Skip to main content

Religious Freedom and Agency

Religious Freedom and Agency

My son, Ryan, is a chaplain in the US Navy. He is also one of the professionals who are not professional evaluators I interviewed. I've shared, with his and his wife's permission, several interviews we had together about his views on evaluation and agency as a chaplain, as an Air Force band trombonist, and as a father, along with interviews I've done with his wife Nicki.

Today he sent an email about religious freedom and I have posted below a couple of relevant links that summarize some of his and my assumptions and beliefs that guide our evaluation lives and the evaluation lives of many people I've interviewed. I think these assumptions are actually at the heart of most evaluators' belief systems whether or not they have articulated such or even thought about it explicitly. Probably, even if they are atheists and don't believe God gave them their freedom to use their agency to declare themselves such, I believe these are fundamental beliefs of most humans.

As indicated in other posts to this blog I've made recently, I see our purpose for coming to earth as God's spiritual children as an opportunity to learn to evaluate or to use our agency in a wide range of situations.

Regarding religious freedom see https://www.lds.org/topics/religious-freedom?lang=eng

Regarding agency see https://www.lds.org/topics/agency?lang=eng

Transcribe and insert here a segment from Ryan's oral presentation about his responsibility as a chaplain to protect all he serves in their right to use their agency to use their freedom of religion however they choose.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

August 5, 2017 Introduction and Invitation

August 5, 2017 Beginning about 1997, I began documenting people's evaluation lives by interviewing them to ask what evaluation is to them and to give examples of them evaluating. In 2016 I published a book ( Volume #150 in the American Evaluation Association's New Directions for Evaluation series) about the evaluation lives of seven professional evaluators. Rather than publish their transcripts, they used our interview experience to create articles which are included in that volume. In 2018, a sequel was published about the evaluation lives of twenty-nine additional professional evaluators (Volume #157) that is available through Wiley. Here is a  link to a pre-publication draft  and here are the transcripts of my interviews with 24 of those evaluators (all those who gave permission to make them available to the public. However, my original interest was in understanding and sharing the evaluation lives of every day people (not just professional evaluators) in their perso...

LDS views on learning to use both thinking and feeling in most evaluation situations

The following quotes are taken from interviews M held with B in 2014-15. Both M and B are LDS and they used that fact to explore several themes that I've seen in my interviews with LDS people about making evaluative decisions as individuals, in families, in church councils, in work settings, and more. The interviews themselves are available here . Many others are available in the first blog post in August 2017. B: In our marriage, the decision came from the basis that husband and wife are equal and therefore they should have equal say in the decisions.  It has never mattered that I'm the wage-earner in our home and that essentially 100% of our income comes from me.  It isn't my money and her money.  It is our money.  And therefore I have no more power in my voice than she does in terms of how we choose to spend the money, because we are equal.  And that's been the policy ever since the beginning because I think that's how God wants it to be.  At least...
DDW Fieldnotes 9/23/2011—Research and Project Ideas Recorded 9/23/2011 and transcription finished 9/26/2011 Research Framework.amr File DDW: Okay, I’m walking along thinking here. I want to talk about my research project ideas. Yesterday I got working on analyzing some of the stories from Terkel’s “Working” book. And they’re so rich and full of evaluation. So I wanted to start sorting out some of what I’ve got. 1. First, I have sources of lived evaluation stories from “working”, from all the other books Studs Terkel has written and that other people like him have done, including most biographies. Which would include ethnographies and  phenomenologies (like the ones by Max VanManen and his students at http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/sources/ , (1min) journal articles, stories, others. There’s an endless stream of those. 2. I also have my own case studies that I’m conducting with people. And one thing I’ve struggled with those is to know how deep I should take them...