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A Past Not Present: Memory, Christianity, And Indian Removal Mission Sites In The Great Lakes And The South, Sean Thomas Jacobson

Dissertations

American Indians, cemeteries, Christianity, historic preservation, memory, public history

What’S Religion Got To Do With It?: Differing Religiosity Domains’ Association With College Students’ Sexual Consent During First-Time Intercourse, Kaylee Richmond

Dissertations

Within the U.S., 36% of women and 17% of men report experiencing sexual assault (Smith et al., 2017). The absence of sexual consent is often regarded as a defining component of sexual assault (Beres, 2014); thus, a potential area to examine to decrease rates of perpetration and victimization. To date, there has been a lack of research on contextual factors that are likely related to sexual consent, with a general focus on external consent (i.e., verbal/behavioral indicators; Muehlenhard et al., 2016). The present study examined the role of a contextual factor, religiosity, on sexual consent processes during the context of …

Isaac Newton As A Prophetic Interpreter, Kenneth Jørgensen

Dissertations

Throughout his life, Sir Isaac Newton was deeply dedicated to the science of decoding biblical apocalyptic writings. To understand and appreciate Newton's prophetic scheme, it will be advantagous to have a certain grasp of what sources and ideas might have influenced him. No comprehensive study before this one has helped us see Newton from that perspective. A survey of the development of canonical apocalyptic hermeneutic and interpretation, beginning before the time of Christ and ending with Newton, shows that four distinct systems of hermeneutics had developed by that time. Historicism was the earliest and the preferred system among Protestants until …

"The Best Man That Ever Trod Shoe Leather" And His "Crown Of Rejoicing" : The Personal Relationship Of James And Ellen White, 1845-1881, Gerson Cardoso Rodrigues

Dissertations

James White (1821-1881) and Ellen G. White (1827-1915), co-founders (with Joseph Bates) of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, were united in marriage on August 30, 1846, and lived together for thirty-five years until James died. As leaders (though Ellen White never assumed any administrative post) of the emerging denomination and putting all effort for the growth and mission of the Adventist cause, the Whites lived an intense life of writing, publishing, preaching, and traveling. Though their marriage was a blessing for both of them, the intensity of their lives, health issues, and their humanity, caused marital difficulties in some periods of …

Hemingway, Sartre, And Secularization: Finding Religion Without God, Marcos Antonio Norris

Dissertations

This dissertation intervenes in the critical debate over Ernest Hemingway’s religious orientation. One camp of Hemingway scholars argues that he was a practicing Catholic, while the other camp argues that Hemingway was an existential atheist. Rather than side with either camp in this binary debate, my research offers a third option that bridges the gap between these opposing positions. Examining Hemingway’s life and works through the eyes of contemporary political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, I argue that Hemingway is, properly speaking, neither a secularist nor a theist, but a secularized theist, whose “religion” takes the form of masculine volition, or sovereign, …

Religion, Spirituality, And The Workplace: A Meta-Analytic Study On Outcomes Of Job Satisfaction, Job Performance, And Organizational Citizenship Behaviors, Juan Balcazar

Dissertations

Research indicates behavioral and attitudinal manifestations of religion and spirituality exert cross-domain impact across cognitive, intrapersonal, biological, industrial-organizational, and behavioral domains (Calman, 2008; Ngunjiri & Miller, 2004). The present study conducted a meta-analysis of both religious and spirituality (RS) as predictors on outcomes of job satisfaction, job performance, and organizational citizenship behavior. The present study seeks to delineate and distinguish religious faiths from spirituality by comparing the pooled effect size of religion studies with spirituality studies. A random effects model was analyzed for two subgroups on each dependent variable. Next, a subgroup fixed effects (plural) model was utilized to detect …

Useful For Life: Women, Girls, And Vocational School Reform In Chicago, 1880-1930, Ruby Oram

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how the competing efforts of women to prepare girls for wage-earning and homemaking shaped the development of vocation programs for female students in Chicago schools between 1880 and 1930. Histories of vocational education have neglected the role of women as school reformers and suggested that boys rather than girls were the primary focus of new work-oriented classes in urban public schools. Using Chicago as a case study, this dissertation uncovers how groups of women social reformers, educators, and trade unionists promoted vocational programs to protect school-aged girls from dangerous working conditions, steer girls into "wholesome" occupations, and …

