Contact
PhD Candidate in Intercultural Studies
Fuller Theological Seminary
135 N. Oakland Ave, Pasadena CA 91182
I finished my data collection in July 2023, defended my dissertation in 2025, and have now completed all the revisions I will do. See the recruiting blurb blog post below for what I was working on, and the February 19 (2026) blog post for more about the revisions. 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
Upcoming posts will be glimpses into my research and writing process
A book I'm reading—which began life as a series of blog posts—gave me the idea to go public with some of my creative process (without giving away the full thesis or argument, of course …). During the course of my doctoral studies, I found that I could...
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Book chapter proposal accepted
Recently got a chapter proposal approved for an edited collection; my chapter will examine some of the data I collected for my dissertation to see how Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and pastoral power may be illustrated in the data. For...
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PhD Completed
Dissertation revisions are complete and accepted, so I am officially all done! Fuller's dissertation defense process includes an outside reader, whose name appears on the dissertation approval sheet but who is not a part of the defense itself. My outsi...
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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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