Projects |

Tapestry of Care

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tapestry of Care is a $1.76 million collaboration funded by the John Templeton Foundation. It brings together Baylor’s Future Communities Lab, Harvard Medical School’s Mental Health for All Lab, and The Congregational Collective, a San Antonio nonprofit seeded by the H.E. Butt Foundation to equip congregations across the city with resources for mental wellbeing.

As the project’s research associate, I conduct monthly fieldwork and interviews and manage qualitative research and grant reporting across the three institutions. Our writing from the project adapts frameworks for studying single congregations to the level of a network of congregations, and examines how an external convener helps congregations discern and sustain a shared commitment to care.

Christian Discipleship and Formation Programs

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My dissertation, Christian Discipleship and Formation Programs as a Source of Calling in the Religious Field (Baylor, 2024), drew on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at intensive formation programs that operate apart from congregations. These programs cultivate commitment in short, high-demand settings, and participants then carry that commitment into lower-demand congregations. I am developing the dissertation into a book and a journal article.

Prayer and Sacred Awareness

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This line of work asks how people experience the sacred and how researchers can measure it. My master’s thesis used Waves 1 and 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion to model how adolescent characteristics shape emerging adults’ private prayer a decade later. With Paul Froese, I proposed four dimensions of private prayer as a framework for the field.

A companion photo-elicitation study asks participants to reflect on their thoughts and emotions at moments of felt closeness to and distance from the divine, rather than reporting how often they pray after the fact. Related work examines prayer apps and context-bound sacred awareness on a Christian campus.