Economy Of Condescension: John Henry Newman's Trinitarian Theology, Matthew Kemp

Dissertations

John Henry Newman (1801-90) did not write any systematic treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity, yet it consistently pervades his theological writings. Not only does he frequently treat the doctrine directly, but it also influences how he writes about other areas of theology, so that there is arguably a Trinitarian €œframe€ around all of Newman's thought. Yet there has been surprisingly little scholarship on Newman's theology of the Trinity. This is problematic because it leaves unexplored a major component of his thinking, one that seems essential to a fuller understanding of his theology. in this dissertation I provide a …

Tracing Sehnsucht To Place: Mythopoeia, Visions, Transcendence, And The Journey Of The Rhetorical Refugee, G. Brandon Knight

Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to explicate a rhetorical conceptualization from C. S. Lewis’s notion of longing, or sehnsucht, in hopes of extending its employment to two other contemporary contexts—Christian Hedonism and American Humanism. To do so, I utilize the method of rhetorical criticism to analyze Lewis’s most famous sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. Following this paradigm chapter, I then compare uses of longing within the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism initiated during the eighties through the seminal text entitled Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. In doing so, I uncover distinct aspects of longing within …

Factors Associated With Attracting And Retaining Church Membership: A Phenomenological Study, Anderson Corley

Dissertations

Purpose: Christian churches in American continue to struggle to maintain membership. This project is a combination research paper and contextual project that uses research gathered in the field to help evaluate the reality of what has taken place in membership and retention in this context. As such, this project aims to explore ministry practices that attract and retain church membership in Christian churches as perceived by active church leaders in the church.

Methodology: This qualitative phenomenological study explores the practices that support membership and retention in Christian churches from the stakeholders’ perspective. The project examines the lived experiences of licensed …

Can You Feel The Spirit? Towards A Sensory Sociology Of Relgion, Beth Laurel Dougherty

Dissertations

How do the embodied senses play into ritual efficacy? In this dissertation, I argue that the relationship between ritual and This mixed-methods dissertation focuses on the ways individuals, local ritual coordinators, and larger organizations use and understand the senses and embodiment as tools for shaping and experiential results of ritual encounters. Establishing an understanding of the role of the sensory in sociological literature and the historical shifts in the sociology of religion, I build an analysis that models ways that the sensory can be used to understand and analyze religious rituals. Using ethnographic and content analysis of rituals in Pagan, …

The Relationship Between Transmission Of Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Attitude, And Culture, Esther M. Hooley

Dissertations

Purpose

Sexual knowledge is important for healthy development of adolescents and adults. Currently, there is no consistent mode of introducing the topic of sex to an individual who has not previously learned about the topic. If a shift were to occur in transmission of sexual knowledge, whether by creating a consistent mode, a culture-specific mode, or focusing on sexual attitude rather than behavior, future populations would be positively influenced. If the educational system, religious organizations, and families could be informed of an appropriate and meaningful way to communicate sexual knowledge to adolescents, negative sexual outcomes have the potential to decrease …

Doctrinal Dialogues: Factors Influencing Client Willingness To Discuss Religious Beliefs, Katherine A. Judd

Dissertations

Religious beliefs are an important part of daily life for many individuals; however, these beliefs are often not discussed in therapy settings. As a result, clients and clinicians may encounter barriers to treatment and be unable to harness potentially beneficial aspects of the religious belief system. The current study investigated factors influencing client willingness to discuss religious beliefs with a therapist, with the factors of interest being perceived clinician cultural humility (PCH), religious outlier status (ROS), and religious commitment (RC). Participants in the current study (N = 535) completed measures assessing RC and ROS and viewed a five-minute clip depicting …

Sexual Assault And Academic Achievement: Creating More Ideal College Campuses For Sexual Assault Survivors By Taking Into Account Intersectionality And Multiracial Feminism, Kelly Pinter

Dissertations

In this dissertation, the reader will learn about 28 sexual assault survivors' perceptions about educational and criminal justice responses to them after a sexual assault and how these sexual assault survivors perceived how race and ethnicity, income, and gender affect cases differently. Additionally, I explore sexual assault policies that survivors think are working, and those they feel need improvement. I also assess in depth recommendations concerning what education administrators, staff, and advocates can do to assist sexual assault survivors.

