Author: Emanuel Cusanelli

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What Helps Canadian Catholics Grow Spiritually in the Parish: An Exploratory Study

This exploratory study used an online survey from the Flourishing Congregations Institute to investigate how Canadian Catholics grow spiritually within their parishes. Using an exploratory factor analysis, we explored the interrelationships among a set of spiritual growth variables. A three-component solution resulted in the Environmental Context of the Community Scale, the Pathway for Spiritual Growth Scale, and the Connecting in Community Scale. Next, we performed a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient to assess the relationship between the items in each scale for spiritual growth. The findings indicated strong, positive correlations for both the Environmental Context of the Community and Pathway for Spiritual Growth Scales, while the Connecting in Community Scale showed moderate correlations. Cluster analysis helped to categorize participants into three groups: Flourishing, Maturing, and Developing Spiritual Growth Catholics. The analysis also identified unique characteristics for each group, based on variables such as age, gender, marital status, income, parish tenure, and Mass attendance.

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The Truth about Churches Discipling Children and Teens

The truth about churches discipling children and teens is they are doing so in a religious transmission ecosystem that includes and depends upon parents, schools, peers, media and social media, and other adult influences. Drawing on recent Canadian-based research, this blog explores some of the challenges congregations confront when discipling children and teens and offers some ideas for churches who want to help the next generation “believe, behave, and belong” as religious groups might wish.

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A Christian Social Engagement which is like the Yeast in the Dough

Both practical theology and sociology of religion are interested in how local congregations in urban contexts are dealing with their environment. To say it bluntly, two attributes exist: on one hand, there exists a model which sees local congregations as citadels besieged by dissolving secular forces and insists on the necessity to limit interactions with non-Christian organizations; on the other hand, a second model contends that being truly Christian in an urban context implies committing to the local environment. Commitment doesn’t necessarily mean evangelizing and calling people to repent in public spaces, but it means living distinctively Christians lives in a secular world.

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Self-Spirituality in your Church: Implications for Discipleship

This is a recording from the third of four webinars in our Flourishing Forward webinar series. This webinar contains information about Sam Reimer’s book Caught in the Current. In his book, Reimer reveals that evangelicals are being influenced by the Canadian cultural zeitgeist, and are being drawn into a self-spirituality that undermines orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In this webinar, Reimer unpacks the central assumptions of self-spirituality, and how it affects evangelical congregations. He proposes some ways that churches can promote discipleship amid the changing Canadian cultural landscape

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Engaged Laity: A Case Study of a Certificate in Catholic Leadership

Are you a leader who is Catholic or a Catholic leader? This is one of the fundamental questions for participants in the Certificate in Catholic Leadership program at St. Jerome’s University. This non-credit program runs on an employer sponsorship model; organizations such as school boards, parishes, and non-profits send a range of participants for the year long experiential program that includes lectures and other foundational teachings, a local or international service learning experience, a cohort retreat, and a capstone project that brings something back to their home organization. Participants are supported both by liaisons at their organization and assigned mentors. The program was designed to meet the needs articulated by church and school leadership who identified a need to help form leaders and engaged laity. In particular, a gap was identified for people who need more than a workshop or in-service training but want something less than a Masters degree– either because they are in the season of family life that might make a traditional program too much of a commitment or because they are already (multiply) credentialed and simply want something more focused.

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Comparing Youth Engagement on Either side of the 49th

When it comes to religion, Canadian and American young adults display a remarkable similarity on at least one point: they’re hungrier for transcendent truth and more interested in matters of faith than previous generations. That’s just one key finding after think tank Cardus partnered with the Angus Reid Institute (ARI) to survey 5,000 Canadians and 5,000 Americans on the state of North American religiosity and faith in public life. This commonality between Canadians and Americans aged 18 to 34 stands in marked contrast to what this massive survey found more generally—that religion is different and operates differently on either side of the Canada-US border. (If you’re interested in those differences, you can read more about them here and here.)

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How Mothering Can Inform the Mission of the Church

Mothers know something about God that can help shape a church’s approach to mission. Based on my dissertation research where I look at the theology within maternal narratives, I propose that what women know about God through the practice of mothering can help shape a maternal missiology that is timely for our current age. The mothering experience reminds us that our world is enchanted with the Divine, that God alone brings new life, and that divine participation includes waiting, uncertainty, and suffering.

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Sharing spaces, sharing visions: The ethics and politics of making Quebec’s churches public

Across Canada, historic churches are closing their doors. In Quebec, the pace is accelerating as local dioceses struggle to reallocate funds for repair and maintenance amid the province’s aggressive funding cuts to religious heritage preservation. Once-sacred spaces are becoming luxury condos, gyms, and even nightclubs. These privatized, for-profit transformations often spark public grief over the loss of a collective inheritance built through generations of tithing and volunteerism.

This church property crisis crystallizes broader political tensions around secularization into concrete decisions about authority, access, and responsibility: Who should profit from the sale of church buildings: religious institutions, private developers, or local communities? Should church properties keep historic tax privileges? Can these buildings ever truly become inclusive spaces if they remain privately-owned religious properties?

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The Spiritual Discipline of Deconstruction

This is a recording from the second of four webinars in our Flourishing Forward webinar series. This webinar contains information about Angela Bick’s recently released book Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada. Canadian Christians frustrated with the Church have come ‘Undone’ and are leaving politely, almost apologetically, in what has been dubbed a “Quiet Deconstruction.” Faith that allows room for doubt, pastors who admit their mistakes, and liturgy with a built-in time for reconciliation – these are just a few of the ways that Canadian churches normalize healthy faith deconstruction. What would it look like if churches were a place where “small deconstructions” happened regularly, in community, alongside ongoing reconstruction?

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