking out against injustice, standing up for truth, or loving your neighbor?” (https://doi.org/10.1177/00918296241261735 ) was published in the journal Missiology: An International Re...
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A recruiting blurb that didn't work
This was the recruiting blurb I used (completely unsuccessfully!) to recruit research participants. Instead, I ended up just using actual social media interactions. I preserve users' confidentiality by excluding all metadata that could lead to them bei...
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Privacy is important
I take people’s privacy seriously. So, even though posts on public pages are open to anyone, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the people who made the posts want “what they have entered online” to “become [a researcher’s] data unbeknownst to them,” as...
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