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
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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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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