Spirituality in higher education has received increasing attention in the last two decades, but the association of spirituality with religiousness creates challenges. As an alternative approach to spirituality, this study proposes a scale to measure the closely related concept of students' authenticity. Using a large-scale, longitudinal dataset,…

What is the role of the chaplain on the 21st century campus? Comparing today's chaplains to their mid-century counterparts, this article presents findings from the National Study of Campus Ministries. Based on a 2006 survey of 1,659 campus religious professionals, it focuses on a subsample of 335 chaplains employed in private colleges and…

Chaplains are embedded in the culture and life of many universities and are a key part of university support for religious students. Yet university chaplaincy has rarely been researched by social scientists. This article explores the role of chaplains and chaplaincy in universities in the United Kingdom (UK), investigating understandings of what…

Extending research on encouraging students' spiritual explorations in ways that enhance their overall wellbeing, this study examined how faculty and staff provided support to college students dealing with challenges to their spiritual wellness. Findings suggest that common challenges to spiritual wellness, such as encountering spiritual dissonance…

Over recent decades, the underrepresentation of women in higher education leadership has continued to be problematic, even as the majority of students at all degree levels (associate through doctorate) are women. Long-standing assumptions about the effectiveness of the "pipeline theory"--that as greater numbers of women assume…

This article examines student engagement with chaplaincy services through a pilot survey administered at a private liberal arts college (n = 1043). Almost half of the respondents reported engagement with campus chaplains, which varied by religious tradition and race. Respondents who had engaged with chaplains were more likely to report integrating…

The purpose of this article is to introduce the theory of interfaith learning and development to the scholarly community. Building on the work of others, the authors adopted an interdisciplinary, equity-oriented approach to developing the theory, which also serves as the basis for a framework intended to guide and inform interfaith practice.…

This study explored how individuals spoke about the dissonance they experienced due to their own intersections of identity within religious and/or spiritual spaces in their communities and on college campuses. In addition, we as researchers sought to understand how discourse may or may not have challenged the idea of dissonance as a negative…

In a recent volume of the "Journal of College and Character," Matt Mayhew and Alyssa Rockenbach presented their frameworks by which they have designed and utilized their IDEALS study over the past several years. In this present article, the authors contend that despite their rigorous research, the researchers and measurements oftentimes…