Narratives Of Competency, Creativity, And Comfort: Religion And Spirituality In Counselor Education, R. David Johns

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Teacher Expectations Of Students In A Predominantly African American School District, Durand Duron Payton

Dissertations

Wong and Wong (2004) reported teachers‟ perceptions could become a self-fulfilling prophecy when addressing the students. According to Haycock (2001) once teachers‟ perceptions had developed, even if they were inaccurate, teachers would begin to act as if their beliefs were factual. By acting as though the beliefs were real, teachers could essentially cause their perceptions to materialize into the expectations of students. The purpose of this study is to explore teachers‟ expectations of students in a predominantly African American school district. Ferguson (1998) had considered the behaviors in which teachers' perceptions of the students‟ impact their expectations towards the students. …

The Predictors Of Calling And The Role Of Career Satisfaction In Working Adults, Kari Ann Leavell

Dissertations

A significant amount of time in adult life is spent working. Individuals enter into their world of work by many circumstances, including feeling called to a given career or viewing their work as a calling. The psychological construct of calling has been shown to have considerable implications for career-related outcomes, including career satisfaction. Further, satisfaction with work has demonstrated a considerable impact on more global areas such as satisfaction with and quality of life, meaning in life, and religiousness. Increased understanding of the construct of calling and its contribution to career development and career-related outcomes can clarify how individuals’ experiences …

The World Is Not Yet Completed: Moral Imaginaries And Everyday Politics In Progressive Religious Communities, Todd Nicholas Fuist

Dissertations

How religion shapes political and civic engagement has been a consistently fruitful question for American social theorists. Religion has often been understood as providing the moral underpinnings of civil society, traditionally in ways that promote cohesion or preserve the status quo. Despite this, there has been a long tradition of progressive religious engagement in American civic and political life, including the abolitionist movement, civil rights movement, and anti-nuclear movement. Through an ethnographic examination of six politically progressive religious communities, including two communes and four congregations, I examine how religion is put towards progressive ends. Through this, I develop the concept …

The Effects Of An Educational Intervention On The Aging Knowlege Of Graduate Counseling Students, Damien Gent Dotson

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of an educational intervention on the aging knowledge of graduate counseling students. Overcoming misconceptions, such as positive and negative stereotypes about older adults, is essential for graduate counseling students to be effectively trained to work with the aging population. Educational interventions have been found to be the most consistently effective way of increasing aging knowledge and helping individuals overcome ageist beliefs rooted in faulty aging knowledge. For this study, it was hypothesized that a comprehensive educational intervention (approximately 2 hours in duration) would increase overall aging knowledge, increase aging and …

The Invisible Woman And The Silent University, Elizabeth Robinson Cole

Dissertations

Anna Eliot Ticknor (1823 – 1896) founded the first correspondence school in the United States, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. In the fall of 1873 an educational movement was quietly initiated from her home in Boston, Massachusetts. A politically and socially sophisticated leader, she recognized the need that women felt for continuing education and understood how to offer the opportunity within the parameters afforded women of nineteenth century America. With a carefully chosen group of women and one man, Ticknor built a learning society that extended advanced educational opportunities to all women regardless of financial ability, educational background, …

The Intersections Of Social Activism, Collective Identity, And Artistic Expression In Documentary Filmmaking, John Abraham Stover Iii

Dissertations

Sociologists have long recognized the important intersection of media coverage and social movements, but few have studied the unique role documentary films play in inspiring activism and disseminating the agendas of new social movements. With this in mind, I studied how political strategies and artistic expressions intersect within the documentary filmmaking industry. Drawing from preexisting contacts and using a grounded theoretical approach that blended extensive qualitative and supporting quantita-tive methodologies, I spent two years in the field with New Day Films, a cooperative film distribution company that also represents a unique type of social movement organization. Using interviews (N=44), fieldwork, …

Long-Term Relationships Between Religiousness And Posttraumatic Stress Response Following Resource Loss From Hurricane Katrina, Amy Katherine Chamberlain

Dissertations

The experience of living through Hurricane Katrina and the resulting losses incurred from the storm have had lasting effects on residents of the United States Gulf Coast. One way in which survivors of Hurricane Katrina have attempted to cope with the resulting stress of such loss is through religious means. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of resource loss on the resulting stress reactions for survivors, particularly in light of the impact religiosity, religious social support, and religious coping have on long-term stress responses to the disaster. Literature shows that these religious factors have been found …

Daimon, Miranda Foster Merklein

Dissertations

The following creative dissertation is a book of 57 poems.

Sea-Cards For The Impetuous Muse: A Reading Of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, Travis Sean Cook

Dissertations

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, marks an important dissent from the general trend of early modern philosophy. This dissertation argues that Shaftesbury's book undertakes a restoration of the classical understanding of philosophy in contradistinction to the understanding presented by the writings of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and other modern thin0kers. According to Shaftesbury, modern philosophy introduces a method of radical skepticism in order to combat the moral and political effects of Christianity. This methodical skepticism, however, turns out to be at least as corrosive to moral and political life as the worldview …

Principles Of Church-State Relationships In The Writings Of Ellen G. White, Marcio D. Costa

Dissertations

The Topic

Since the beginnings of Seventh-day Adventism there have been real or perceived tensions between two contrasting perspectives of church-state relationships: (1) the “eschatological view” that a union of church and state will lead to persecution in the times preceding the second coming of Christ, and (2) the “temporal view” that in order to accomplish its mission in the present, the church needs to work in an independent, but non-conflictual relationship with the state as far as it can do so without violating its primary allegiance to God.

The Purpose

In order to discover Ellen G. White’s position on …

"Blessed Are The Dead Which Die In The Lord": The Influence Of The American Tract Society On The Historical Evolution Of American Literary Sentimentalism, Joel Bridges Henderson

Dissertations

Studies of American literary sentimentalism usually focus on either the genre's origins in the novels of the early republic or its zenith as represented by the midnineteenth- century bestsellers. Such a focus reveals two distinctly different versions of sentimentalism. While the novels of Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and William Brown evidence a genre influenced by Calvinism, the bestsellers of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria Cummins, and Susan Warner represent a sentimentalism inextricably fused with nineteenth-century evangelicalism. The evolution of the genre is more clearly explained by the intervention of the American Tract Society (ATS). In its ongoing efforts to convert the …

The Relationship Between Experiences Of Master Of Divinity Students At The Seventh-Day Adventist Theological Seminary And Their Spirituality, Choung Sook Cho

Dissertations

Problem. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the experiences of Master of Divinity students while enrolled in the seminary and their level of spirituality upon completion.

Method. A quantitative research design with a limited qualitative piece was used to survey MDiv students who graduated in 2004. Exactly 100 participants completed the Christian Spiritual Participation Profile and an instrument that explored the degree of effort put into formal curriculum offering, and the frequency of participation in nonformal curriculum and socialization activities. Participants were also asked to share a positive experienceand to recommend changes to the seminary …

Aims Of Education In The Writings Of Ellen White, Erling Bernhard Snorrason

Dissertations

Problem. Ellen White’s educational philosophy and its application to the aims of education have not been systematically or thoroughly addressed within the parameters and demands of a graduate thesis. The present dissertation explores the aims of education, especially the ultimate aims of education, in the writings of Ellen G. White, one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and could be of value in assessing the present Seventh-day Adventist educational enterprise.

Method. This dissertation is a description and an analysis of Ellen White’s concept of education as revealed by her understanding of the aims of education. It is a …

Staying In Ministry: A Qualitative Study Of Seventh-Day Adventist Women Pastors, Leslie Helfer Bumgardner

Dissertations

Problem. Women pastors in the Seventh-day Adventist Church function under limitations not imposed upon their male colleagues. This study explored the pastoral experiences of 11 Adventist women clergy serving in the United States and what contributed to their longevity in ministry.

Method. This qualitative study followed a narrative design. Data from the purposive sample were obtained through face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. The constant comparative method was utilized to code data into emergent themes. The following methods were utilized to enhance internal validity: triangulation; member checks; clarifying researcher bias; rich/thick description; including negative or discrepant information; and peer debriefing. Two …

A Comparison Of The Health Beliefs Of Florence Nightingale And Ellen G. White And The Incorporation Of Them Into Their Respective Schools Of Nursing, Ruth Duncan Abbott

Dissertations

This study explored the similarities and differences of the health beliefs of Ellen G. White and Florence Nightingale and how these beliefs were incorporated into each of their respective schools of nursing, the Nightingale Training School for Nurses at St. Thomas' Hospital and the Medical Missionary Training School for Nurses at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The research also examined the contextual factors that shaped each woman's philosophy and influenced the manner in which they carried out their work. Additionally, the research provides information about the historical context surrounding the beginnings of modern nursing, education, health, society, …